intimate

[fate_faith_change_chains]

<p>"That statement of Gibson's is less about what he is really intimate with, the making of photographs..."</p>

<p>Would it make sense to assume that Gibson, and a lot of other photographers, are intimate / connected with something else entirely which simply results in the making of photographs ?<br>

In your own case, do you often or sometimes recognize your camera as the tool being used as an ' alibi ' for connecting with the people you photograph, whereas without the camera and photography, you wouldn't be able to connect or be intimate, in whatever fleeting moment, as easily with those people ? Or, you wouldn't find any other reason to connect with them ?<br>

Because it's somewhat different then being primarily connected ( interested ) in making photographs of people, just for the sake of photography, and to which the possible intimate fleeting moments with those people are only of a secondary matter. <br>

<br /></p>

<p><br /></p>

[jtk]

<p><strong>" If we exclude words, all we are left with is W/NW, pointing, grunting, doing cartwheels, bodily functions and chimping. Not exactly conducive to human communications." Luis G</strong><br>

Luis, I don't think many would be "left with" the handicaps that you mentioned.... no photographer familiar with Stieglitz's "equivalents" would be. Very few would think your pricetag evaluation of photographers corresponds to their merit. You cited several expensive photographers whose work was rarely "intimate." Rocks, architecture, quaint moments...that sort of thing. When someone despises the non-verbal (re your disgust with bodily functions and chimping ), is as unaware as you seem about long well-known physiological reality (two potentially-independent brains and their differing specialties/tendencies:"art" on one side and "verbality" on the other...to crudely simplify). </p>

<p><strong>"I'm more interested in hearing their experience with risk in their own photographic endeavors than I am about hearing whether risk is part of intimacy" Fred G</strong><br>

Fred, I may have recently mentioned a portrait of a pair of sisters, one with Parkinsons (I didn't know it), the other with what was believed to be thyroid cancer (likely near-term death). In their 60s/70s, they were surprisingly radiant. The situation was a little loaded for me...I tend to make jokes when I'm anxious, which can be worse than inappropriate. It felt like a knife edge situation.. "risk" that I'd botch the relationship while trying to make a worthwhile image, in turn botching the photo outcome. I did OK, came away with a portrait that moved me and the sisters. The thyroid cancer turns out to be benign. The sisters risked presenting themselves to me in what was thought to be a dire moment, last minute maximum-aggressive chemotherapy in two days (they'd seen my work with other older women). I took a risk with my own insecurities... we all won. The portrait isn't remarkable in any "art" context, but I do think it "intimate."</p>

<p><strong>"If you speak with intimacy (a risk but often enlightening) you are more likely to convey and receive intimacy. Silly and obvious statement but when i think in terms of photographing with intimacy i know that it is more likely to be a reciprocal intimate experience or insight for the viewer." - Josh D W</strong><br>

<br />Josh, I'm sure you're right...but I'm not always graceful enough to "speak with intimacy" ...which sometimes adds "risk." As well, I suspect (hope) that risk adds potential... my awkwardness with masks, tendency to abruptness, sometimes leads to openings in relationships...maybe it seems "honest." I'm not proud of that, but I know it's true and am sometimes rewarded for exploiting it.</p>

 

[Norma Desmond]

<p>Phylo--</p>

<p>Thanks for your initial point. Helpful way to think about it. Yes, it would make perfect sense that Gibson and others are intimate with other things than the act of making photographs and that intimacy leads them to make photographs or the making of the photographs leads them to that intimacy. I still, however, don't find the particular quote of his terribly useful.</p>

<p>The answer to your question about my own motivations is that it varies. Sometimes it is the camera that helps me make an intimate connection that might not otherwise be made. I am often grateful for that. Sometimes it is the intimacy of a connection that I desire to photograph. Sometimes it seems totally a visual thing that I wouldn't care to accompany with a particular emotional state. Sometimes I feel no intimacy in the moment the photograph is snapped yet something very intimate seems present in the photograph. It's neat when that happens, because it confirms my belief in how different photographs sometimes are from photographic moments. I tend not to photograph for the sake of photographing. I tend to really appreciate photographing subjects I feel a connection to and lose interest quickly when photographing just to try to make good pictures. Except when I'm out practicing. Then I might photograph any old thing and really enjoy the process, but then my goal is usually some specific technique and not necessarily a "good" photo.</p>

<p>The word "alibi" at first seems unnecessarily loaded, implying "sneaky." Even in fleeting camera-oriented relationships with people, I try to be up front about what I think a situation holds for me and what I'm attracted to in a given photographic situation. There have surely been times when I've been sneaky. I have often been a photographic voyeur. I don't see that negatively, but there might be some sense of "alibi" in voyeuristic camera use.</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>John--</p>

<p>Thanks for the story. I can relate. When I feel any sort of competition between wanting to get a good photo and wanting to really remain true to a relationship or situation, it's tough. I feel good when I can keep in mind that getting a good photo in a sense seems like a high honor to pay someone I care about, even someone I don't know that well. So I can honor them in how I deal with them and relate to them and I can honor them in coming up with a product that will mean something to them, to me, and if I'm lucky, perhaps to others as well.</p>

<p>How do you feel about the lack of remarkability in an art context? Would you like to have that in addition to the intimacy you feel you achieved or is that something not important to you? Do you ever think about creating art or does that not usually come up for you? I think many moving and compelling photographs probably don't qualify as art. But I also think there's something compelling about the quest to create something that is art.</p>

<p> </p>

[inoneeye]

<p>Fred, i feel there are risks involved.. FG"I agree with John that there is a riskiness to intimacy, at least for me." - i would like to hear your take. <br>

In fact it seems that sharing at its best often becomes an intimate experience.<br>

Generalizing the risks i have experienced - I find that being intimate with strangers is sometimes a risk. emotionally. Even with the photograph as a buffer. There is often a vulnerability when we share our most meaningful experiences, verbally and visually.. With practice i think the vulnerability is lessened as our experience and confidence develops. I have also encountered physical risk in choosing to place myself in harms way to record, express some of the risker habits, fetishes, fascinations ..(not exclusively sexual) that i have photographed. Some people just don't want to go there.<br>

When itimacy is expressed by closeness in proximity to strangers there is often a risk. Putting yourself out there is risky if you want to maintain some control over others perception of your work. Easy to say it doesn't matter but seldom is it so black and white. I experience it as a fluid consideration. Sometimes it really doesn't matter, other times i feel at risk, vulnerable putting myself out there by sharing a private experience. <br>

Why would someone share a private matter? Is he stupid, narcissistic? I don't think that even matters in a photograph, unless it becomes an obstacle. I think there is a truth to be tapped that not everyone is capable of capturing. It often translates into a more energized or insightful image. It is not pretty or clever or bizarre or nice..., it is more. It reflects some insight, knowledge of humanity. Risky undertaking.</p>

[luis_g]

<p>Fred G. No, I wasn't addressing to anything you said.</p>

<p>BTW, I took yet another look at your portraits just now... They are intellectually elegant and potently humane. Your use of light and shadow as metaphor is poignantly poetic. A finely developed sense of being in multiple levels of existence is in your pictures and words, like a magician at the circus keeping an impossible number of patters spinning. Taking risks beyond the horizon of convention, your subjects are individuals and archetypes. They radiate what it means to be alive and in the undertow of mortality in their own skin, yours, and mine. I get the feeling that they are a kind of casus belli, and see some visual riffs similar to Weston's portraits, particularly the one he did of Mr. Galvan. I could live with more than one of those on my walls. They will linger in memory.</p>

<p> </p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>Josh--</p>

<p>Interestingly, I feel more of an intimacy risk with people I know than with strangers. I'm used to coming more from the head than the heart and using my intellect to relate rather than my senses. So photographing people puts me in a more physical and visual relationship, a more emotional level than I'm used to dealing with. That's uncomfortable for me sometimes. But it's also been challenging and fun. People that know me, and I've only been seriously photographing for five plus years now, are suddenly seeing a different side of me, a more sensual side, a more erotic side, a sexual side, someone who is looking at people. I've always been a voyeur, loving to watch people who aren't aware I'm watching. I love seeing people being themselves, unmasked, as John might say, not aware of another's gaze. With my photographs, I feel like I'm coming out of that closet a little, admitting I like to watch, I like to know your intimate moments, the moments you think are private.</p>

<p>In some of my photographs, I'm exploring men my age, clothed, nude, semi-nude. Many of us are feeling particularly vulnerable as our bodies are really starting to change, our sexuality becoming very different from what it was 10, 20, 30 years ago. It's risky because it's real. Sometimes it's confrontational. Looking at someone else through my lens often gives me a different and honest picture of myself . . . physically as well as emotionally. It's scary to look carefully at a 50+ year old body. It's also liberating to do it appreciatively and pay photographic homage to it as something worth looking at.</p>

<p>I also feel at risk as a gay guy. Looking at my portfolio, I'd say it's somewhat obvious it's the portfolio of a gay man. And there are times and many aspects of my photos that I think are about being gay, at least to some extent. At the same time, they are very much about being me and about the individuals being photographed. I worry that, where I might want people to view some photos in the context of sexuality or my sexuality, they are viewing them as always about my being gay. I've had people interpret my photos to mean things about what it is to be a gay man when I really was just expressing something about me or about the person I was photographing, who happened to be gay but where gay was not meant to be the focus. It has sometimes felt like projection and has felt awkward. I worry that some connections from photographer to viewer in my case may be strangely filtered if someone thinks I'm expressing my homosexuality rather than simply my sexuality. I think there is an important difference. I hope that makes some sense.</p>

<p>Why share private matters? To a degree, it's cathartic. It helps me clear the air inside. It connects me to something beyond myself. Who knows, those shared intimate moments may reach someone else and open them up to something. It makes my world a more vital place.</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>Luis--</p>

<p>Those are some really powerful and meaningful words to me. Thank you. Wow. Your willingness to be so expressive about my photos and to analyze them as you have is very generous. I appreciate it!</p>

[luis_g]

<p> Josh is right. There are risks involved in any human transaction, and the less formalized, the greater the risk. I remember many years ago at a concert, moments before entering the mosh pit, I yelled and held up my battered Nikon F, 20mm and flash. 30+ guys raised their fists in response and yelled back (I hoped it meant something positive). The music began, my earplugs went in, and I waded into the pit. My martial arts training served me well as bodies flew all around me, I managed to calmly dodge most of them, the others I pushed along their trajectory. No one deliberately slammed me. 20 minutes later, on the dance floor, I pointed to the camera, and a woman nodded with a smile, and danced transparently less than 3 feet from me as I took a dozen exposures. It could all have had many other outcomes, but didn't. I could have been made a target in the mosh pit, but wasn't. The girl, with whom I only communicated by sign language, could have turned me down, been on guard, called for security, etc., but she earnestly collaborated with me. If one can overcome mistrust and fear, often the Other responds in kind, and an incredible human-to-human broadband connection is established. Sometimes this can take years, other times, it happens in minutes.</p>

<p> We take the risks because we have to in order to share the experience of being human with another.</p>

<p> Everything we say and do (including art) reveals who we are to those that have eyes and ears. All of our masks, clothes, signifiers, and emotional armor are like Saran Wrap around our naked souls in public (attention Lannie!).</p>

<p>All forms of protection also serve to deaden our senses and entomb us.</p>

<p><strong></strong></p>

[don_e]

<p>"There are risks involved in any human transaction."</p>

<p>Should I assume "transaction" doesn't refer to an exchange, value for value?</p>

 

[Landrum Kelly]

<blockquote>

<p>All of our masks, clothes, signifiers, and emotional armor are like Saran Wrap around our naked souls in public (attention Lannie!).</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Well said, Luis, and sometimes I think that clothes are the flimsiest barriers to true intimacy. The more insidious barriers, in my opinion, include the bureaucratic mask of impersonality (or its equivalent outside of the formal organizational context) or excessive social consciousness (not to say simple self-consciousness). The question in every case is how we get persons to drop their psychological barriers,which is typically (I believe) a more significant barrier than mere clothing. (If I say it two or three times perhaps I will finally approach what I am trying to get at.)</p>

<p>Fred, I was looking over your own portfolio last night after the "other thread" finally imploded, and I was struck not only by the long list of persons who had left comments, but also by their great variation in terms of photographic experience, gender, and who knows what else. You must be doing something right if you are able to speak to so many people through your photos. My own photos typically do not touch people at that level--about the best that I can do with my pictures of decaying houses is to evoke a sense of nostalgia, not intimacy. I shall have to study your technique to see if there is anything there that I can steal.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

[luis_g]

<p> Don E., you're right... "interaction" or "exchange" would have been better.</p>

<p> </p>

[AJHingel]

<p>I have enormous respect for photographers like Fred that so clearly often is intimate with his subject matters and with the viewer in much of what he is showing us here on PN. I like enormously what such photographers do with photography, but intimacy in photography can be something different and maybe even something more subtile and less direct.</p>

<p>No-one, I would believe, can by my photos tell whether I'm gay or not and yet I put fully my intimate self into what I'm doing in photography. I believe that the possible quality of what I'm doing, when I succeed, is enhanced by the intimate relationship between me and my photography whether it concerns my choice of scenes, my compositions, my use of my camera or post-processing. That leaves totally out any intention of communicating my intimate self to the viewer. Also that is intimacy - less spectacular, but very real and surely not abstract.</p>

[Landrum Kelly]

<p>Pnina started this thread this morning:</p>

<p>http://www.photo.net/no-words-forum/00Tawr</p>

<p>Maybe some of you could post your own best efforts to her thread.</p>

<p>What the thread shows me is that "intimacy" can sometimes allude to a look, sometimes a touch, sometimes an object--and (I believe) sometimes a scene from nature, as I argued at the outset of this thread.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

[don_e]

<p>The thread shows me that the notion of intimacy in the minds of most of the posters are either young hetero couples or mother and child. No one has as yet posted "nature", including you. Luis Triguez makes an otherwise copycat nw thread worth looking at, -- as he often does.</p>

<p> </p>

[AJHingel]

<p>By Pnina adding the time dimension - "A moment of intimacy" - you invite for the mother and child type of photos.</p>

[don_e]

<p>I'm not saying they don't represent intimacy, just that, like this thread, the notion of intimacy represented is narrow.</p>

[fate_faith_change_chains]

<p>I just looked at that nw thread, and posted a sort of nature image on it, an image which, taken in context of ' intimacy ' is also a rather cliché one, but what the heck...in cliché's one often finds little truths also.</p>

<p>I still think, that the intimate in context of photography, has more to do with the quality's / insights hinted at and shown in that flying bag scene that I've linked to...it reveals something bigger then the intimate, perhaps something that encompasses any concept of " intimacy", surrounding it and making it less transparent.<br /> <br /> Indeed Don, the definition or understanding of it is mostly taken too narrow.</p>

[AJHingel]

<p>I agree, and that's why I kept out of most of the discussion.</p>

[don_e]

<p>"Don E., you're right... "interaction" or "exchange" would have been better."</p>

<p>Exchange and transaction are indentical; interaction, a more general or inclusive term, includes exchange, sharing, and other kinds of relations. I'll stipulate to the OP's limitation on the type(s) of intimacy he means, but I still don't get the "risky" part, though it seems everyone responding does -- intimacy and risk appear chained together, as if a discussion of intimacy cannot be true to the subject without calling up "risk". Risk is a charateristic of exchange, but not of sharing.</p>

<p> </p>

[Landrum Kelly]

<blockquote>

<p>No one has as yet posted "nature", including you. --Don E.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>I imagine that my feelings of 'communion" with nature are really a kind of biological high, based on serotonin or something else that comes as a by-product of hard mountain hiking. Perhaps there is a transcendental explanation or something more to it (or behind it), but, in any case, I have felt more than I could ever show in a photograph. I am reminded of Alfred North Whitehead's famous pronouncement that "consciousness is an emergent property of physical processes." Yes, I suppose that it is, but that is hardly to explain it--and to offer a biological explanation for "intimacy" or any other psychological or "spiritual" state is hardly to give an ultimate explanation that is completely intellectually satisfying.</p>

<p>I am also suddenly reminded of the quote by Geoffrey Winthrop Young: <em> "<em>The mountaineer returns to the hills because he remembers</em> always that <em>he</em> has forgotten so much." </em></p>

<p>That quote is not necessarily about the same thing, but there are some special moments in solitary wilderness experiences (including ocean kayaking, where one does not even leave tracks) that seem both very special and very ephemeral. Returning to nature--and having the same special experience all over again--thus often remind me of Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence" (at least on some interpretations).</p>

<p>"Intimacy" is as elusive as any of the psycho-physiological states and concepts that I have referred to above, whatever may be their ultimate source or origin.</p>

<p>Love is the most elusive and mysterious of all such "emotions," both in direct experience, and in terms of being captured in a photo. We see the photos of couples in love, or of mothers with children, but do we feel the love? I would say that we do not, although we might be reminded of something similar in our own experiences.</p>

<p>With people, I think that we most often capture a sense of intimacy through their eyes. With nature?? No photograph can ever give me the sense of expansiveness that nature can, but a photo can, to paraphrase Young, make me remember that I have forgotten so much--and I am thus impelled to go out and seek it anew.</p>

<p>The photos I bring back from wilderness outings are always disappointing. Even if they are beautiful, they do not allow me to re-experience what I felt in its fullness in nature.</p>

<p>--Lannie<em><br /> </em></p>

[Landrum Kelly]

<p>To go back briefly to the idea of "intimacy with nature" or even "communion with nature," I can only say that the impulse to re-experience something is surely indicative that something was experienced that touches or touched one very deeply--whether it should be characterized as "intimacy," "spiritual communion," "runner's high," or something else.</p>

<p>I have used the Geoffrey Winthrop Young quote for years without doing any research on Young himself. Here is what I found on Wikipedia moments ago:</p>

<blockquote>

<p>[A]n explosion [in WW I] caused injuries requiring the amputation of one of his legs.<sup id="cite_ref-Hankinson2_2-0"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Winthrop_Young#cite_note-Hankinson2-2">[ 3] </a> </sup> After the amputation, Young walked sixteen miles in two days to avoid being captured by the Austrians. He continued alpine climbing for a number of years – using a specially designed artificial leg that accepted a number of attachments for snow and rock work – and climbed the <a title="Matterhorn" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matterhorn" title="Matterhorn">Matterhorn</a> in 1928. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Winthrop_Young (fair use quote)</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Whatever we call it, we are talking about some powerful stuff here. When something strikes us as very nearly "divine," we will go through hell to experience it again.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

[don_e]

<p>"The photos I bring back from wilderness outings are always disappointing. Even if they are beautiful, they do not allow me to re-experience what I felt in its fullness in nature."</p>

<p>Disappointment in intimacy cannot be a pleasant feeling. The photograph is not the photographed, as Winogrand said. Re-experiencing is too much a burden to demand from them. They are only "a small remembrance of something more solid", as the lyric goes.</p>

<p>I've posted to Pnina's NW thread after reading your post.</p>

 

[Landrum Kelly]

<blockquote>

<p>"The photograph is not the photographed."</p>

</blockquote>

<p>That is surely true for all photos, but how much more so for photos that purport to capture emotional or other internal states! I think that a lot of great wilderness experiences feel so great that we really believe that we can capture the moment in a photo, not realizing at the time that what makes the moment so special is a lot more about our internal response to nature than it is to nature itself.</p>

<p>That's a nice photo on Pnina's thread, Don.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

[don_e]

<p>Lannie, if you haven't seen this, it may be worth your time:<br>

<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Glen-Denny-Yosemite-Sixties/dp/0979065909/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244526979&sr=8-1">http://www.amazon.com/Glen-Denny-Yosemite-Sixties/dp/0979065909/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244526979&sr=8-1</a></p>

<p>"That's a nice photo on Pnina's thread, Don."</p>

<p>Thanks. The first one was shot on Gold 400 with a Nikon One Touch -- that was hot to the touch. The woman is a former free solo rock climber, speelunker, ice climber, and guide. The moment captured is when, as she says, she began to see the desert. Now that Fran and Terby Barnes, and last year Rick Showalter, have died (Melanoma got two of the three) she may be the most knowledgeable person regarding that desert now. This was the photo that got me back to doing photography in a serious way after a long hiatus.</p>

<p> </p>

<p> </p>