Fantasy

[jtk]

<p>Fred, my comments about genetics are founded in brain research. Loci in the brain that specifically identify symbols (eg letters) have been identified. It follows that there are genetic variations in their significance to perception. For an easy resource, the ongoing and entertaining Charlie Rose special programming on brain research touches that point (<a href="http://www.charlierose.com">www.charlierose.com</a>). </p>

<p>People are not interchangable despite the political/philosophical urge to normalize them. I was speaking of science and real differences, not making a "crack."</p>

<p>You've just attempted to justify attempts to "correct" my thinking (rather than addressing ideas). That some become anxious when non-normative ideas are expressed is OK from my perspective...it's background noise, generally tolerable but sometimes deserving mention. Your high school Shakespeare experience made my point better than I could ever have: you and your pals distracted yourselves with symbols at exactly the time in your lives when Shakespeare's juice might have been most compelling. </p>

[jtk]

<p>A tip o' the hat to Allen Herbert :-)</p>

<p><strong>Fred</strong>... I have no " desire for closer engagement." I want ACTUAL engagement....some give and take, more logic, more flow of ideas, less ideosyncratic use of what should be shared terms, less automatic acceptance of what we've been told, less sealed-off thinking. I want more perspectives, I don't want everybody to be content with what we think we believe.<br>

It doesn't seem commonly recognized here that some are elderly academics, others are professionals with and without studios, others are happy poseurs with berets, others have strange corporate backgrounds, others are teens with what are often unfairly called "sophomoric" concerns. When we take core ideas as "givens," attempting to normalize, we sell each other short...we're all bozos on this bus, but we're not all the same. </p>

[mizore]

<p>Me, I was last employed working on the Great Wall of China (actually something similar but the fantasy with a touch of Kafka is better than the official description). I've been a dogsbody teacher of freshman composition, a mid-list science fiction writer, and I walked around my neighborhood today with my Border Terrier and an F3.</p>

<p>I have no problem with people having different views.</p>

<p>Fantasy gets at things that mere logic misses. Reality is what we know now by logic. Fantasy is what we might know, what we used to know, what escapes logic but can be much more true.</p>

[luis_g]

<p> Allen, I disagree with you. Fred's handled this with kid gloves, in a gentlemanly way, never lowering himself to giving John the due he richly deserves.</p>

<p> John Kelly frequently engages in Personal Attacks and constant (overcompensating) put-downs of both the overt and covert kind here, gleefully breaking the Terms of Use. Many of those comments have been cleaned out, so you may have missed them. He's done it to several people in here besides Fred and yours truly.</p>

<p>John says stuff like: "I want ACTUAL engagement....some give and take, more logic, more flow of ideas, less (sic) ideosyncratic use of what should be shared terms, less automatic acceptance of what we've been told, less sealed-off thinking. I want more perspectives, I don't want everybody to be content with what we think we believe."</p>

<p> Guess what? People here are free to express themselves, participate or observe, share or sit on ideas, accept what they want, seal-off thought, or be content -- or not -- as they wish, as long as they adhere to the Terms of Use that John himself often disregards.</p>

<p> If John wanted engagement, then he should be <em>engaging</em> , instead of combative, polite instead of snide, and gentlemanly, instead of dictatorial.</p>

<p><em></em></p>

<p> </p>

[Julie H]

<p>[<em>Addressing the original topic of Fantasy</em>]<br>

There is an interesting quote from the very end of <a href="http://www.theparisreview.com/viewinterview.php/prmMID/5901">this Paris Review interview with Annie Proulx</a>, where she's talking about response to the movie made from her story, <em>Brokeback Mountain</em>:</p>

 

<blockquote>

<p>... So many people have completely misunderstood the story. I think it’s important to leave spaces in a story for readers to fill in from their own experience, but unfortunately the audience that "Brokeback" reached most strongly have powerful fantasy lives. And one of the reasons we keep the gates locked here is that a lot of men have decided that the story should have had a happy ending. They can’t bear the way it ends—they just can’t stand it. So they rewrite the story, including all kinds of boyfriends and new lovers and so forth after Jack is killed. And it just drives me wild. They can’t understand that the story isn’t about Jack and Ennis. It’s about homophobia; it’s about a social situation; it’s about a place and a particular mindset and morality. They just don’t get it. I can’t tell you how many of these things have been sent to me as though they’re expecting me to say, oh great, if only I’d had the sense to write it that way. And they all begin the same way—I’m not gay, but . . . The implication is that because they’re men they understand much better than I how these people would have behaved. And maybe they do. But that’s not the story I wrote. Those are not their characters. The characters belong to me by law.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>She starts by saying that she thinks, "it’s important to leave spaces in a story for readers to fill in from their own experience" and yet she ends by sayiing, "The characters belong to me by law."</p>

<p>I wonder how possessive others feel of their own fantasies or at least the images or stories made from or of them. Do you intend to "leave spaces" for the viewer? Or not? Or do you not even think about it one way or the other?</p>

<p>With my own composite images, I like it if people elaborate or extend my idea (as I intend it) but I don't like it if they "get it all wrong." Which means I give them some space, but not very much. Of course, in fact, they take as much space as they want.</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>As an aside, I've heard the "I'm not gay, but" line a lot from straight guys who like my male nudes. I can't think of a time I've ever commented on a female nude and started out saying "I'm not straight, but . . ."</p>

<p>Her reaction reminds me of the things Josh Dunham-Wood was saying in the <em>Empathy</em> thread. He talked about the difference between initial response and then how we handle that response. Annie has done her job and the guys reacting the way they do have understood her story quite well and have been touched in just the way she wanted them to. It's how they handle their reactions she's trying to control and she will always fail at that. Hers is a surprising reaction to me. If people came out of the movie whistling and smiling, she'd have something to worry about, because that kind of reaction might mean she totally missed her mark. But wanting Ennis to meet someone is so in keeping with their own empathy for the characters, an empathy that her writing goes a long way in creating, that it's hard to imagine her being upset about it. They haven't missed her point, they're responding personally to her point. They're wishing . . . because of her point.</p>

<p>I discussed this movie at length when it first came out with lots of people and no one I know had the kind of reaction she describes. Perhaps because I talked to mostly gay men who are all-too-familiar with this kind of tragedy associated with being gay, we all accepted the ending as quite genuine and real and never fantasized about happier endings. Many real-life gay endings have been, in fact, not terribly happy. I don't know if Matthew Shepard is the household name it should be. I also know many straight guys who stayed away from it, not because it was gay-themed but because it was a love story, a "chick flick" as the saying goes these days. Their loss.</p>

<p>The movie was as much Ang Lee's piece as Annie Proulx's. I'd be interested to hear of his reaction to the phenomenon Annie was talking about.</p>

<p>Many interpretations I read of my own photos strike me as fantasy. Though I talk a lot about my photos in the critique forums and even in the interview I did recently, I prefer to talk about process and, sometimes, general mood or what I might have been thinking, but really try to stay away from interpretations of my own work. I respond to some of my own photos with thoughts of meaning and interpretation but wouldn't want to risk influencing anyone as to how to react to a photo of mine. That is their experience to have, as a viewer. Occasionally, people will suggest I do this and that to a photo, a different crop, black and white instead of color, and I may tell them why I made the choices I did. I also think there's a difference between "critique" and viewer response. Were a critic or a fellow novelist suggesting Annie change the story to "make it better," I could understand her negative reaction. But viewers responding that way is a different matter, to me.</p>

<p>Recently, there was a bit of controversy over a portrait I posted where I had done a bit of "over-the-top" processing to what was called an otherwise "quite beautiful" and "striking" portrait. A couple of people really wanted it done in a more straightforward way. They felt it could be a much more beautiful portrait without my added processing. That meant they were getting something that was in it for me. I didn't want it to be just another beautiful portrait. Regardless of their desires for how I should have presented it, I knew they were seeing what I saw and their negative reaction was somewhat built in to my own handling of the portrait. I didn't intend it to be a "strikingly beautiful" portrait. I knew they got it even if they were wishing to see something else. That's fine with me.</p>

<p>Ambiguity can often motivate fantasy. One can even take strong stands in their work and still be ambiguous about some things or allow for some amount of ambiguity in a response.</p>

<p>Thanks for this addition, Julie.</p>

[Julie H]

<p>I'm also surprised at Proulx's reaction. The only thing I can think of is that I feel that there is always a foundation myth behind any fantasy and that backstory is sacrosanct; absolute -- so that the fantasy will hold water; so it can "stand up" -- not be so amorphous that it won't hold its players.</p>

<p>Maybe for Proulx, the ending is part of that necessary structure, though I find it hard to take an <em>ending</em> as part of the foundation.</p>

<p>When I was a little kid, I had some incredibly elaborate fantasy games that I played -- for years -- my little sister and a bunch of my close friends. We had all kinds of mysterious and invisible (to non-players) rules -- and god help any outsider who tried to join in and broke the rules.</p>

<p>Obviously, now, in making pictures or otherwise creating something to communicate what I have in mind, I am now not only inviting outsiders to join in, but it's part of my job to make the structure of the origin-myth known (however rudimentary) to those not in-the-know. I still think that the foundation, at some level, has to be fixed, but within the framework, play is invited, not discouraged.</p>

[mizore]

<p>Julie, Annie Proulx is a wonderful writer, but anyone who gets upset in public about fans reappropriating their characters needs to understand a whole lot of things. First, if a writer uses cultural stereotypes, then they're not hers in the first place. Her characters were in some way against the cliches (the beautiful doomed blonde; the seductive and slightly sinister brunette, normally found in lesbian pulp fiction) and an use of the cliche of the "and (s)he died because society/lover was too cruel." When the movie came out, I was hanging out on the net with a bunch of gay folks, and their sense of what happened was that Proulx transformed some of cliches, but that she didn't escape the pulp ending (required in the 1950s to have any gay fiction out in print and which many gay people simply rewrote in their own minds, knowing what the convention was, and probably knowing the legal reasons why everyone had to die in the end). </p>

<p>Fred, the original story makes far more of the two men being not attractive and rather gawky farm boys than did the film. I think Proulx's point was that the glamour and romance of beautiful boys wasn't the main concern. When Danny Overstreet was murdered in Roanoke by a homophobic crazy who shot up a gay bar, people pointed out that Overstreet wasn't going to get the press that Matthew Shepard got because Overstreet was a fat guy in his 30s rather than someone beautiful in his teens. Proulx's good point is that people who aren't classically YAVIS and who aren't educated can have this great pain too. </p>

<p>But in commentary on the film and on Proulx's site, people pointed out that they'd known people in those places who were gay and who didn't have that level of trouble from the communities they were in. Where I lived in rural Virginia, pretty much everyone knew who was gay and while there was homophobia, probably less acting out of it since various people were various other people's kin. When the Phelps people threatened to picket Overstreet's funeral, the Roanoke and Salem police told Phelps's daughter that they couldn't protect Westover Baptist Church pickets. No pickets showed up -- I suspect the gist of that phone conversation was that if the Overstreets wanted to make mincemeat of the Phelps, the cops would be helping the Overstreets, that nobody would see causing pain to a family that had lost a son as anything decent people would protect. And the killer was a drifter, not someone local. </p>

<p>And nobody's done that story because America's general cultural cliches about Southern cities would find it unbelievable. The Roanoke Pride Festival went from being a furtive private event to having major banks as a sponsors and a website. (One of my fantasy projects would be a photo documentation of Roanoke gay life, complete with dates at NASCAR races).</p>

<p>So, was Proulx accurate? Do readers/viewers seeing cliches repurposed have a right to rework the story? For "the love killed him/her," of course they're going to provide a different ending since that's the way people learned to read those books from the 1950s on, whatever the doomed love: gay, interracial, wrong class (remember <em>Love Story</em>). People used to give Shakespeare happy endings in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Tacky in those cases, and overly sentimental, but an always unhappy ending is as much a cliche as anything else, and as sentimental. If it's there to sneak by the laws against positive representations of gay romances, of course, even the author would expect the readers to provide more realistic endings: two old men cooking for each other, two old women arguing about who lived with who when.</p>

<p>If 80 percent of what we see is our brains filling in the gaps, then I suspect that we all more live in fantasy worlds than most of us would like to believe. </p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p><strong>Julie--</strong></p>

<p>Yes. What you're saying makes sense to me . . . that you have a self-imposed obligation to make sense of what you're doing and to communicate what you want to the viewer of your photos. I, too, have intentions behind many of my photos, and will use the photographic tools at my disposal to communicate those foundations you refer to. Some photographs demand more of me along those lines than others. We each have to draw the line for ourselves where our control begins and ends. That's part of showing your work to others. I often see lack of good photographic technique and bad use of photographic and communicative tools used as an excuse. One can overplay the hand that says "every viewer sees it differently." Sometimes, the viewer doesn't get it because the photographer blew it or didn't show what he thinks he showed. And, sometimes what the viewer does has more to do with the viewer than with our photographs and we do well to recognize that.</p>

<p><strong>Rebecca--</strong></p>

<p>Some excellent points. I had forgotten, until you reminded me, that some friends of mine make that point over and over again. They are tired of seeing gay stories end in tragedy. I understand their point.</p>

<p>I didn't watch this movie with a notion of accuracy. So whether or not these things happen where Proulx claimed they happen doesn't much matter to me. And, despite some anecdotal information to the contrary, I suspect there is enough homophobia in these towns for there to be some relevance to the story.</p>

<p>I actually saw <em>Brokeback Mountain</em> as a Western. I love Westerns, and I liked seeing some of the subtle homoeroticism to be found in films like <em>Red River</em> (Montgomery Clift and John Ireland comparing the size of their guns and their shooting abilities . . . with Walter Brennan looking on amused) come to fruition here. I think Ang Lee took on the tradition of the Western quite beautifully. I don't fault him for using handsome leading men. It's what's done in Hollywood. I accept it. Going against that type allows me my own photographic voice at times.</p>

<p>For me, and as we've discussed before, good art straddles the line between stereotype and iconic or representative figure and also between cliche and significance. These characters, to me, were individuals as well as universally relatable, very human and also types, as I think we all are to a certain extent. We are constantly escaping and defying roles because roles exist. This story was about these two guys and it was about me and it was about a lot of gay men, all at the same time.</p>

[fate_faith_change_chains]

<p>One of my <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8elKC-DLS8">favorite movie endings</a>, is the one in Spike Lee's <em>The 25th Hour. </em>The viewer gets to see the fantasy, while in the end only left to "fantasize" about the inevitable reality, as it always is...</p>

[luis_g]

<p> I liked Brokeback Mountain, and saw it as more about American Rigor Mortis intolerance, going well beyond gayness. When I first came to this country, a few years after Robert Frank had finished The Americans, I had this unreal Modernist idea of America as a beacon of freedom and equality for humankind. A few weeks after arriving, my aunt took my mother, sister and I to Sears for the first time. I was awed by the variety of goods, their egalitarian (to me) attitude, and the large size of the fishing section. My sister needed to go to the bathroom, and I waited outside while all of them went in. I walked to the water fountains, and noticed there were two sets of bathrooms and water fountains. When they came out, I, unable to read English, asked my Mom and Aunt about this, and they very politely glossed over it with nervously saying something about how Americans don't like black people, so everything is separate. I remember my heart falling out of my chest, in slow motion and shattering on the floor. This was how I related to Brokeback.</p>

<p> I love Proulx's style. She did a great short story in which photography plays a part called <em>Negatives</em> , which is great reading.</p>

<p>I can't speak for her choices, but if I wanted to convey an unmistakeable, monolithic message (and I don't), photography would not be my first choice. I'd go with something akin to a telegram.</p>

<p> I am grateful whenever someone spends more than 7 seconds looking at one of my photographs, and I welcome their reading of it, whatever it is (as long as it doesn't harm someone else). If what I was feeling comes across, great, if the picture sparks someone else to come up with their own reading and feelings, that's as good as it gets. I would rather leave space and sparks for the viewer to synthesize something out of his own psyche and carry it forward. If it only meets my expectations and fantasies, that's very limited. If it acts as a breeze in a dandelion field, all the better.</p>

<p> </p>

[fate_faith_change_chains]

<p>Well, I must admit Luis, you sure do a good job of sparkling my fantasy regarding your own photographs without even having seen them, but only having read many of your meaningful posts about everything photography. I mean, you say you're glad, grateful, if someone looks at one of your pictures for longer then seven seconds and bothers to read something in it, and yet...you don't wish to show at least a few of them here ??!! Not making any judgement call, just saying that I'm truly curious what sort of photographic style goes behind all the words...</p>

[mizore]

<p>Phylo, the only photographer Luis G I could find on line seems too young to be our Luis G (the last segregated bathrooms I witnessed disappeared in the late 1960s, perhaps a bit later, but would have been unheard of by the mid-1970s and the on-line Luis G is in his 20s).</p>

<p>With any art, having some sense of how much this reading/interpretation can be blocked, and how much leaving ambiguity here would be useful is part of the skill. I think that works that attempt to force one and only one interpretation tend to be stultifying. Anticipating possible ranges of interpretations and playing with them is part of what makes the artist interesting. Most interpretations of <em>Hamlet </em>don't take into consideration what people believed about ghosts in Shakespeare's day -- and knowing what they believe makes <em>Hamlet</em> a descent into damnation, Horatio not withstanding. And that's a very different play than the reading I knew about when I was younger, before people had worked with the popular texts about the dangers of ghosts.</p>

<p>We might read that young Mapplethorpe self-portrait differently now that we know the end of the story than how Barthe read it without knowing how the story ended. Similarly, we might read Annie Leibovitz's photo of Lennon and Ono against what happened a couple of hours later. For Richard Powers, who used the photo's title as the title for one of his novels, WWI frames Sander's "Three Farmers on the Way to a Dance." </p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>I'd like to echo Phylo's sentiments. Luis has contributed greatly to these forums and often puts things into a concise perspective that stimulates me and often seems to lead to some new way of seeing something, almost as if I thought it was always there but it wasn't. And that happens, even when I disagree with him. I, too, would be very curious to see some of your photographs, Luis, but, like Phylo, I respect whatever reasons you may have for not sharing them.</p>

[luis_g]

<p> Phylo and Fred, thank you for respecting my privacy. I took down my aged website to re-do it with the promised help of my only website-designer friend. He married & moved, is now super-busy as a new dad, and I haven't gotten around to finding someone else to help me with putting something new up. When I do, (and I may just end up donning another handle and putting up some new things on Flickr) I will let you know in private. Thank you for the kind words.</p>

<p> Geez, Rebecca, you <strong>Googled</strong> me? :-) Oh, to be 20-something again.</p>

<p> </p>

[mizore]

<p>Luis, you've elected to be non-private in your opinions of others. The rest of the active participants here are out there with works on line for better or worse. My writing name is in my profile.</p>

<p> </p>

[luis_g]

<p> Rebecca, I understand where you're coming from on this. I am enjoying myself here, and will continue to do so as long as I don't get warned and/or booted. BTW, <em>my</em> writing name is not in my profile....wait, I <strong>did not</strong> elect to put up a profile...Oops, I didn't do it -- <em>again</em> . I haven't reviewed pictures _publicly_ here either, though I'm sure everyone else has. If you check by my name, you'll see the three rolls of film, indicating that I contribute my share to this site, and not just in this and the off-topic forum</p>

<p>As a Wise Man said about the BB (Bozo Bus, which as far as I can tell is the Keseyan spiritual vehicle for the PoP forum), a great bit of fantasy in itself (boomeranging back on topic here), each of us is <em>different</em> .</p>

<p> </p>

[Julie H]

<p>I would like to give two quotes that I think may get to the crux of the disagreements about the role of fantasy in photography. This is taken from an essay about sexuality and photography; <em>The Pleasure of the Phototext</em> by Jane Gallop that first appeared in <em>AfterImage</em> in 1985:</p>

<blockquote>

<p>... Photography is art like sex is fantasy, desire, imagination. It is one's own ideas projected onto the world, shaping and distorting the world, framing the world and making it into an object of art or an object of desire.</p>

<p>... I am pursuing the idea of a relation between sexuality and the medium of photography, which is not sexuality <em>in</em> photography, but is something like the sexuality <em>of</em> photography. In August 1984 I heard Leslie Bellavance, a Milwaukee artist and teacher, make a similar point: "Erotica and photography have what seems to be parallel paradoxes. The erotic paradox is the meeting point of dependence and independence. The photographic paradox is the meeting point of nature and art." Bellavance's paradoxes resemble Barthes's statement that the <em>punctum</em> is what I add that is already there. The erotic paradox is this strange combination of dependence and independence. In order to be erotic, the object must depend on the viewer, on the aroused one, on our fantasies, our imagination, our constructs, our framing, and yet, the object must also remain independent, still real, still other. Eroticism itself is a relation to something that is very much part of our imagination, our projection, our desires. Our eroticism is what is most narcissistic or most imperialistic in our relation to the world, and yet, there is also some relation between our desires and something that is really out there, that is independent of our fantasies.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>This is more about the relation of the viewer to the completed photograph, but I think it also is about how or what the photographer will <em>use</em> "out there" to make visible his own internal fantasies.</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>I relate to the dynamic as more active than passive. In that respect, I am more inclined toward the first quote.</p>

<p>Both quotes suggest a too strictly psychological approach to sex, however. Certainly, imagination and fantasy have roles to play in sex. But so does the physical act itself. Sex can be as animalistic as it is erotic.</p>

<p>What I would also add to these quotes is something about sensuality. I like dictionary.com's first two definitions:</p>

<p><em>pertaining to, inclined to, or preoccupied with the gratification of the sense or appetites; carnal; fleshly.</em><br>

<em> </em><br>

<em>lacking in moral restraints; lewd or unchaste.</em></p>

<p>I think particularly the notion of "lacking in *moral restraints" may be relevant to fantasy. It's why I emphasize the secret nature of many fantasies. We are free to be as immoral as we want in our fantasies, without fear of repercussion. That can be liberating. Fantasies are not governed by the same rules of propriety as actions (except, I suppose, where religion is involved).</p>

<p>There is a factor of exhilaration missing from both these quotes.</p>

<p>*Moral considerations around art are probably worth a whole other thread. But I think morality has a different relationship to aesthetics than to other aspects of our lives. Then again, as we see in discussions about street photography, about privacy, about shooting homeless people, photography can be used as an excuse for lack of morality as well.</p>

[mizore]

<p>The reading suggestions are interesting; most of what people says comes from what they've read more than an interaction between what they've read, what they've photographed, and what they've thought about extending what they've read. I don't know who suggested<em> Camera Lucida </em>to me or in which thread, but that was worth the trip.</p>

<p>Fred, I always think of the Ten Commandments as a list of things to avoid if one doesn't wish to be killed or beaten by one's neighbors. Morals and manners are for getting along with other people in particular cultures.</p>

<p>Aesthetic pleasures can be sensual. But there's a big argument in writing as to whether pornography, strictly defined as material aimed at stimulation for masturbation, can also be art/literature. W.H. Auden said that it couldn't be. Samuel R. Delany has been writing things that prove one can get very graphic and still produce something that's more than a stroke book. Or perhaps things that graphic aren't stroke books.</p>

<p>The erotic fantasy is one kind of fantasy, though I think Freudians would argue that all pleasures are erotic at their core.</p>

<p>The other side of fantasy is wondering how much of the pleasure of a work is dependent on the culture and subcultures we live in, the pleasure of sharing a common experience, or an uncommon one? Do we imagine more than is there because a work pushes certain culturally determined buttons for us, or that if we like this, we're like people we admire? We fantasize a role for ourselves as appreciators of this art that people we would like to be or be with like. Style and taste as identity, perhaps. This came up in the other thread on Berkeley -- how much is something good because it's accepted to be good by people we want to identify with? </p>

<p>I don't like Yoko Ono; I think she's a derivative rich girl who fucked her way into various art circles, and will bite anyone suggesting that I can't stand her because I'm petit bourgeois -- I think a lot of "you don't like that because you're petit bourgeois" is coded dislike for the poor who don't have time for doing small audience art -- real petit bourgeois in Marxist terms are shop owners and wedding photograhers, not lumpen proles like adjunct composition teachers). I think she's a fantasy for certain kinds of guys, and the vigor of their defense of her tends to more make me think they're aware at some level that they're identifying with the money, the beauty, and the connections, and that they're creating an imaginary Yoko. If her art is being the blank canvas for male imagination, then she's done that well, and I think that is part of what she's done, the art of the courtesan for which I'm not the audience.</p>

<p>Maybe all art is a seduction of the viewer, listener, though, getting the viewer or reader to put himself or herself into the spaces the work suggests? </p>

<p> </p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>Yoko does, indeed, push buttons.</p>

[fate_faith_change_chains]

<blockquote>

<p>This is more about the relation of the viewer to the completed photograph, but I think it also is about how or what the photographer will <em>use</em> "out there" to make visible his own internal fantasies. Julie</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Nan Goldin on <em>The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, </em>wich deals explicitly with dependence and independence in individual and socially constructed relationships :</p>

<p>" Real memory, which these pictures trigger, is an invocation of the color, smell, sound, and physical presence, the density and flavor of life. "</p>

<p>The quote is also applicable to fantasy, <em>real fantasy. </em>Memory being as much dependant on the external facts as it is on fantasy because of it - memory - being internal. Fantasy being that key-moment when one remembers to remember > a quality often evoked through photography.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.artbook.com/0893813397.html">http://www.artbook.com/0893813397.html</a></p>

<p> </p>

[Julie H]

<p>I was actually more interested in the paradoxical parallel than the sexual angle. Dependence/independence; nature/art. The conundrum of using what happens in your head while working from/in/on the real. Wanting to keep the real real, but wanting to make it work in or with the fantasy. If not a direct depiction of one's fantasy, then at least a derivative of it -- its direct descendent.</p>

<p>How to make a picture that, out of the everywhere and anytime of the world, says "Stop! Hey, something is happening here." It's an artificial, invented construction (<em>only</em> the <em>construction</em> is artificial; I'm saying nothing about the content or meaning), an instant playing field that invites the viewer to come on/in and join the game. I think that when making such photographs, one is aware (I know I am) of making a space for others, of hoping people, (preferably many thousands, even millions of screaming fans) ... will "feel" the space that I've made and will play. With me. The completion, fulfillment of my fantasy-into-photograph requires the participation of others. Confirmation that the space has been made and that the game is recognized -- and of course irresistably cool. (Goes without saying.)</p>

<p>I feel that the Tanyth Berkeley photographs that we all looked at in John's thread were a good example of a made space that invited us in. For me, Fred's and Phylo's pictures are very strongly inviting; to come into the space they've made. I also get this from some of Rebecca's pictures.</p>

<p>I think that many kinds of photgraphy do not do this. Many photographs seem to me to demand passive observation or at least that you stay outside the frame; don't mess with the goods. Oddly, to me, Nan Goldin's photographs are this way. I don't feel welcome. But that's probably just me.</p>

[mizore]

<p>Only in the nervous breakdown of the species that was the 20th Century did anyone care about the artist (I'm exaggerating -- other periods of cultural hysteria have also been high periods for romanticizing artists). William Butler Yeats said that this change happened around WWI, before poets were people with certain incomes and educations; after, they were something far more romanticized. </p>

<p>What people care about is their own fantasies, any one artist/poet/photographer being only the midwife to what's on their minds, something that brings their fantasies into fuller apprehension. Most of their response to any given piece of art is from their own heads, which is why culture and the arts are constructs built on earlier work, and not <em>sui genesis, </em>a variety of shared consensus and communication, not satori. "Shakespeare in the Bush" is a funny lesson in cultural relativism and the arts. </p>

<p>Fred, I followed Ono one New Year's Eve reading at St. Marks Poetry Project. Charisma, yes, but that's an actress's game, and we have a context for her that we wouldn't have for a poor Japanese girl who crashed the reading and held out a rose. But then all art is context dependent.</p>

<p>For me, a photograph is an intersection between what the camera can do, what I can see, and how what's out there can be chunked, and the choices I make in how to chunk it (collage can use photography, but it's a different beastie than photography). For the viewer, if my ideas are obviously more important than what they'll make of the photograph, then I'm just in the way, rightly or wrongly. The trick is to get them to use their own imaginations. Allure is possible; pedantry falls flat.</p>

 

[fate_faith_change_chains]

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<blockquote>

<p>The conundrum of using what happens in your head while working from/in/on the real. Wanting to keep the real real, but wanting to make it work in or with the fantasy.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Julie, yes, I think it's inherently a matter of letting the things you look at change by changing the way you look at them.</p>

 

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