Transcendence and Transformation

fate_faith_change_chains · May 31, 2010

It is a connection to another time and place . . . by the symbolic method Josh has been speaking of. I find transcendence to be more a seeing than an interpreting. I think it has to do with time (and timelessness) and place (and space).

</blockquote>

Here, <a href="

Francisco 1905 cruising down market street</a>. Worth watching the whole video, it has something transcendent, and, something purely visual with compositions sliding in and out of the frame. The music adds another layer.

And then, watch the same ride in 2005 :

<a href="

Francisco 2005, market street.</a>

luis_g · May 31, 2010

[Fred, for me, in layman's terms, Transcendence is the revelation of an unforeseen level of existence.]

Don, still thinking about your thoughts on this matter -- in relation to Fred's OT of T 'n T. The idea of the Plenum is a good one. Of course, the photographer's intent/thoughts/feelings are also part and parcel of documentary photography. We can still see cave art, and make guesses, but how we wish we knew what they thought and felt when they did them. Do you think a viewer can hear the claviers, too, or just feasts on the density of the information within the frame?

Is this ballet, secret even unto the participants, important to the historians/researchers/lay people of the future?

Don- "Their value is the result of effort, work, labor. Photos of no known provenance, without 'historicity' (which includes the photographer's celebrity if any) are landfill."

Their value is due to a lot more than that: Intelligence, visual and social.... Wit.... Grace.... Vitality.... Involvement....Rarity...Creativity... Insight....historical significance, and much, much more. Working with an 8x10 (or Gigapixel rig) guarantees an information-rich plenum, but little else. As to the notion that photos from "more ordinary" people will be thought of as "landfill" by historians and people of the future, I think that's a delusion. Today, historians, researchers and lay people eagerly seek and seize upon finding, sharing, enjoying and studying the work of unknowns that deals with things/topics of interest. I doubt people from the future will be very different.

[ Nobody threw out the "landfill" Zapruder film because it was accidentally made by an amateur on his lunch hour.]

A special note of thanks to Don for bringing in documentary work into this thread. The way the oil spill plumes are snaking around in the Gulf, I may soon be drawn into doing a little documentary work myself. This is helping me sort things out, to prepare mentally.

Norma Desmond · May 31, 2010

Phylo, thanks for those links. I do that ride and, more often, walk that walk, a lot. It will never look the same to me. And how it will look (to me) from now on will be a matter of at least partially transcending what I see by connecting to another time. It seems like your example shows some simpatico with transcendence. Again, it helps bring us back to the original topic.

I find it interesting that the 1905 film (pre-earthquake) seems much more evocative than the current one. Yet, I do find when I walk or ride in the trolley car down that stretch of Market Street, it is usually a more evocative and sensuous experience. The 2005 film doesn't give me the sense of contrast between the upscale business and retail sides of the street and the much more derelict, alcoholic side of the street that exists in abandoned phone booths, empty urine-soaked store entryways, and the shadows cast by many historic buildings that flank the track-laden streets. The "action" in 1905 seemed to be living and out in the open. Much of the action in 2005 is hidden from the sunlight. I think something about the situation and activity in 1905 allowed for this method of filming to be more transcendent (and at the same time more accurate) than utilizing this same method of filming in 2005, which I think misses more. In 2005, you don't have people running around in the middle of the road where the camera stays. The 2005 version is, therefore, overly clean and purified. There would be more transcendent ways to film this in 2005 and those ways might actually give a more "accurate" picture as well.

I hadn't thought of the transcendent capabilities of accuracy until viewing these two films.

don_essedi · May 31, 2010

Luis and also Luca re: the landfill and value. My comments were made without regard to the images personal, artistic, or documentary value, but considered the social and cultural value. It is just a problem of logistics and need. In order for any of those images to get preserved and appreciated someone will have to make the effort the photographer didn't, and that takes time and money as well as labor. Besides art, there's the interests of historians, cultural anthropologists, maybe a new discipline (call them electronic archeologists), curators looking for something new for next season, collectors looking for another store of value, maybe someone like Michael Lesy gets interested, etc. Even unknown and uncelebratated art photographers need to be documentarians of their own work, otherwise their photos continuing to exist socially, culturally in the future is left to chance.

Philip K Dick's 1964 novel The Man in the High Castle is an alternate history story in which the Axis won WWII and California is part of Japan's Greater Co-prosperity Sphere. The Japanese have a collector's passion for US pop culture and history. The owner of a business that makes fake Civil War revolvers for that market explains something to his employees. He puts two common Zippo lighters on the table. One costs whatever they cost at any store in town, but the other is priceless because it was the lighter FDR had on his person when he was assassinated in Miami. That one has "historicity". Just watch Antiques Roadshow and you'll see the measure of historicity applied to all kinds of objects, including photos. So...fill out those IPTC fields, folks.

je ne regrette rien · May 31, 2010

Transcend - go beyond.

In photography probably going beyond the mere appearance of the items which "appear" - first in real world to the photographer and then to the viewer sensing what is shown on the photograph.

The intermediate step is the photograph, which could reflect the transformation intent of the author - or not.

Probably you are right: transcendence just is.

It might be intentional - and here we come back to things already posted: presenting what we see to induce a certain reaction in the viewer - or by chance.

Intentionality to chance is fluid. There are so many "things" in a scene, and then in a photo, and then in the eyes of the viewer.

I liked the notion that black and white transcends. It's true.

But also colour transcends, when it marks a photo and determines the visual message, most of all whet colours in reality would not bring along the same message.

The frame transcends, and the point of view.

I also believe that there is one fundamental point of transcendence, which is time.

As time passes, it transforms photographs.

Take an example: <a href="../photo/6918913">this</a> photo of Times Square in NYC in 2007. Everybody can go there, over the years (it will remain basically unchanged over years). I have, as I believe, a very limited possibility of transcending Times Square.

But showing Times Square - a metaphor of course - as it was (consider the footage of LA's market street in 1905), at a time when nobody can make a personal verification is transcending.

Norma Desmond · May 31, 2010

"I hadn't thought of the transcendent capabilities of accuracy until viewing these two films." --Fred

I'd like to add that I'm also thinking about the added accuracy that transcendent elements can provide. The lack of effective transcendent elements in the 2005 film seems to help make it inaccurate in terms of a more complete picture. This may relate back to what Julie was talking about in her well-conceived post about what the subject "is" . . . and is not . . . transcendence.

je ne regrette rien · May 31, 2010

Addendum In respect of time as a factor for transcendence, this was used by Garry Winogrand (I know I pop him up from time to time, but I like his photographic attitude and several of his photos). He kept his film undeveloped for years, and not by chance. It was deliberate, partly because of his workflow, partly because he wanted "distance" from his shots.

fate_faith_change_chains · May 31, 2010

Fred, yes. The "hustle and bustle" is missing in the 2005 version, and the 1905 ride, showing us things that once were ( which the 2005 ride ofcourse also does ) looks strangely more modern, about a future erupting. I do think the 2005 is " as accurate " as the 1905 film, in that the camera's perspective is unchanged showing us the difference through the lens of that viewpoint, hundred years later. We can only imagine how the 2105 ride would look like in comparison to the 2005 one, again from that same viewpoint. ------- Something else, here's a quote from the book Atget, John Szarkowski :

Perhaps Brassaï made the definitive empty garden chair photograph, and surely his friend Henry Miller wrote the definitive caption for all such photographs :

" Among all the objects which Brassaï has photographed his chair with the wire legs stands out with a majesty which is singular and disquieting. It is a chair of the lowest demonination, a chair which has been sat on by beggars and by royalty, by little trot-about whores and by queenly opera divas. It is a chair which the municipality rents daily to any and everyone who wishes to pay fifty centimes for sitting down in the open air. A chair with little holes in the seat and wire legs which come to a loop at the bottom.The most unostentatious chair, the most inexpensive, the most ridiculous chair, if a chair can be ridiculous, which could be devised. Brassaï chose precisily this insignificant chair and, snapping it where he found it, unearthed what there was in it of dignity and veracity. THIS IS A CHAIR. Nothing more. No sentimentalism about the lovely backsides which once graced it, no romanticism about the lunatics who fabricated it, no statistics about the hours of sweat and anguish that went into the creation of it, no sarcasm about the era which produced it, no odious comparisons with the chairs of other days, no humbug about the dreams of the idlers who monopolize it, no scorn for the nakedness of it, no gratitude either."

Miller is, of course, pulling our leg. The photograph is about all the things he denies.

</blockquote>

I wonder if there's a line to be drawn between the transcendent and the imaginary, even though the imaginary in turn can be transcendent.

Norma Desmond · May 31, 2010

Luca, thanks. Yes. Transcendence can be intentional for many photographers and it can be a way of viewing for many viewers and it can just be, without intention, because of something about the medium and the individual vision and presentation.

I agree with you that color can transcend as well as black and white.

I think I understand what you mean by "the frame transcends" and I think the frame/framing (not a literal frame of course, say, made of wood, but the act and result of framing) is a key element in a photograph's being transcendent. I've always considered the implied frame of a photograph to be both a limit and a move toward transcendence. Seeing the photographic space alongside that space from which it was made seems to suggest that symbolic nature of the photograph itself.

The time element you're talking about is one means of transcendence. Times Square has changed a lot in just the time since Rudy Giuliani cleansed it of a lot of its character and commercialized and Trumpized it in the last decade or so. Your photo is a photo and is not Times Square and in that sense is transcendent. Relatively speaking, it is also not especially a transcendent photo and it's not trying to be that. There are more transcendent photos of Times Square, even to me, right here and now in the present. I'll try to find a couple of examples.

Norma Desmond · May 31, 2010

Phylo, I'm grateful for the final line about Miller pulling our leg. When I read "THIS IS A CHAIR. Nothing more." I laughed. As if there is just a chair. Hah! Again, back to Julie's great post on what "is" the chair. There is no chair absent things that are supposedly not part of what the chair is. The Platonic chair is a myth, although it's a very stimulating and rich Idea ;)))

Wow. The difference between imaginary and transcendent. My first impulse is to say that imagination is more personal than transcendence. Imagination seems more about me and transcendence seems somehow outside of me. But I need to think more about it all. Thanks for the spark.

don_essedi · May 31, 2010

Luis: "Do you think a viewer can hear the claviers, too, or just feasts on the density of the information within the frame?

Is this ballet, secret even unto the participants, important to the historians/researchers/lay people of the future?"

Considering its a photo of two young black men in an alley, there are odds someone might put a dark interpretation on it, but all the responses it's gotten so far are smiles. I think people feel something "lighthearted" when viewing it. As to its importance to the future? Possibly. According to friends and family who visit here from Chicago and St Louis, race relations here "feel" different than in their cities. It's not all sweetness and light here, just different. Their phrase is "not menacing". In the defacto segregation era (or even afterwards) I doubt Charles "One Shot" Harris would have photographed on the streets of a white neighborhood, for example. I look at this photo by Swank (1934) and I think "these kids lived in the same neighborhood"

http://www.chronicle.pitt.edu/media/pcc040913/historic_photos_PGH.html

Thinking about my photos of African Americans or of white and black together, I guess there's an absence of "menace" or "tension" of a racial sort. I'm not out documenting race relations, but the photos "suggest" not menacing, not tense. So, yeah "possibly".

"[ Nobody threw out the "landfill" Zapruder film because it was accidentally made by an amateur on his lunch hour.]"

Historicity. My landfill comment had nothing to do with "amateur", but a colossal mass of undocumented images.

Norma Desmond · May 31, 2010

Actually, Phylo, the way Szarkowski wrote this, quoting Miller and then adding his own clincher at the end, is a transcendent kind of writing. His means of writing itself makes a point that the words themselves written differently and more narratively wouldn't have. The ability to set up and then undermine has a certain power beyond what the words themselves say. It puts some onus back on the reader!

luis_g · May 31, 2010

With regards to Phylo's two Market Street clips (and I have biked, walked, trolley-ed and driven it), when we look at the earlier one, we are seeing a world to which we are not desensitized. Also, a world which was far freer, and had a street life. Ours does not, not like that. The earlier view is more organic and free-form. The latter is more restrained, between the lines, and we are quite desensitized to it.

__________________________________

I don't know of a single archive of documents and/or photographs that is not being digitized, if it isn't already. The idea that archives of the future will still be primarily paper has little to support it presently. Don's idea of the supremacy of paper prints is endemic, hardly the norm today, much less likely to be that 100 years from now. The costs of maintaining paper collections is becoming unsustainable.

Don, I lived in Chicago for years, though have never spent much time in St. Louis (what a nice name!). In large parts of Chicago, it's not sweetness and light either, I assure you. It's different everywhere, and those differences are real and significant and part of the identity of a certain timespace coordinate.

One great thing about the landfill, as you call it, is that as long as the photographs are labeled, I can do a search, and in seconds find all the Benkovitz pictures there. I understand what you are saying and doing, but I do think you are undervaluing what others are doing, and the future value of their work. Yes, I know about provenance, historicity and market values of objects. Their value as documents depends on who's looking, and why.

___________________________

don_essedi · May 31, 2010

A difference between the 1905 and 2005 footage is how many people are on the street; and the very structured environment of 2005 compared to the near anarchic one in 1905.

The bicyclists in the 2005 caught my attention. It seems their one-only behaviors replicate what is common in the 1905 footage. In 1905 everyone jaywalks it seems. In 2005, one bicycalist rides over a median island; one bicycalist waves; one crosses the street dismounted. Is this "real" or "staged"? Is the 2005 one replicating more than the route of the 1905? Or are these behaviors just part of being on the street, and not staged because there is no need to. People jaywalk, U-turn, wave etc. Maybe the need to stage is that there's no guarantee there'll be bicycalists on Market St at the moment, but they are there commonly otherwise.

But, it seems, foot traffic is a rarity on the street in 2005. It makes it less interesting for me than 1905, or even when I lived and worked on Market in the 60s and 70s.

Allen Herbert · May 31, 2010

"can transcend or transform the subject/s of a photograph? Can a photographer or a viewer transcend or transform the subject/s of a photograph? "

I think a photograph, sometimes, takes on a life of its own transcending both the photographer and subject.

We are recording the world as we try to perceive it.......but, the camera takes on a life of its own, seeing, and perceiving in different unique ways. We see what we think we are seeing.... what the camera can sometime see is a different story...but we lay claim to it as our art.

Light does not dance to our tune; neither does the cosmos except our consciousness...what we think we are photographing with our art might be something totally different in reality. The camera, just a tool, can show another reality, not the reality we have created in our minds.

How many times have you taken a photograph which was not really yours but something else? And then we wonder, sometimes, why the viewer sees more than we in the photograph.... the photograher.

Just a thought.

inoneeye · May 31, 2010

and slap! "Miller is, of course, pulling our leg." good read Phylo. Caption or critique it captivates me takes me on a ride and provides surprise. pause. It is left up to me now in spite of a strong lead. A favorite way (for me) to learn something... "It puts some onus back on the reader!" Like this gave me pause Luca "He kept his film undeveloped for years, and not by chance. It was deliberate, partly because of his workflow, partly because he wanted "distance" from his shots." especially meaningful to me as I process some very old film and scan some negs that I overlooked/shelved years ago. I am enjoying the tangible benefits of distance in time and easing of the burden of intent or expectations.

je ne regrette rien · May 31, 2010

Josh,

you know what I'm doing right now?

Scanning film I shot something over 30 years ago. With my father's Leica III. Must have been 15 years old, or so. Experience was what it was, the lighmeter scale did not match the aperture scale on the lens, so I guessed. Ilford Pan F.

The film is terribly damaged, some photos you cannot look at, but there are a few, which maybe ...

... could be somehow transcendent. :-)

Allen Herbert · May 31, 2010

"He kept his film undeveloped for years, and not by chance"

Really, does that make him something special? Or, perhaps too much arse staring was involved.

Most photographers can't wait to see their results but i suppose it's Artsy to wait so you say.

inoneeye · May 31, 2010

Allen, I read Luca and the GW quote as an observation not a proclamation. not an art decree.

je ne regrette rien · May 31, 2010

Allen,

Really, does that make him something special? Or, perhaps too much arse staring was involved.

</blockquote>

Yours is a rhetorical question. We all well know that it does not make him special at all. What makes him special - are some, or most of his pictures, depending on your politics.

It's a free world you know, fortunately.

By the way, the post was about gaining a distance from one's photographic work, taking GW as an example.

It was not, as Josh notes, an overall endorsement of his work.

Allen Herbert · May 31, 2010

Josh, did i say otherwise? just an observation about Artsy things

..nothing personal, yet;))

Allen Herbert · May 31, 2010

“ Yours is a rhetorical question”

Well, sort of with an innuendo thrown in.

“gaining a distance from one's photographic work”

Just tells me that that there is a lack of confidence.

Either it works or does not.

Only Art Directors make the banal work if they are of a mind to.

je ne regrette rien · May 31, 2010

:-)

Just tells me that that there is a lack of confidence

</blockquote>

Where? Of Whom? According to firm statements I read here and around, I would say the contrary: there are so many self-confident, self-nominated "photographic artists" that it is definitely easier to count those who do not think they are.

inoneeye · May 31, 2010

Luca "By the way, the post was about gaining a distance from one's photographic work, taking GW as an example." with that in mind, I think that distance from my own work is one of the great rewards I have experienced in photography and other mediums. I love the day that I experience a disconnect from my work. When it engages me primarily as a viewer. As an architectural designer I can almost feel a tangible switch flip the day that I walk on to one of my projects and forget (nearly) that this is my creation. Transcending my involvement, my role..? It most often happens months even years later, once a client has claimed the space and made it there own. The disconnect from my input is not 100% but it somehow just feels like it doesn't belong to me anymore. and I like that. The same with photographs. I look at photos I have authored and posted and I am more viewer than creator. Putting that distance to work as a creator does put a different twist on the process.

Allen Herbert · May 31, 2010

I don’t think so. Too many Virgins worried about if they can perform. Be honest most of you are too scared to post a photo.

Have a little think.

“I love the day that I experience a disconnect from my work.”

Why would you want to distance yourself from your work which is part of you? Your work is an integral part of yourself.... walk way? See it from a distance, an observer; think again, nobody walks away from themselves and becomes a remote viewer...

Sign In

Transcendence and Transformation

Recommended Posts

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Top Posters In This Topic

Popular Days

Top Posters In This Topic

Popular Days

Posted Images

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

Create an account

Sign in