thrashing about

<blockquote>

<p>"By the brokenness of his composition [he] makes himself master of a certain weapon which he could possess himself of in no other way. The speed of the emotions is sometimes such that thrashing about in a thin exaltation or despair many matters are touched but not held, more often broken by the contact."</p>

</blockquote>

<p>To those who would suggest that such "such improvisations would seem such that they must inevitably crumble under the attention," he says, "It would be these same fools who would deny touch cords [sic] to the wind because they cannot split a storm endwise and wrap it onto spools."</p>

<p>That is the poet <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Carlos_Williams">William Carlos Williams</a> and he's talking about poetry, not photography. Do you think that what he says applies to photography? Is it possible for pictures to be made of that kind of experience? To make pictures that convey violent personal experiences that one does not understand; made while one is in the midst of an emotionally excited state, "a thin exaltation," where one has no conceptual understanding of what is going on? No stepping aside, no consideration, not even a tiny hesitation, to compose or organize or sort out what is going on? Accepting broken composition as unavoidable because to compose would be to lose sight?</p>

<p>And/or is this exactly the kind of thing that photography allows you to escape from? That kind of confusion, that on and on and on of disordered, distressing ... <em>noise</em> is what you work so hard to see through or past or beyond by waiting, thinking, composing, shaping, etc. And who wants to look at other people's emotional Rorschach blots? Confessional regurgitations?</p>

<p>What do you do with raw, intense personal experience that involves you (not somebody else), as a participant, not an observer, that, by definition, is not composed? To compose it is to exorcise it. Do you just leave such things to the poets?</p>

<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Carlos_Williams">William Carlos Williams</a>: "... this loose linking of one thing with another has effects of a destructive power little to be guessed at: all manner of things are thrown out of key so that it approaches the impossible to arrive at an understanding of anything. All is confusion, yet it comes from a hidden desire for the dance, a lust of the imagination ... "</p>

<p>I think it is possible to photograph in the throes of such experiences. I think it is also possible to use such experiences as a springboard or inspiration or just something absorbed to photograph in a more intentional and deliberate way, even a more "composed" way, if you will.</p>

<p>Sometimes my photographing become just the experience that I become involved in the throes of, rather than the other way 'round. So, it's not necessarily (though it sometimes is the case) that pictures are made of that kind of experience but rather that the picture-making itself actually becomes that kind of experience.</p>

<p>I just had a week where I was in the throes of some of these very kinds of experiences. I couldn't often pick up a camera for a variety of reasons. But when I do pick up the camera, the experiences will still be in my fingertips, and will be for a long time to come.</p>

<p>Yes, I think pictures can be made from this kind of experience and, yes, photography can allow me an escape from it as well. Making photographs can also allow me to process (not just escape) these kinds of experiences.</p>

<p>Being sensitive to everything of interest to you, that is happening at one time and perhaps difficult to reconcile or understand, is not a bad thing. Thrashing about may occur in the mind and in the imagination and it is the mind and the imagination that can make something of it all, or not. Perhaps the poet is lamenting the tendency of some, perhaps himself included, to throw all of it down into a poetic composition whereby the elements that are invoked in the composition are simply touched rather than being interpreted as they might be, as they have not been held long enough or intensely enough to be intelligently interpreted and molded by the photographer or poet.</p>

<p>I like the OP that Julie has provided. We often find ourselves in photography in an excited moment when there are so many stimuli to our mind that we choose some and reject or only partially come to terms with others. It is a question I think of both of timing and attention, but perhaps particularly the latter. We don't understand all of what we are seeing or even imagining and the created result of our analysis and synthesis is something that we will question thereafter, or others will do that for us. Often the result is interesting, but it may also be a missed opportunity</p>

<p>That is one reason why, at the provocation (that may be too strong a word) of another poster in another forum, that I am doing a small study of comparative shooting, one in which I shoot by initial reflex only (not elaborate thinking) some subjects in my home town with an automatic P&S, then some weeks later, and not influenced by having looked at the first series of images, I will walk the same paths and shoot more methodically the same or similar subjects, but this time with my usual analysis and contemplation before clicking the shutter. The later comparison of images probably won’t allow me an analysis of how I interpret a scene in which I am emotionally attached or in which the elements are fast moving and exciting to me, thus similar to the case in question, but I will hopefully gain some feeling about how I shoot simply spontaneously as opposed to methodically. That may have something to do with the recognition or not of matters (physical, imagined) that are not held, only touched, and thus broken by the contact. But perhaps not. Worth trying I think. Having said that, I will read more carefully what the poet is saying and try to carry his analysis into my work.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Poetry and photography are not essentially different expressions. To organize any string of words is a purposeful expression, even if chaotic or not following established form. Organizing the light is such an expression, as would be drawing with a pencil. But, photography is probably not generally practiced this way. If you imaging a turbulent soul ending the day with some scribbled journal. entry, would you imagine anyone ending that same day by picking up a camera? Maybe, sometimes. Probably not too common though. The word is the dominant communication form.</p>

<p>Working out psychological tensions through photography may just happen less impulsively because of the equipment required - being more involved than a pencil and paper.</p>

<p>Yes, what JCW says is applicable to many forms of expression besides poetry, including photography. Many photographs have that kind of dramatic experience at their source. While no viewer may know literally and exactly what is going on (to do that, texting is better than photography), few of us are total strangers to such experiences, thus we can identify and empathize, or at least be disturbed/moved by them.</p>

<p><strong>JH - </strong>" No stepping aside, no consideration, not even a tiny hesitation, to compose or organize or sort out what is going on? Accepting broken composition as unavoidable because to compose would be to lose sight?"</p>

<p>We've been here before on this forum, with the idea of working out of the subconscious. The truth is that the less practiced (i.e., slow, deliberate, clumsy & conscious about process) are going to threaten the integrity of the experience. Very few photographers ever develop that kind of speed, and I believe it is naive for those that don't to think that those that do are not able to compose at a subconscious level without losing the gestalt of the source code.</p>

<p><strong>JH - </strong>"And/or is this exactly the kind of thing that photography allows you to escape from?"</p>

<p>I'm not sure that it works as an exorcism for everyone all the time. It doesn't always work as an escape hatch for me. Sometimes it lets me go into these things deeper instead of showing me the way out. Some things one has to work out on multiple levels. Picturing, naming, and giving them form may have worked for Jesus and other magicians/priests to exorcise demons, but it is often not enough for the rest of us. Other solutions may be required. And some of these issues perhaps should not be done away with, but instead <em>mined, plowed and fertilized. </em></p>

<p>It may not necessarily be confusion for everyone, but ultra-clear seeing/thinking, something most of us are alien to (which is why it <em>seems </em>confusing). Noise is not what I'm primarily working through. It's personal desensitization, numbness, disassociation, habituation, categorization, crystallization of all kinds.</p>

<p><strong>JH - </strong>"And who wants to look at other people's emotional Rorschach blots? Confessional regurgitations?"</p>

<p>Lots of people, myself included, as long as it is not presented in a sententious, graceless, monotonic, unimaginative manner.</p>

<p><strong>JH - </strong>"What do you do with raw, intense personal experience that involves you (not somebody else), as a participant, not an observer, that, by definition, is not composed? To compose it is to exorcise it. Do you just leave such things to the poets?"</p>

<p>No. I use it by becoming a poet with my camera.</p>

<p>M has put his finger on what I've been thinking about as the issue; it's the equipment, but also the absolute requirement that you be "there" in some sense. Fred is suggesting he can resurrect it or bring it back. Can you show us examples? I'm interested in pictures that show *your own* exaltations; pain, joy, fear -- not pictures of other people's. Pictures that show what is not native to the eye.</p>

<p>What Arthur is doing in his project is also in accord with what I'm thinking about. Can you forget the eye and shoot from the heart after so many years of perfecting the machinery to do the opposite?</p>

<p>I'm thinking of Sally Mann's books, <em>What Remains</em> and <em>Proud Flesh</em> in which I find her "thrashing" because she feels and she goes after it ... I'm thinking about the difference, in the book <em>A Violet Isle</em>, between the pictorial excellence of Alex Webb's pictures versus the imperfections of Rebecca Norris Webb's. And I'm thinking his are better, but hers are more powerful.</p>

<p>When do you make pictures because you <em>need </em>to? Not like a big game hunter who hunts because he ... can. Because he's got the skills and the means. But like the starving man who hunts because he's got a terrible hunger.</p>

<p>[Luis, don't think I've forgotten about you. Tomorrow ... *cracking my knuckles* ... (ouch!)]</p>

<p><em>"Everything is a subject; the subject is yourself. </em><br /><em>It is within yourself that you must look and not around you...</em><br /><em>The greatest happiness is to reveal it to others, to study oneself,</em><br /><em>to paint oneself continually in one's work." </em>- Eugene Delacroix<br>

<br /><br />That was sent to me this morning by a friend with whom I have been sharing some recent photographs. I had told him that I was fascinating by the photographs, even though I had no obvious outward reason. There was nothing I could say in words about the photographs that meant anything.<br>

<br />The subject is always <em>your self</em> - ah-hah!, it really hit me then - thank you Delacroix. As Julie beautifully said, it isn't about the hunter with the equipment and skill to bag a trophy, it is about hunger - to see into your self.<br>

<br /><br />Until very recently, I played the hunter almost all the time without knowing it. "I must see and capture something no one else has seen!" Meh.<br /><br /></p>

<p>"...the starving man who hunts because he's got a terrible hunger." Julie</p>

<p>There's deep error in that. </p>

<p>"Hunting" is not done "because" of "terrible hunger." It's a skillful activity, done according to people's cultural roles..it's not done "because" of (ie response to) any extreme feeling. It's exactly the opposite: a hunter is dispassionate, meditative, and traditionally responsible for feeding others. Crazies are the exception, bad providers, despised for good reason: Julie seems to see a parallel between them and poetry: might work if poets were more often speed freaks than opium eaters.</p>

<p>Julie, I may have misunderstood your OP. Now that you've said more and M has added to it, I think I better understand what you're saying.</p>

<p>I didn't mean to suggest that I resurrect or bring back the throes of my experiences. I meant to suggest that I put those throes to use at a later date, and that some of those throes become a part of me. What I would now say, as I get clearer on your own thoughts, is that I don't think of my photographs either as exaltations or as showing my exaltations but rather as a crafted counterpart to exaltation. I also didn't understand that you thought photographing in the throes of exaltation meant that the photos would then show those exaltations. I find a much looser connection between how the photo is taken and what the photo may show. I lean more to catharsis than representation.</p>

<p>I experience a circle in which I photograph experiences AND experience photographing? There isn't a clear demarcation. There's a blending. </p>

<p>Photographically composing an uncomposed moment may be a way of liberating (not constraining or escaping) that moment, especially since composing can be so antithetical yet related to and/or born of the uncomposed moment. In that way, composing and even contriving can themselves be nihilistic acts and composing and contriving might therefore be considered "exaltations." I don't agree that to compose is to lose sight. To hesitate, to consider, to craft is often to gain sight and insight. (I use compose as I would in music . . . to intentionally create, in this case, a photo . . . as opposed to emphasizing "compositional" or graphic elements.)</p>

<p><strong>JH - "</strong>[Luis, don't think I've forgotten about you. Tomorrow ... *cracking my knuckles* ... (ouch!)]"</p>

<p>Oh-oh....</p>

<p>I disagree with Julie and m stephens about equipment. I can easily make a significant number of exposures, specially uncomposed, far quicker than I can write a mediocre poem, or engage in babbly automatic writing (or speaking in tongues, for that matter). Again, assuming one has developed the ability to work rapidly.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>[<em>looking placidly over my reading glasses at Luis in his leopard-skin loin-cloth as he pounds his bare chest manfully (his pink city-boy toes give him away)]</em></p>

<p>Luis. Since you (didn't) ask, here is what I want. Not the fish that you keep harpooning and bringing home. They're lovely; they were tasty. That's not what I want today. Not the live fish in their own water, though that's headed in the right direction (the water has a lot to do with what I'm after). Put the fisherman (photographer) in the water too and bring me the whole package and you're getting closer.</p>

<p>Now, take out the fish, take out the fisherman and just bring me the turbulence (or at least foreground the turbulence) that the fisherman generated in interaction/reaction to the fish. But only turbulence that's generated by a fisherman who does not know/understand what's causing his interaction/reaction. He's not sure if he's afraid (it's not a shark), if he's joyous (it's not an angelfish), what or where or why he has these feelings. Only that it's from/because of something happening "out there" and it's written in the turbulence.</p>

<p>Bring me that, Mr. fancy-loin-cloth "it's easy as pie," faster than the Quickie Mart photographer and I will be impressed. Especially since everything I've written above is a metaphor and the camera resists metaphor tooth and nail (it can be done but you'll bear the scars ...).</p>

<p>In <em>Proud Flesh</em>, Sally Mann is watching her husband's body deteriorate due to his debilitating disease. She has feelings. They seem to originate in his flesh, but they are not his flesh. How does she picture this?</p>

<p>Fred, it's the unknown part, the thrashing *because* you don't know part of the Williams quotes that I'm interested in. It seems to me that if you compose when you don't know what it is that you're composing, you will quite possibly destroy it.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>"you will quite possibly destroy it"</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Some thrashings are perhaps more fragile than others. Those that can be destroyed so easily might not be worth not destroying.</p>

<p>Orgasms? Sometimes, to be worth anything, they have to be controlled . . . else they spoil all the fun.</p>

<p>Thrashings thrash with other thrashings. They're not isolated occurrences.</p>

<p>Escapes from responsibility sound impossibly idealistic.</p>

<p>Composing is only destructive if seen as a type of answer or solution. It can be a questioning.</p>

<p><strong>JH - "</strong>[<em>looking placidly over my reading glasses at Luis in his leopard-skin loin-cloth as he pounds his bare chest manfully (his pink city-boy toes give him away)]"</em></p>

<p><em>Geezus, </em>is my computer camera on? That's a thong, and NOT real leopard fur<em>, btw.</em></p>

<p><strong>JH - "</strong>Not the fish that you keep harpooning and bringing home. They're lovely; they were tasty."</p>

<p>Just get it over with and call me Bwana...</p>

<p><strong>JH - "</strong>Bring me that, Mr. fancy-loin-cloth "it's easy as pie," faster than the Quickie Mart photographer and I will be impressed."</p>

<p>Whoa....why would Julie assume she is privy to what Juan Carlos Williams meant but Fred and I aren't? Maybe we're not in 100% agreement with each other, but does anyone really believe they have a monopoly on understanding JCW's words? I do not.</p>

<p>Who said this was easy? I certainly did not, but it is doable, and with some intensive work and time enough, almost anyone can begin to pull this off to some degree now and then -- unless this is regarded in an absolutist pure manner. I do not think JCW meant it that way. I see this as a living, <em>organic, biological process in real time and space, </em>with all the attendant gooey messiness, pliability, self-healing and redundancy living things have.</p>

<p>By coincidence, I saw a documentary on Sally Mann going about photographing "Proud Flesh" a while back. What I did not see her doing was dis-integrating the experience into <em>pure</em> turbulence minus anything. Her equipment, attitude and process were transparent and did not get in the way. She and her husband were clearly collaborating. The whole process was quite down to earth and holistic, not some kind of isolated abstraction. And IMO, she's quite the visual poetess.</p>

<p>I think a lot of things end up becoming (in our own lives) whatever we imagine them to be.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>If a poet considers a phrase, edits in his head, or god forbid scratches out a line and replaces it, has he destroyed whatever it is Julie is talking about? Could he do it with a quill, which takes a little more savvy to use than a pencil or ball point pen and might be considered a little more of a technical burden? Does every poetic exaltation have the exact same character as every groan or scream? Do some of our screams last for days on end, with a variety of ebbs and flows throughout the days or are they all shouted for the same duration and at the same decibel level?</p>

<p>______________________________________</p>

<blockquote>

<p>down to earth and holistic, not some kind of isolated abstraction --Luis</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Indeed!</p>

<blockquote>

<p>When do you make pictures because you <em>need </em>to? Not like a big game hunter who hunts because he ... can. Because he's got the skills and the means. But like the starving man who hunts because he's got a terrible hunger.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>When you're a commercial photographer making a living from *pictures*, you often <em>need</em> to make certain kinds of pictures, regardless if you <em>want</em> to make them. When the 'want' pictures get priority over the 'need' pictures, <em>then</em> you really <em>need</em> to take them, : /. </p>

<p>Interesting discussion, again. It's reasonable to compare a poet to a photographer. The poet's tools are simpler. You just can't top a paper, pencil and shirt pocket for convenience. But, even acknowledging that advantage, there's no reason a photographer can't bring the same - shall we say, <em>expressive gift</em> - to his fellow man as the poet. The same thought process, emotions, considerations, ramblings, feelings, or even <em>turbulence</em>. I wonder though, listening to Julie's humorous demand - "where's the beef?" - what the evidence of that turbulence might look like. I mean, really LOOK like?</p>

<p>On this morning's photographic outing, I kept asking myself (because of this thread) is this frame coming from within or without? Am I taking something in, or am I putting something out? I have to say, the answer was not always clear. In 72 frames it was clear a few times. The rest was a hazier mixture of both. Partly, I suppose, because I went out feeling rather neutral. Just open to what might happen in front of my lens.</p>

<p>I'd like to see someone identify a picture with a simple declaration of the turbulent state of mind. Just to see what the evidence might look like.</p>

<p><em>"I'd like to see someone identify a picture with a simple declaration of the turbulent state of mind. Just to see what the evidence might look like."</em></p>

<p>M, I'll bite, but these may not be very communicative to others.</p>

<p>http://www.photo.net/photo/11472847</p>

<p>http://www.photo.net/photo/11572206</p>

<p>The first was during a moment of self-questioning, not long adfter the deaths of my two parents, when I composed this winter scene in a local previously ignored graveyard. Was I seeing something while not seeing something else, or was I allowing my subjective feelings affect the composition. I did take some small solice from the apparent linking of the two gravestones, but maybe there was more that my mind didn't connect with in view of my somewhat turbulent thoughts.</p>

<p>Photo 2 is an enigma present at an otherwise rather idealic long sands beach. What does this view of a staircase running nowhere, with broken plants and long ago writing suggest that I have or have not held and expressed when my mind thrashed about in attempting some sort of composition. Or is it too banal to possibly suggest more than it did? Maybe my thoughts were not peaceful or hedonistic enough as they might have been before the musical ocean on the other side of that dune?</p>

<p>Two from Masahisa Fukase's <em>Ravens</em>:</p>

<p>http://japan-photo.info/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Fukase-03c.jpg</p>

<p>http://www.hermitary.com/archives/ravens/fukase-04.jpg</p>

<p>_____________________________________</p>

<p>The problem with asking others for such photos is that it's like asking for proof of something that, almost by its nature, defies proof.</p>

<p>(Arthur is brave to show his own photos in this regard.)</p>

<p>I was going to suggest that M find some that he thinks go in this direction, because part of this is that it's such a personal and reflexive sort of thing being suggested that, as a viewer, it really has to be one that hits you in the gut as it were, that accomplishes for you, the viewer, what we're claiming it can accomplish for the photographer. If you try to interpret or project whether the photographer was in the throes of exaltation, you will have already missed the boat. So you gotta go it alone.</p>

<p>Just quickly - I have to dash - I wanted to say that I wasn't throwing down a gauntlet to "show me!" I hope no one took it that way as a personal challenge. I really just meant, "what would the evidence of turbulence look like?" It was considerably more innocent than it now sounds by reading it again.</p>

<p>I'll check the links after lunch. I just wanted to clear that up.</p>

<dl><dd>Why not concentrate on an actual poem from the man, <em>The Red Wheelbarrow </em>:</dd><dd><br /></dd><dd><strong>so much depends</strong><br /><strong>upon</strong></dd></dl><dl><dd><strong>a red wheel</strong><br /><strong>barrow</strong></dd></dl><dl><dd><strong>glazed with rain</strong><br /><strong>water</strong></dd></dl><dl><dd><strong>beside the white</strong><br /><strong>chickens.</strong></dd></dl>

<p>From the wiki article on this poem :</p>

<blockquote>

<p>The pictorial style in which the poem is written owes much to the photographs of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Stieglitz">Alfred Stieglitz</a> and the precisionist style of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sheeler">Charles Sheeler</a>, an American photographer-painter whom Williams met shortly before composing the poem.<sup id="cite_ref-Ekphrasis_1-0"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Wheelbarrow#cite_note-Ekphrasis-1">[2]</a></sup> The poem represents an early stage in Williams' development as a poet. It focuses on the objective representation of an object, in line with the Imagist philosophy that was only ten years old at the time of the poem's publication. Williams' later works sacrifice some of this objective clarity in order to personalize the image for the reader.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>I find the poem very Eggleston sounding. Must be the glazing <em>RED</em>, against the softness of the white ( chickens ).</p>

<p>http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/williams/wheelbarrow.htm</p>

<p>Robert Frank: <a href="http://unrealnature.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/frank_billboard.jpg">billboard</a>; and <a href="http://unrealnature.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/frank_sugar.jpg">sugar</a>.<br>

[from <em>The Americans</em>]</p>

<p><a href="http://www.masters-of-photography.com/W/waldman/waldman_phaedra_full.html">http://www.masters-of-photography.com/W/waldman/waldman_phaedra_full.html</a><br>

Or, browse for max waldman marat sade (his best work, shot at midnight in his studio after the performances, isn't online afaik)</p>

<p>http://www.studiolum.com/wang/tarkovsky/53.jpg</p>

<p>( my mood is a vampire, killing every thought )</p>

<p>The sentiment and situation that Julie presents in her OP, is, if I understand it's significance, something that is not easily conveyed to others, no doubt in view of its very strong subjectiveness and the difficulty of the viewer to detertmine if, and the nature of, the turbulence felt by the photographer. What the photographer perceives in those moments of thrashing and what he does not hold onto and then let infuse into his creation, are often unknown to the viewer, although they ceratainly can influence how the photographer interprets his subject.</p>

<p>As Fred says, I think, the proof is not something that easily appears in the result or which can be communicated easily. M's request for examples of images we have made under turbulent personal situations was not considered by me at all as a challenge, but simply as a request for useful companion pieces or examples to the discussion. The photographs I made are products of such thrashing in the mind at exposure, but the results may or may not voice that to all viewers. And, contrary to what Fred kindly says, I feel that there is no bravery at all involved in presenting an example or two. We are here for that.</p>

<p>In view of the imperviousness of the vision of the viewer to the sense of turbulence in the photographer (and not simply recognizing visually enacted turbulence such as those in the images which Fred has referenced, and that are not necessarily representative of the thrashing or turbulence in the mind of the photographer during their realisation), we do not know what the photographer has seen and then not held onto and treated in his mind before/at the exposure. We see only the final and possibly incomplete distillation of that overall experience.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>(and not simply recognizing visually enacted turbulence such as those in the images which Fred has referenced, and that are not necessarily representative of the thrashing or turbulence in the mind of the photographer during their realisation)</p>

</blockquote>

<p>I chose these pictures for the emotional turbulence that I thought likely stimulated them. (I've also read some about the circumstances of their making.) The visual "turbulence" is a bonus. I know the difference. [subtle, Arthur, but I got it.]</p>