intimate

[Landrum Kelly]

<p>Be a mystic, Fred, and split the difference.</p>

<p>I just wanted to post #100 on this great thread.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

[don_e]

<p>"There seems to be an assumption of running away from what's difficult or challenging."</p>

<p>The quotation from my post refers to the evidence that our society evinces difficulty with intimacy, so much so that it is a common element in the plots of movies, sitcoms, plays, and soaps, and some like "making a commitment" have become joke writer material (my favorite being the first episode of Married With Children, the airline stewardess saying I want a guy who'll make a commitment. Someone who will stay the night), and in the context of conveying intimacy to the viewer from this culture.</p>

<p>"I assumed you were ringing a bell of sarcasm by using the word "spirit" since you were referring to me and you know of my anti-religious bent."</p>

<p>Nope. It was actually a compliment. We're not intimate enough for me to gauge my language with you that way.</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>Thanks. Having read Luis's response, I figured I had it wrong. Appreciate the compliment and your clearing up my misreading.</p>

[luis_g]

<p> Like Fred, longing, desire, angst and the potential risks of intimacy do not repel or make me seek consolation. Instead, they sustain, seduce and empower me.</p>

<p>These things, and many others, are the the wellsprings of creativity.</p>

<p> </p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>"We're not intimate enough for me to gauge my language with you that way."</p>

<p>Leads me to a further thought. We seem to have come at this from the intimacy-involves-risk-taking perspective, where the intimacy "contains" that element of risk-taking. In being intimate, we risk something. Most of us have probably also experienced it the other way around: taking risks fosters intimacy. A nice counterpoint.</p>

[don_e]

<p>Fred:<br>

It is not clear to me what the risks are that are commonly referred to in this thread. In the day, the risk of intimacy was vd, pregnancy, a bad reputation -- "intimate", a euphemism for sex. Is the risk a blow to the ego? A disturbance of lifestyle? Street photography may risk anything from being shot dead on the spot to a passionate romance, but experience informs me the odds are nothing will happen and there is no risk worth measuring. merriam-webster.com's definition of the noun matches my comment that risk is an element of the human interaction of exchange, and as a verb "to expose to hazard or danger", which is how it seems to be used in this thread. <br /> </p>

<p>Lannie:</p>

<p>I agree with you about the quality of this thread. I've learned somethings here and have much food for thought. I too photograph off-trail and wonder how to convey the intimacy of the experience of being in nature. This thread has got me to review a stack of my prints and consider them from the perspective of intimacy. Some I think express solitude, stillness, yet seem intimate to me. Can we speak of the intimacy of solitude? How to convey that? If the photos of nature are expressing its awesomeness or grandeur, they are unlikely to express intimacy as well. Ansel's mountains convey the sense of why the ancients placed the home of the gods on mountains, but not intimacy, for example. Perhaps part of the problem is the absence of the human in most nature photography. </p>

<p><br /> </p>

<p><br /> </p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>"Perhaps part of the problem is the absence of the human in most nature photography."<br /> <br /> If I sense the photographer's presence, I'm more likely to think of the intimacy of a landscape or natural scene.<br /> <br /> "It is not clear to me what the risks are that are commonly referred to in this thread. In the day, the risk of intimacy was vd, pregnancy, a bad reputation -- 'intimate', a euphemism for sex."<br /> <br /> Associating intimacy with sexual relations seems reasonable on one hand but not exhaustive. I reread some of my own posts and may have concentrated too much on sexual aspects , though I also talked about my personal responses to aging and operating on the visual and emotional as well as the intellectual level. The kinds of risk I'm thinking of are the risks of emotional and/or psychic pain (heartbreak, misunderstanding, recognizing one's own fragility, seeing oneself through the eyes and responses of others, . . .). I wasn't thinking of pregnancy, vd, or even AIDS.<br /> <br /> The case of the bag clip Phylo linked to might help. Being so attached now to the process of photographing, I am not allowing myself to take things for granted, not allowing things to fade into the background as much as I used to. Subjects are popping up all over the place. In trying to visualize and make visual what used to seem not visual, I am touching some things in a way I haven't before. I connect to them rather than letting them pass me by. I look at the world somewhat differently and it often seems to be looking back at me (especially since I photograph so many people). The risk is losing the protective shell of privacy, for me, as I see myself in others' eyes, faces, bodies, poses, environments. As I strip masks away from people or seek to penetrate those masks and understand them, I am confronted with many of my own. I risk my own comfort zone. And I risk the protectiveness and familiarity of the Fred-persona I've built up over the last 50 or so years if I allow a relatively unfiltered view of myself and my emotions to come through to a viewer in my photographing.</p>

[don_e]

<p>"I wasn't thinking of pregnancy, vd, or even AIDS."</p>

<p>The comment of mine refered to began "In the day", meaning 'in former times', not 'today'. Your reply seems along the lines of my "Is the risk a blow to the ego? A disturbance of lifestyle?" I can see the potential for such risk in photography that occurs in a 'session', but I don't do that kind of photography. Mine occurs in public or off-trail. I assisted in a studio 35 or so years ago and haven't entered one since. This may explain why I needed to get some clarity on the risk being discussed.</p>

 

[fate_faith_change_chains]

<p>The Kiss :</p>

<p>http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/klimt/kiss/klimt.kiss.jpg</p>

<p>An impossibility of intimacy, by the possibility ( risk ) of rejection... and all this while being intimate.</p>

[luis_g]

<p> One can encounter rejection, probably the most common and inconsequential kind, except to the mammoth ego. There are sundry physical risks, some less likely and/or injurious than others. The mostly unspoken ones, as Fred alluded to, are internal. Most of us are afraid of, and resist transformation at all costs. Intimacy lubes that chute. It is a catalyst towards realizing what we are, therefore what we might become. Risky business.</p>

<p> Don E., One can't consciously 'convey' intimacy anymore than one can convey the blues, or cool. You have to live/be it. I detect intimacy in your pictures, and perhaps more strongly, reverence.</p>

<p> I think it was Wendell Berry (friend of Gene Meatyard),</p>

<p>http://www.fraenkelgallery.com/index.php#mi=2&pt=1&pi=10000&s=0&a=19&p=1&at=1</p>

<p>...who said: "The obvious is the last thing we see". One's transformation into a photographer involves becoming intimate, first and foremost, with Light. We are awash in torrents of it from our first day, but few of us become truly intimate with it. Or seeing. When we do, we begin to be transformed into a kind of poet. We will stop on a crowded street, having an epiphany at the colors in an oil slick, gesture, act of kindness, interaction, natural forms, etc as others pass by, lost in another dimension. The language of the birds, trees and rocks suddenly does not require a Rosetta Stone. To be perfectly Whitmanesque about it, we begin to realize that the universe has always been singing to us, but we rarely listened.</p>

<p> </p>

[don_e]

<p>"I wasn't thinking of pregnancy, vd, or even AIDS."</p>

<p>The comment of mine refered to began "In the day", meaning 'in former times', not 'today'. Your reply seems along the lines of my "Is the risk a blow to the ego? A disturbance of lifestyle?" I can see the potential for such risk in photography that occurs in a 'session', but I don't do that kind of photography. Mine occurs in public or off-trail. I assisted in a studio 35 or so years ago and haven't entered one since. This may explain why I needed to get some clarity on the risk being discussed.</p>

 

[don_e]

<p> The moderator should remove this duplication. Some weirdness in db?</p>

 

[Landrum Kelly]

<p>In shots involving persons (as opposed to those involving nature or inanimate objects), I think that the fullest intimacy requires mutual vulnerability. The photographer must typically be open and relaxed in order to get the subject(s) to be open and relaxed, and [almost] no one is going to drop his or her guard if there is no sense of safety or security in doing so. Otherwise the risk is simply too high--not to say that some persons are not capable of taking the risk when the situation is not reciprocal, but I think that most will not. In the same way that no one wants to show up at a formal function in an open-necked sports shirt or casual skirt and blouse, no one is likely to open up for the camera unless some psychological armor has been dropped by the photographer. Nudes are often photographed by persons who are clothed, but they cannot be natural and relaxed unless they feel that they are not being judged or evaluated by virtue of their nakedness.</p>

<p>Even nudists typically require visitors to take off their clothes. I am more concerned with psychological armor than clothes <em>per se</em> , but clothes often do represent a kind of armor-regardless of what they do or do not actually cover. By the same token, one's "spiritual armor" or "spiritual clothing" (or "psychological armor" or clothing, if one insists) can convey a sense of either threat or security. Persons who are hostile or judgmental cannot be intimate in any sense with anyone, and the "camera" can pick up on that, I think.</p>

<p>Another way of saying all of the above is that intimacy requires a sense of mutual trust between photographer and subject.</p>

<p>In cases where the photographer is "looking in" on someone else's intimacy, such as in the mother-child pictures of Pnina in the No Words forum, the mutual trust is not between the photographer and subject, but between or among the subjects themselves. If the subjects are aware of the photographer's presence, they must at a minimum be able to trust the photographer--if the sense of trust (and thus of intimacy) between the subjects themselves is to be preserved.</p>

<p>As for nature, well, Anders, where are you? I can only say that I often feel more secure in the wild than back in "civilization," and thus I can feel "intimate" with nature. If I have a sense of the divine in nature, then I can only say that I have to have some sense of trust that I will be "taken care of" (also in some sense) in my vulnerable situation. I never carry any kind of weapon when hiking or running. That would ruin the specialness of it for me. The spiritual communion with nature would not then be possible, because my concept of the divine is not that of a violent, angry, or vindictive God. I can commune with nature and nature's God only because I do conceive of God in "omni-benevolent" terms--not merely omniscient and omnipotent terms. Such a God would always be one that I could trust to protect my own psyche no matter what might happen to my body.</p>

<p>If I truly trusted in such a God all the time, I think that I could live my entire life in a sense of intimacy with others--regardless of how they treated me. Then I might be truly capable of living the Golden Rule, of returning good for evil, and of being seen as a friend to all, including my enemies. Jesus is reputed to have met his traitors at Gethsemane by calling one of them "friend." If God were to take human form, then that is the kind of God that I would trust.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

[jtk]

<p>"There seems to be an assumption of running away from what's difficult or challenging." - Fred G</p>

<p>Fred, running away from intimacy is, IMO, like labeling a photograph.</p>

<p>My impression is that people run away from photographic risk, challenges, by talking a lot about their photographs, putting them in academic context, quoting authorities rather than speaking directly as one would if one had one's own experience, labeling one's work as "art" when one fails to adhere to photography's native values ...and most silly of all, FLEEING RISK by "meaningfully" labeling a photo with something explanitory ("Nature's Violence," "Wisdom of Age," or one of my own, "Communion-Spirit Rising"),</p>

[Landrum Kelly]

<p>As for nature photography, I love to shoot clouds and the sky as much as mountains or water. Here is one that I might have named "Tranquility" to convey the sense of peace--and intimacy with nature--that I felt when taking the picture:</p>

<p>http://www.photo.net/photo/8557953&size=lg</p>

<p>It is interesting to me that what is actually being seen here are thunderstorms, which I later chose to show in their violent splendor in other crops/processing in the same folder, which was based on one single digital file.</p>

<p>All of that processing came later, however. When I shot the photo, I was looking out across a flat pasture filled with cattle (which I have cropped out). It was a very peaceful, pastoral scene, and I felt a sense of inner peace when shooting it. I can call that sense of inner peace "intimacy" with no contradiction, given my world view.</p>

<p>The same evening, I shot this one with that same sense of peace:</p>

<p>http://www.photo.net/photo/5895106&size=lg</p>

<p>Interestingly, the nuclear reactors of the Savannah River Site were not far beyond the trees on the other side of this pond, but my sense of peace--and intimacy <em>qua</em> communion with nature--survived that knowledge.</p>

<p>All the labeling and cropping and photoshopping of both pictures came later, of course. The actual intimate experiences of communion with nature in taking the photos are very different from what goes through our minds when we label, title, or manipulate them later.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

[Landrum Kelly]

<p>If I were to try to describe what I feel when I am shooting in the wilderness (or simply being in the wilderness, for that matter), I would fail, but I think that Eunice Tietjens' words would resonate with any nature photographer who feels any sense of "intimacy" or communion with nature.</p>

<p>I first saw portions of this poem while reading Thomas Hornbein's <em>Everest: The West Ridge</em> in 1969.</p>

<p>Hornbein and Willie Unsoeld surely felt what she was speaking of in making the first traverse of the mountain--and their photos (and supporting quotes in the book) show the specialness of the occasion for them. They actually spent the night--unprotected--on Everest while trying to come down a route that they had never seen before. Talk about vulnerability! (<strong>Their photos and other quotes can only be found in the Sierra Club editions of this book.</strong> Later editions preserve the narrative but <strong>leave out most of the photos </strong> and the quotes--without which the true meaning of the narrative is unintelligible.)</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

<p>The Most Sacred Mountain</p>

<p>Space, and the twelve clean winds of heaven, <br /> And this sharp exultation, like a cry, after the slow six thousand <br /> steps of climbing! <br /> This is Tai Shan, the beautiful, the most holy. <br /> <br /> Below my feet the foot-hills nestle, brown with flecks of green; <br /> and lower down the flat brown plain, the floor of earth, stretches away <br /> to blue infinity. <br /> Beside me in this airy space the temple roofs cut their slow curves <br /> against the sky, <br /> And one black bird circles above the void. <br /> <br /> Space, and the twelve clean winds are here; <br /> And with them broods eternity — a swift, white peace, a presence manifest. <br /> The rhythm ceases here. Time has no place. This is the end that has no end. <br /> <br /> Here, when Confucius came, a half a thousand years before the Nazarene, <br /> he stepped, with me, thus into timelessness. <br /> The stone beside us waxes old, the carven stone that says: "On this spot once <br /> Confucius stood and felt the smallness of the world below." <br /> <strong>The stone grows old: <br /> Eternity is not for stones. <br /> But I shall go down from this airy place, this swift white peace, <br /> this stinging exultation. <br /> And time will close about me, and my soul stir to the rhythm <br /> of the daily round. <br /> Yet, having known, life will not press so close, and always I shall feel time <br /> ravel thin about me; <br /> For once I stood <br /> In the white windy presence of eternity.</strong></p>

<p>Eunice Tietjens</p>

<p>(The bold-faced section is that which appears in Hornbein's book--along with his photos and those of other members of the first American Everest expedition in 1963.)</p>

[don_e]

<p>I'll accept John's "fantasies" comment in regard to 'nature', according to my distinction between 'intimate knowledge of' and 'intimate relationship with'. I do not think one can have an intimate relationship with 'nature', -- nature with single quotes to indicate it is a concept, not a thing, and a rather contemporary one. Most casual (i.e., not science) ecology/environmental-think is about a fantasy 'nature'. It is likely a substitute for religion, an immanentist-pantheistic religious variant. The intimate relationship assumed is not with 'nature', but with oneself, or rather oneself projected onto the world as the imaginary entity 'nature'. Whether this goes to actually existing things, not concepts, this telephone pole or this tree, this vine or this telephone line, I am not certain.</p>

<p>Some will object as I may have dissed their belief and said their god does not exist. That's ok.</p>

<p> </p>

[Landrum Kelly]

<p>INTIMACY WITH NATURE</p>

<p>I think that intimacy is about oneness. When lovers "merge into one," they do so not only with their bodies but with their souls. Communion can be promoted or conveyed through sexuality. It is not itself sexuality.</p>

<p>In like manner, when persons say that they feel "at one with nature," they are trying to convey the same spiritual dimension of intimate existence, I think.</p>

<p>There is much food for thought in all of this thread, and I shall have to remember it the next time I venture into the high mountains--or go to the duck pond of the local park. Nature is where one finds it.</p>

<p>The artificiality that we try to impress upon nature with our imposing edifices and climate-controlled environments ultimately fails to resonate with our souls. Thus, when kudzu (imported from Japan) down here in the South invades our man-made structures, some of us are actually rooting for the kudzu:</p>

<p>http://www.photo.net/photo/5226774&size=lg</p>

<p>http://www.photo.net/photo/5227354</p>

<p>I cannot commune with skyscrapers. I cannot be intimate with glass and steel--but I can be with granite and gneiss and schist, especially when water runs over them, or when the wildflowers and moss grow on or beside the expanses of bare rock. The only paved roads that I really love are the ones that are crumbling and going back to nature, with grass coming up through the cracks as it does in the sidewalks or in my driveway.</p>

<p>I would live outside if I could, and it is not because I am part Cherokee. It is because I am human. I want to smash this computer screen since I do not seem to have the will power to walk away from it--so that I can go mow my lawn because my neighbors prefer it manicured rather than wild. Alas. . . .</p>

<p>John Muir's most famous quote comes to mind. . . .</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

<p> </p>

[Landrum Kelly]

<p>WRITING WITH LIGHT--OR WORDS, OR BOTH</p>

<blockquote>

<p>Most casual (i.e., not science) "ecology/environmental-think" is about a fantasy 'nature'. It is likely a substitute for religion, an immanentist-pantheistic religious variant. --Don E. (Quotation marks supplied by me.--LK)</p>

</blockquote>

<p>The romantics were transcendentalists, I think. Their beliefs are fantasy if their transcendent reality--Nature or Nature's God--is not a reality. Wordsworth says more to me than Cartier-Bresson. I wonder what he might have done had he had a camera. The same goes double for Keats. What would he have seen in the face of Fanny Brawne that he might have conveyed to us with a photo?</p>

<p>Keats and Wordsworth--two romantics, one who was inspired by a young woman, the other by that other "nature"--but both pulled into that part of nature that inspired them. Keats, having no camera to capture autumn, had to give us photos with words:</p>

<p>Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!<br /> Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;<br /> Conspiring with him how to load and bless<br /> With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;<br /> To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,<br /> And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;<br /> To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells<br /> With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,<br /> And still more, later flowers for the bees,<br /> Until they think warm days will never cease,<br /> For Summer has o'erbrimmed their clammy cells.</p>

<p>(from "Ode to Autumn")</p>

<p>But Keats was not only intrigued by the physical beauty of autumn. He was at his best when exploring the psychological space of being in love, with all its ecstasies and tortures:</p>

<p>But when the melancholy fit shall fall<br /> Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, <br /> That fosters the droop-headed flowers all, <br /> And hides the green hill in an April shroud; <br /> Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose, <br /> Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave, <br /> Or on the wealth of globed peonies; <br /> Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, <br /> Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave, <br /> And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes. <br /> She dwells with Beauty--Beauty that must die; <br /> And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips<br /> Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh, <br /> Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips: <br /> Ay, in the very temple of Delight<br /> Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine, <br /> Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue<br /> Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine; <br /> His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might, <br /> And be among her cloudy trophies hung.</p>

<p>(from "Ode to Melancholy")</p>

<p>Surely a photographer can likewise be a poet, as surely as Keats gave us "pictures" with words.</p>

<p>I would not dare call it fantasy. I can feel it. It is real, intimately real, whatever it is--and what I am feeling is not the rock or the wind, but what they are "saying" to me. (The scare quotes are deliberate.)</p>

<p>Which is more substantial and less fantastic: that which I can see or feel with my senses, or that which I can feel and know with my soul? Is love itself a fantasy? Is the sense of intimacy a fantasy?</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

[don_e]

<p>"I think that intimacy is about oneness."</p>

<p>'Nature' is a concept in your mind. It has neither body nor soul. 'Nature' cannot share, 'nature' has no volition, no behavior, no intention, no presence -- except what you imbue it with.</p>

<p>Finally, 'nature' doesn't care.</p>

<p>The major prophets, if they were with us, would recognize it as your idol.</p>

<p> </p>

[don_e]

<p>The romantics, if they did not invent 'nature', propagated the concept into the popular imagination.</p>

 

[Landrum Kelly]

<p>Don, you seem to want to make my words into an example of the pathetic fallacy. I am not really personifying nature, although it may seem that I am. I have used "scare quotes" deliberately once or twice to make that clear--I thought. At other times I have spoken metaphorically.</p>

<p>Are you, too, attacking a straw man? Maybe it is catching.</p>

<p>Meanwhile the substantive issues that I have addressed go unremarked.</p>

<p>Well, so be it.</p>

<p>Now, as for the word "intimate" (or "intimacy)," what is its referent?</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

[don_e]

<p>No strawman. You wrote: "I would not dare call it fantasy. I can feel it. It is real, intimately real, whatever it is--and what I am feeling is not the rock or the wind, but what they are "saying" to me. (The scare quotes are deliberate.)" And I write that this "nature" is a concept in your thinking, not something in front of your nose (or your lens). It is a concept. Can you have an intimate relationship with a concept in your mind?</p>

<p>"Which is more substantial and less fantastic: that which I can see or feel with my senses, or that which I can feel and know with my soul? Is love itself a fantasy? Is the sense of intimacy a fantasy?"</p>

<p>Intimacy and love are not fantasies. You can feel them with your senses. You have nothing else to feel with.</p>

<p> </p>

[don_e]

<p>"Now, as for the word "intimate" (or "intimacy)," what is its referent?"</p>

<p>A shared relationship among at least two sensisble entities who freely and wholly participate. Freely participate implies consciousness, volition, choice, no duress. Shared relationship should not be thought of as involving exchange of value for value.</p>

<p> </p>

[luis_g]

<p> Of course I can be intimate with nature. I _am_ nature, or at least a subset thereof. I don't know about you guys, but everything in me (including consciousness), is the result of natural laws and processes -- including intimacy. </p>

<p> The alienation from nature is a relatively recent religious idea that leaked into early western science, and quickly abandoned as soon as science became capable of understanding basic systems.</p>

<p> As to the question of how to convey intimacy with nature, the answer is the same as to how to convey the blues, or coolness. You have to live/be it. Then it just flows into your work.</p>

<p>This is something that was clearly visible in Pnina's thread, with some notable exceptions. They were illustrations of intimacy between others, not intimate photographs. </p>

<p>Lannie, what admirable energy! Of course photographers can be poets. Your work is very romantic, reminds me of Alfred Bierstadt's, though more restrained, less flamboyant. You have an American Luminist streak in you too.</p>

<p>Intimacy can mean many things.</p>

<p>1)A close, familiar, affectionate or loving personal relationship with another person or group.</p>

<p> [This looks like Don E's take: "A shared relationship among at least two sensisble entities who freely and wholly participate".]</p>

<p>2) Deep understanding of a place, subject, period of history, etc.<br>

3)An act of expression serving as a token of familiarity. The quality of being comfortable, warm or familiar.</p>

<p> These are inifnitely broader and seem more applicable to nature and ideas. All are equally valid.</p>

<p>Don, I thought we settled the quid pro quo business a while back.</p>

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