"The Ground Beneath Her Feet"

[jtk]

<p><strong>Phylo, you seem to have reinforced a point that I was exploring and tentatively making.</strong></p>

<p>Elvis's recordings can be heard, but his voice cannot. <strong>By contrast</strong>, Holden Caufield continues to exist in <em>every bit of the fullness</em> that J.D. Salinger created...and Holden will have eternal influence among <em>literate teens</em> than poor Elvis, in the flesh or recorded, ever did (I get a kick out of flattened Elvis, but not nearly as much as from flattened Chuck and "Keef.")</p>

<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holden_Caulfield">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holden_Caulfield</a></p>

<p><a href="

href="

<p>A parallel thought: some premier classical musicians hold that <strong>recordings are not "music."</strong> <em>Perhaps , like photographs, recordings ("Elvis") are <strong>flattened phenomena</strong>. A fine fictional doppelganger of Elvis would have more dimensionality, might be more "real" than any recording. An example I can think of is <strong>Crying of Lot 39</strong> by Thomas Pynchon...but I think it would have had to focus more on The Paranoids, a Beatles-like band to come closer to creating "real" people. Another example might be Anthony Burgess's <strong>Clockwork Orange</strong> (inhabited by a doppelganger of Mick Jagger).</em><br /><em></em><br /><em></em><em></em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crying_of_Lot_49">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crying_of_Lot_49</a></p>

<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clockwork_Orange">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clockwork_Orange</a></p>

<p><strong>Phylo,</strong> I doubt even you, a unicorn true-believer, can cite an example of anything unicorn-involved that approaches the dimensionality of Holden Caufield, much less the soulfulness (do you accept the idea of soulfulness?)....anything whatsoever unicorn-related beyond the commercial trash imposed on children by people unaware of meritorious alternatives, such as Wind In The Willows?</p>

<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_in_the_Willows">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_in_the_Willows</a></p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>Music is performed. Then it may be recorded. <em>[i think both are music, but that's beside the point, and I do generally have a fuller experience at live performances.]</em></p>

<p>Photographs are ONLY recordings. <em>[Of course, they are much more, but </em>in comparison to music<em>, there is no "live" version of a photograph.]</em> There was no "live performance" that could have been seen and referred to as a photograph also.</p>

<p>Had you been at the live musical event, you would have heard the music. Had you been at the taking of the photograph, youe would NOT have seen the photograph (you would have seen only the photographer and what was being photographed).</p>

<p>The music WAS the performance. The photograph IS NOT the photographed.</p>

<p>Nothing is flattened by a photograph, because a photograph is what it is. Those confusing the photograph with the photographed think a photograph is flat.</p>

<p>That's not to say that a photograph doesn't have an intimate relationship with the reality upon which the camera focused originally. It does. I get that relationship. And I also understand what to look for in a photograph and that I won't be able to walk behind the photograph and get a different perspective on it, like I can with a human being or sculpture. I accept what the medium gives me in its fullness. I understand the medium's relationship to the raw materials the camera was pointed at and I don't pit photograph and reality in competition with each other.</p>

[Norma Desmond]

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

[jtk]

<p>Fred, I think the OT's issue had to do with "flat" vs "real," <strong>not</strong> the relative flatness of one medium or another.</p>

<p>...further, a bio or novel is not a medium, whereas a photograph, the way you evidently understand it, is a medium. They are no more parallel than a menu and the memory of a meal. The finest photograph (yours, for example, or one of my poor efforts) is inherently flat by comparison to a well-written bio of the subject, recounted memory of the subject, film of the subject in interview, or a novel based upon the subject. IMO</p>

[jtk]

<p>Fred, two possibly conflicting concepts seem to underly your last comment.</p>

<p>The first is that a photograph is not flat because it refers to nothing, is sufficient unto itself.</p>

<p>The second is that a photograph IS flat because it refers to nothing, has no more substance than is immediatel visible to all or most viewers, and is is sufficient unto itself. Except, of course, on the isolated occasions in which the photograph unleashes sigificant ideas among viewers who may know something relevant to the flat object.</p>

<p>I think the second stands well by itself, but that the first is absurd.</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>John, I didn't think the OT was comparing one medium to another. I thought you made a bad analogy by talking about the flatness of recordings compared to live music and then comparing (flat) musical recordings to (flat) photographs. It was actually you who were comparing mediums, and you still are. I don't see novels as competing for fullness or flatness with photographs. You do.</p>

<p>To say I understand "photograph" as a medium is to mischaracterize what I think about photographs. It is certainly to give only a very incomplete summary of my views about photographs.</p>

<p>I understand that you think photographs are inherently flat. I don't. Pictures are full and I don't confuse visual and verbal grammars. I don't expect the same things from a full experience of each.</p>

<p>Of course, I didn't say that a photo refers to nothing. I said, paraphrasing, that<em> a photograph is not the thing it refers to. </em>The reason I said that is to answer your flawed analogy about live music and recordings. You said that some claim that a recording is flat compared to live music. Then you said that a photograph, similarly, is flat. I took you to be saying that a photograph was flat compared to the object/subject/scene which was photographed. I was not saying it's not flat because it refers to nothing. (Again, I don't think photographs refer to nothing.) I was saying the comparison doesn't hold up and that I don't compare photos or novels or sculptures or paintings to the things to which they refer. A reference doesn't have to be meant, understood, or related to as a comparison. I don't relate to photos of people the way I relate to people. And I don't relate to photos of people the way I relate to written descriptions of people. So, your notion of "flat by comparison" has little use for me.</p>

[jtk]

<p><em>"...your notion of "flat by comparison" has little use for me." </em>- Fred G</p>

<p>Fred,<strong> others here may find Salman Rushdie's meditation on flatness</strong> of a photograph as <em>interesting</em> as I do. Your yes/no decision is your business but doesn't engage the OT.</p>

<p>I tend to agree with the OT's Rushdie-related hypothesis about flatness : <em>Even my favorite photographs can seem "flat"</em> <strong>by comparison</strong> to many other "works": literature, theatre, live music, film etc...and recordings (I don't personally dismiss recordings as non-music).</p>

<p><strong>Photographs <em>always exist in a context</em></strong><em>, </em>as do all other phenomena. <strong>Context provides everything beyond flatness.</strong><br /><strong></strong><br />An unknown photographer's image of an unknown subject seems flat by comparison to a photograph whose context is more full: <em>compare a "known" photographer's body of work </em>(Avedon, Steichen) to a solo photo by an "unknown" photographer (random Flickr snap).</p>

<p>A work (photo, novel, dance etc) is <strong>flat</strong> if it doesn't evoke much response...and limited context limits response, may result in flatness.</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>John, if you'll read my comments on this thread, you'll see I've engaged the OT substantively, not just with a yes/no. I don't require a context to get beyond what you see as the flatness of a photo. I look and see. This is not to dismiss context by any means. But often a photo doesn't need it and often a photo provides it itself. </p>

<p><em>[You have dismissed so many OTs with yes/no responses that it's strange for you to accuse me of doing so here. Reread your responses to Truths and Lies, Does Photography Affect Biography, and Arthur's recent Deconstruction thread.]</em></p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>"<strong>Photographs <em>always exist in a context</em></strong><em>, </em>as do all other phenomena. <strong>Context provides everything beyond flatness." --John</strong></p>

<p>"all other phenomena": What context do you require for a piece of music not to be flat? What must you know or read about a good jazz piece or classical composition, or pop song for that matter, before you can appreciate it beyond flat?</p>

<p>I understand Rushdie's words to have more depth and import than you do. He at least made a commitment to <em>photographs</em> being flat. Now you've reduced that to "<em>everything</em> is flat without a context" which means photographs are no different from anything else. You're kind of saying "water is wet." Rushdie was making an observation about photographs, not about everything having a context.</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>Back to what Rushdie was saying and what Kent seemed concerned with. (It would be nice to hear some of your views, Kent, on these matters.)</p>

<p>Rushdie talked about photographs taking the life from a person, and that death begetting life. As I said, I think it's a poor description. I think photographs, portraits for example, even when I don't know the subject of the photograph or anything about them, can be more immediately illuminating. Many portraits are about facial expressions. Those expressions can show me a lot about a person. The stilled moment often provides a depth that fleets by much more quickly and even sometimes superficially when life is busy happening. Photographs can provide focus. An expression can also transcend the particular person and have an illuminating effect.</p>

<p>I don't often slay people with my camera, though I have at times (metaphorically), to interesting results. I <em>look at</em> people through my lens. I <em>look</em> carefully. So do many other photographers. When that looking is evident, a photograph doesn't need to kill in order to beget. It can enrich with immediacy.</p>

[don_essedi]

<p>"A photograph takes the life from a person by making him or her motionless, flat, and often colorless, yet at the same time confers a sort of immortality. Death begets life."</p>

<p>The OP refers to this as a "line of thinking" in Rushdie's "extensive philosophizing" In a later post he refers to it as not Rushdie's thinking, but his "paraphrase". What the photographer is "making" is the person motionless, flat and "often colorless". I think this refers to the print, the physical photographic print, which is indeed not alive like the photographed was at the taking, is motionless because it is a 'still', and may be a b&w photograph (colorless).</p>

<p>The discussion has moved on, it seems, to a quality, rather than a physical property, 'flatness'. We say a carbonated drink becomes flat when it loses its fizz, or we speak of flattened affect. How does "context" provide 'fizz'?</p>

<p> </p>

[Julie H]

<p>Adding a little to Don's comment, 'flatness' is tactile; it requires, is discovered/confirmed by either touching the physical print/thing (the photo-object) or from bodily movement relative to the presented image (onscreen, for example).</p>

[don_essedi]

<p>I infer from both John's and Fred's posts that 'fizz' is desirable, a good quality for a photo to have. </p>

 

[Norma Desmond]

<p>Don, I didn't talk about fizz and nothing I said should be taken as implying anything about fizz. Fizz can be desirable or not, depending on its use. I think a physically flat photo can, significantly, have a quality of <em>depth</em>, in and of itself, verbal context supplied or not. I find depth a better opposite of how I've been thinking of flat. Fizz is more of a lark and is often bound to lose its luster. Photographs with depth tend to gain over time, not lose. I think photographs can have more or less depth even when the print medium is physically flat.</p>

[don_essedi]

<p>Fred, I agree that "depth" rather than "context" is the opposite.</p>

 

[jtk]

<p><em>"Fizz is more of a lark and is often bound to lose its luster." </em><strong>- Fred, mixing at least three bizarre metaphors </strong>:-)</p>

<p>Fred, the OT had to do with "flat," not with fizz :-) It was contrasted with dimensionality. Rushdie has wonderful command of English, after all...uses the right word for the right purpose and is undeniably an artist, after all. Have you read his work?</p>

<p>Steak is better when it sizzles. I think context evokes something more than is superficially obvious, is sizzle not mere fizz. Context is the sizzling "something extra." A fine photo, like a sexy blues song, has sizzle.</p>

<p>To say a photo has or lacks "fizz" is a directly negative comment on transient value, an expression of negative bias... whereas a steak with plenty of sizzle is consumed enthusiastically. It's not a mere soda, after all.</p>

<p>A photograph without context (no relation to a body of work, few associations in the viewer's mind) might just be a flat piece of paper (or flat-screen monitor?), just as you say. But I've read a little Rushdie and I don't think he is quite that one-dimensional :-)</p>

[jtk]

<p>... pardon my misattribution.</p>

<p>Fred didn't evoke "fizz," that was Don E. Fred did, however, fabricate a wonderfully mixed metaphor...worthy of a recent President :-) </p>

[Kent Shafer]

<p>Well, the whole discussion of flatness is fascinating, but all I meant by it in the original post was that a photograph is (usually) two-dimensional.</p>

<p>The main thing this book is about (I think—I'm just a casual reader and not a literary scholar) is boundaries. The boundary between life and death, boundaries between countries, and, in this story, the boundary between alternate worlds. Where is the boundary between reality and fantasy? Who can cross the boundary, and how? In the book, music can break down the boundaries. So can photography.</p>

<p>In a movie that features a ghost, is the ghost any less real than the other characters, since all of them are just colored shadows on the wall anyway?</p>

<p>Sometimes a photograph becomes more "real" than the original real thing. For example, recall the Viet Nam war photo of the man being shot in the back of the head, or the one of the naked little girl on fire. The actual people who experienced those things are just two out of thousands upon thousands who suffered and died in that place and time. Those actual people are no longer real for most of us—if they ever were in the first place. The human mind's ability to comprehend suffering on the Viet Nam scale seems to be fairly limited. But the photographs are <em>real</em>. They are part of our world today.</p>

[don_essedi]

<p>"Sometimes a photograph becomes more "real" than the original real thing." <br /><br /><br />Eddie Adam's photo of the murder of a Viet Cong by Brig. Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan and Nick Ut's photo of Kim Phuc are not what you describe. The Viet Cong was not shot in the back of the head, and Kim Phuc is not on fire. How does this relate to a photo being "more "real" the the original real thing"?<br /><br /><br />You see, we have photos that describe what was in front of the lens at the moment.</p>

[Kent Shafer]

<p>Don, thanks for the corrections. I've now gone back and looked at the pictures, which I probably should have done before. (Side of the head, not back, and severely burned but not actually on fire.) I don't know if my faulty memory of these famous photos has anything to do with the points being discussed—probably not much.</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p><em>"pardon my misattribution"</em></p>

<p>No.</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>Don/Kent, I think somewhere between the extremes of describing what was in front of the lens and becoming more real than the original thing is where most photographs are.</p>

<p>In another thread, people are taking on the task of talking about what is or is not a photograph. That topic is most often handled as a classificatory discussion rather than a descriptive one. Even when descriptions are provided, it is done so with the purpose of including or excluding certain things as photos.</p>

<p>In this thread, and many others in the Philosophy forum, are we deciding if it's BLACK or if it's WHITE, if a photo is a recording or a creation, if it is found or made, if it is less real than or more real than or just as real as reality? It seems to me that not all topics have to boil down to a debate between THIS or THAT. Just as, in that other thread, it would be more interesting to discuss the different ways photographs have been made over the years, perhaps how those different methods of making photos affected or were affected by the imagination or thinking of the photographers utilizing the different methods and how those different methods strike us, so in this thread it would seem we might get to more meat if we stopped staking our usual territory and instead engaged some ideas about method and results.</p>

<p>Rushdie talked about stalking, and that reminds me of Sontag's talking about photographers as voyeurs. I often feel the stalker/voyeur in me even when I am engaged with and feeling empathy toward my subject. Perhaps it gives me a little thrill that I like (even crave) when I photograph. Maybe I like having just a little secret to myself even when I'm in a relationship. My secret is not only the voyeuristic one, that I like looking at and watching you, my subject. It is also the photograph I may have in mind, may be visualizing. So Rushdie's notion of disappearing (this is in the actual quote that Kent provided a little while after the original post) makes sense to me as long as it's not overplayed. I think, from the outside, it might appear that the photographer becomes an absence. From the inside, there's both an absence and a presence, a negation and an assertion or commitment. It's not whether I do one or the other. It's the combination with which I do both. For me, stalking doesn't require stealth and it doesn't require complete disappearance. I can stalk and be a voyeur even while I know you know I'm there. I don't have to hide behind trees or my camera to do it. It's a state of mind.</p>

<p>And I think the level of stalking and even stealth and voyeurism can be seen in the photo. I can often get a sense of when someone has "stalked" a homeless person to a degree where it feels off, objectifying and exploitive. And, I can get a sense when someone uses their own voyeurism genuinely when I see some nudes. I can also often tell when an attempt is being made to hide that voyeurism with "artistic" clichés.</p>

<p>Part of Rushdie's significance here is that he is addressing both the act of photographing and the photograph.</p>

[don_essedi]

<p>"I don't know if my faulty memory of these famous photos has anything to do with the points being discussed—probably not much."</p>

<p>Faulty memory isn't the issue for me. What I considered was that in a discussion of the real and reality you chose examples for it that are false but you belived were real. Does it matter in what part of his head the Viet Cong was shot, or whether the girl was on fire or not? Depends on what you mean by reality -- or perhaps moreso -- "more real".</p>

 

[don_essedi]

<p>Regarding stalking, violation...(I believe Doisneau preferred 'fishing') I wrote that nothing issues out of the barrel of the lens and impacts the target. It's the other way 'round. Something issues from the scene and impacts the film, marking it (or, for digital sensors, is converted into electrical signals).</p>

<p>So, is this thread about the interiority of the photographer? About appearances and behaviors? The reification of metaphors and analogies? I think there is an 'entanglement' of the photographer and what is seen in the vf. What comes out of that (the photograph) describes how they got along together, rather than being an entanglement of the photograph and the reality.</p>

<p>The problem of photography is its descriptive power -- the power to make anyone feel 'if I had been there to see that myself, that's what I would have seen'. There's the magic. Simple, naive, childlike, and inescapable. I think all photographers attempt to overcome that, including (and may be especially) the artists of "straight photography". Some may do it with violence. They 'stalk' to 'do it in' and be rid of its power.</p>

<p> </p>

[jtk]

<p>"<em>Does it matter in what part of his head the Viet Cong was shot, or whether the girl was on fire or not? Depends on what you mean by reality -- or perhaps moreso -- "more real"." </em> - Don E</p>

<p>Those two photos hold different (more or less?) meaning than they did back then. "Reality" changes. Today, for example, many Americans accept unquestioningly that the dead man was merely "Viet Cong," whereas when the photo was made many (I do recall) understood that an American pawn (SVN was a puppet government) executed a Vietnamese patriot (alleged Viet Cong) on the street. Reminded some of a Southern-fried American lynching. Times change, meanings change, "real" changes.</p>