Imaging and Imagination: How Are They Related? Reflections on Creation v. Discovery

[aplumpton]

<p>Anders, I love it! (the first quotation of your compatriot). A remark completely free of any obfuscation.</p>

[Julie H]

<p><strong>Anders</strong> said: " ... facts ..."</p>

<p>Shall we discover or create this unlabeled Julie-thing?</p>

 

<blockquote>

<p>"One must believe that there was someone over there. But where? Not in that overstrained voice, not in that face lined like any well-worn object. Certainly not <em>behind</em> that setup. I know quite well that back there there is only "darkness crammed with organs."... The other, in my eyes, is ... always on the margin of what I see and hear, he is this side of me, he is beside or behind me, but he is not in that place which my look flattens and empties of any "interior.""</p>

<p>-- Maurice Merleau-Ponty, <em>The Prose of the World</em> (1973)</p>

</blockquote>

[aplumpton]

<p>Although it is a singular quote like the one above, and while admitting to virtually no experience of the writings of the Marxist French philosopher, the translated following passages (from Merleau-Ponty, "The Structure of Behaviour") may contain some interest for the photographer:</p>

<p>"to understand the relations of consciousness and nature: organic, psychological or even social, humans and our world are interconnected: neither causes the other, instead we shape <em>and</em> are shaped by our environment. Furthermore, we have both a natural (predefined) existence and the ability to change that nature via conscious choice."</p>

<p>And as commented here in a primer on the works of the philosopher (http://www.tameri.com/csw/exist/merleau.shtml)<br>

<br /> "Phenomenology, as proposed by Merleau-Ponty, is concerned primary with physical existence. The human body, and its perceptions, is the way we relate to and understand existence. Merleau-Ponty suggested meaning therefore begins with perception. Because meaning begins with perception, Merleau-Ponty found it necessary to discuss how perception works. Perception starts, according to Merleau-Ponty, with the preconscious moment the external comes into contact with the body. The conscious interpretation of input, as neurologists have affirmed, follows the experience by a significant lapse.<br>

About the only thing clear in Merleau-Ponty’s view is that nothing can be certain. We struggle to define terms like “self” and “body” which are the very basis for philosophy. If we cannot define “person” without creating a tangled web of relationships, then nothing else can be reduced to an ideal. It would seem the one thing we should know, ourselves, is impossible to know."</p>

<blockquote></blockquote>

[fate_faith_change_chains]

<blockquote>

<p>"How many good photographs have you lately made with words ?"</p>

</blockquote>

<p>To make images with words, images fading in and fading out by and with them, that's <em>poetry</em>.</p>

[Landrum Kelly]

<blockquote>

<p>If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes -- Picasso</p>

 

</blockquote>

<p>This very nice (though problematic) quote appears as the caption of a photo on a thread in the "No Words" forum, a thread which combines a photo with a quotation:</p>

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

<p>--Lannie</p>

[AJHingel]

<p>Just for the sake of "facts", Picasso, and Cezanne, are the great exceptions among the great painters of the 19th and 20th century when it comes to words. Cezanne, mainly because he "was not there" (Paris), but painted alone in the forest and mountains around the beautiful town of Aix-en-Provence, and Picasso because he never manage fully to master the language used among the artist around him, French. Apart from those exceptions, the spoken and written language and reflection on the works of art was a central aspect of everything that happened around modern art from the mid 19th century and until at least the second world war. Reflections and putting words on works of art have however another relation to artistic expression since the postmodernist movement started moving. Maybe because the Americans to a certain degree took over!<br /> As mentioned, earlier in this thread, when we take quotations out of there context, they can be used for supporting any argument.</p>

[AJHingel]

<p>By the way as <strong>Landrum</strong> rightly refers to the fact that Merleau-Ponty never wrote directly on photography but he surely wrote on art (mainly paintings. See the doubt of Cezanne ("La doute de Cezanne" for example) and not least "perception" as <strong>Julie</strong> so often has referred to.</p>

[AJHingel]

<p>Last small comment, and I stop for the moment, Merleau-Ponty is the perfect example of a philosopher that turns sociologist and anthropologist in his writings and thereby becomes directly relevant for making us understand not only the artist, but also his subject, reality, the world around us. This is why he so often is mentioned in relationship to the writings of Alfred Schütz, who teaches us to detect social reality by the actions and signs of human behavior in social contexts: the social construction of reality. The two citations of <strong>Landrum</strong> above are perfect examples of these two dimensions in the work of Merleau-Ponty, the social and the "individual" (perception) in lack of a better word. I clearly get more out of the discourse on the social dimension. My photography is almost only that.</p>

[Julie H]

<blockquote>

<p>"... what is the color of your own skin? The odd thing about skin color is that, in contrast to the ease with which we can name the colors of everything around us, no adequate color term seems to apply to our own skin color.</p>

<p>" ... Skin color seems qualitatively uncolored. What could be the reason for this? Consider an analogy with taste. What does your own saliva taste like? It does not taste like anything, really. And the same is true for the smell of your nose, of course -- it does not smell like anything.</p>

<p>" ... the apparent "uncoloriness" of your own skin is just like the lack of perceived taste, smell, or temperature of your own body. Your skin color, like these other senses, has been calibrated to zero by your color perception system, and this lets us more easily see color deviations away from zero, i.e., away from the baseline color. So just as we are designed to taste minute changes from the baseline taste of our own saliva (we can taste only a few molecules of salt), or feel even tiny changes in our baseline temperature, our difficulty in perceiving and categorizing skin color changes away from the baseline.</p>

<p>"And why might <em>this</em> be useful? Probably because one's skin color can change depending on one's mood or overall state, and being able to sense these moods in others can be a strong advantage. Uncolorful, uncategorizable skin tones are just what we'd expect if color vision were intended for mind-reading through the window of skin."</p>

<p>-- Mark Changizi, <em>The Vision Revolution</em> (2009)</p>

</blockquote>

[Landrum Kelly]

<p>Anders, it was Arthur, not I, who responded to your remarks on Merleau-Ponty.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

[AJHingel]

<p>Yes I see, sorry to both you and <strong>Arthur</strong>.<br>

Anders</p>

[fate_faith_change_chains]

<p>In photography, the world is not only the medium but also the author of our ideas, whether they're created or discovered by and through the world, us. A photograph may deal not only with the nature of truth but also with the truth of its nature, which can be both imaginative as well as strictly descriptive <em>imaging</em>.</p>

[luis_g]

<p><strong>U-Li </strong>- "Your skin color, like these other senses, has been calibrated to zero by your color perception system, and this lets us more easily see color deviations away from zero, i.e., away from the baseline color."</p>

<p> I wonder if this is "calibrated", or merely habituated...and in the case of color, it is worse. Unless one is near a neutral background, color is mercurial and affected by neighboring colors & light temps. It is not absolute, but co-dependent and relative.</p>

<p> </p>

[aplumpton]

<p>Currently on the off-topic forum, there is an entry on optical illusions, which relates to relative motions and the effect of foveal and peripheral vision on how we perceive them. While photography can suggest but not transmit motion, optical illusions can be created by color and pattern. I wish I could remember the artist, but several hangings in the Albright Knox Museum of Buffalo (seen about 30 years ago) were abstract compositions of lines, forms and complementary colors in close prioximity, which created such optical illusions or tensions in part due to the way the different colors (differing wavelengths of reflected light) interact in our eyes and visual cortex. Such co-dependence and relativity is also seen in the abstract geometrical paintings of the 20th century Hungarian artist, Vasarely (http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/famous-artists/victor-vasarely.htm). I believe that such illusion and relativity may either accept or deny a point of reference.</p>

[Julie H]

<p><strong>Luis</strong>,</p>

<p>Are 'calibrated' and 'habituated' different in this context? What I was thinking about with that quote was the total absurdity of Lannie's Picasso quote, "If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes." Setting aside the obvious (those gelatenous marbles don't work by themselves), and going to the way that people seem to want to think that we developed sight in order to let in some light. Add a few holes in the front of our heads and it will be so much brighter in here! When the reality is that vision developed for very specific reasons and is a process conditioned by what/where/who you are. Think about how absurd/meaningless it is to say of taste "If only we could pull out our brain and use only our tongue."</p>

<p>However, or in spite of that, it's interesting to think about why people might (want to) say (and quote) "If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes." It's as if there is something comfortable, natural, usefully informative about "clean" vision. As if any contamination by an "I" makes it suspect. This leads to -- from a purely functional point of view -- the feeling that discovery in the sense of an (impossible) untouched (by the brain) reception is contrasted to creativity which becomes equated with manipulation, deception and trickery.</p>

<p>Which seems to suggest that the person who quotes "If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes" feels that all that you need to know is available on the surface of the (silent, scentless, touchless, timeless) visible world as it is discovered absent any intention by a picture-maker. That there is nothing beyond or behind or unclear or otherwise hidden from view that might be or that needs to be "handled" to be made visible or to be brought into the visible. That there is nothing to be revealed, to be learned from anything other than what is "naturally" exposed to the eyes.</p>

[AJHingel]

<p><strong>Arthur</strong>, concerning optical illusions, in the Merleau-Ponty text on "Cezanne's doubt" one find a whole shows on the canvas, or a photographer shows in a photo. </p>

 

<blockquote>

<p><em>"He (Cezanne) makes a basic distinction not between "the senses" and "the understanding" but rather between the spontaneous organization of the things we perceive and the human organization of ideas and sciences. We see things; we agree about them; we are anchored in them; and it is with "nature" as our base that we construct our sciences.</em><br>

<em>Cezanne wanted to paint this primordial world, and his pictures therefore seem to show nature pure, while photographs of the same landscapes suggest man's works, conveniences, and imminent presence. Cezanne never wished to "paint like a savage." He wanted to put intelligence, ideas, sciences, perspective, and tradition back in touch with the world of nature which they were intended to comprehend. He wished, as he said, to confront the sciences with the nature "from which they came." By remaining faithful to the phenomena in his investigations of perspective, Cezanne discovered what recent psychologists have come to formulate: the lived perspective, that which we actually perceive, is not a geometric or photographic one. The objects we see close at hand appear smaller, those far away seem larger than they do in a photograph. (This is evident in films: an approaching train gets bigger much faster than a real train would under the same circumstances.) To say that a circle seen obliquely is seen as an ellipse is to substitute for our actual perception what we would see if we were cameras: in reality we see a form which oscillates around the ellipse without being an ellipse. In a portrait of Mme Cezanne, the border of the wallpaper on one side of her body does not form a straight line with that on the other: and indeed</em><br>

<em> t is known that if a line passes beneath a wide strip of paper, the two visible segments appear dislocated. Gustave Geffroy's table stretches into the bottom of the picture, and indeed, when our eye runs over a large surface, the images it successively receives are taken from different points of view, and the whole surface is warped. It is true that I freeze these distortions in repainting them on the canvas; I stop the spontaneous movement in which they pile up in perception and tend toward the geometric perspective. This is also what happens with colors. ....</em></p>

</blockquote>

 

[AJHingel]

<p>"whole paragraph that"...shows !!!! (to understand what I tried to write above.<br /> One could continue on the question of "interpretation" of the artist with this paragraph below, again from the same small text of Merleau-Ponty on Cezanne:</p>

<blockquote>

<p>We live in the midst of man-made objects, among tools, in houses, streets, cities, and most of the time we see them only through the human actions which put them to use. We become used to thinking that all of this exists necessarily and unshakably. Cezanne's painting suspends these habits of thought and reveals the base of inhuman nature upon which man has installed himself. This is why Cezanne's people are strange, as if viewed by a creature of another species. Nature itself is stripped of the attributes which make it ready for animistic communions: there is no wind in the landscape, no movement on the Lac d'Annecy; the frozen objects hesitate as at the beginning of the world. It is an unfamiliar world in which one is uncomfortable and which forbids all human effusiveness. If one looks at the work of other painters after seeing<br /> Cezanne's paintings, one feels somehow relaxed, just as conversations resumed after a period of mourning mask the absolute change and restore to the survivors their solidity. But indeed only a human being is capable of such a vision, which penetrates right to the root of things beneath the imposed order of humanity.</p>

</blockquote>

[luis_g]

<p><strong>Julie - "</strong>Are 'calibrated' and 'habituated' different in this context?"</p>

<p>To me, the difference is significant, because calibration would mean there is a standard or index against which all is compared, and habituation means no such standard, no additional mechanism, just an extinguished response. One that can shift as our skins tan or wrinkle, because if you have a standard, if it is not frozen, then it will need a way of changing. Desensitization is a very familiar issue for most humans. But in the context that you follow with, no, not that much difference.</p>

<p>I read Arthur's quote and thoughts as a kind of reductionist, fundamentalist longing, a turn towards (over)simplification. (I can hear Occam's Razor being stropped as I type this)</p>

<p>Arthur's thought is not an unusual thought on this forum. There are images made just through the eyes of deceased animals, and they are <em>nothing like what we see, let alone some kind of purified vision.</em></p>

<p> </p>

[luis_g]

<p>I meant to add animals "and humans" above. And, no, I would not expect the eyes of the deceased to be the equal of those of the living.</p>

<p>I think Julie pegged it with: "As if any contamination by an "I" makes it suspect. This leads to -- from a purely functional point of view -- the feeling that discovery in the sense of an (impossible) untouched (by the brain) reception is contrasted to creativity which becomes equated with manipulation, deception and trickery."</p>

<p> </p>

[AJHingel]

<p><strong>Luis</strong> if this is the case , then according to the quotation of Cezanne made by Merleau-Ponty above, <em>discovery</em> related to painters would equal "painting like a fool" (not "savage" as written in the English text above) and the work of art of an artist (read photographer) would always be <em>creativity</em>. Sounds reasonable to me. </p>

<blockquote>

<p><em><strong>Cogito, ergo sum</strong></em> (Descartes)<br /><br /></p>

</blockquote>

 

[aplumpton]

<p>Luis,</p>

<p>Don't you think there might not be a significant distinction between "simplification" (in the researcher's and often artist's sense of "a separation of garbage (the unnecassary) and things of value") and "over-simplification" (whatever that sometimes subjective judgement may signify). The simplification of a multitude of apparent relationships apparent in a vast amount of data, including that found in much written and visual information is often the required path to a much simpler and more meaningful relationship between all the data (also the Einstein objective).</p>

<p>From a Wikipedia chapter: "(The) sense that Occam's razor is usually understood. Simplest is not defined by the time or number of words it takes to express the theory; "[simplest] is really referring to the theory with the fewest new assumptions."</p>

<p>I might add to the concept of simplist in regard to theories by adding to that "and the fewest irrelevant suppositions or information".</p>

<p>You do have me puzzled about your statement:<br>

"There are images made just through the eyes of deceased animals, and they are <em>nothing like what we see, let alone some kind of purified vision."</em></p>

<p><em>Y</em>ou may be taking this from a quote. Would you care to clarify it, or the source? Thanks.</p>

[fate_faith_change_chains]

<p>Seeing with the eye or with the <em>I</em> are two ways of looking at ( and through ) one thing. Either way, the camera doesn't care.</p>

[aplumpton]

<p>Anders, Descartes's original statement was "Je pense, donc je suis," and meant for a larger audience than his Latin speaking colleagues (He translated the expression to Latin later on). Being (I am) is not very fruitful for a human, without the thinking aspect. Of course, the mere fact of thinking does allow reasonable proof for "I am".</p>

<p>Phylo is right that the camera doesn't care, as for the case of the painter's brush. How much art can be created without thought of one sort or another? "Discovery is not like a camera", it is hardly a thoughtless event ("I chose to look in that direction"...etc.).</p>

[AJHingel]

<p><strong>Arthur</strong>, you are right but I thought that I had already uploaded enough i French and that a change would clean the air. The latin version is so frequently used, so why not? </p>

[luis_g]

<p><strong>AP - "</strong>Don't you think there might not be a significant distinction between "simplification" (in the researcher's and often artist's sense of "a separation of garbage (the unnecassary) and things of value") and "over-simplification" (whatever that sometimes subjective judgement may signify).</p>

<p>I understand the value of simplification. Shedding everything from the optic nerve back seems like an over-simplification to me.<br /> <strong>AP "</strong>From a Wikipedia chapter: "(The) sense that Occam's razor is usually understood. Simplest is not defined by the time or number of words it takes to express the theory; "[simplest] is really referring to the theory with the fewest new assumptions."</p>

<p>I have no idea why you included the above, as I never said, or thought, anything resembling it. I anticipated someone would invoke Occam (and Descartes). There are many kinds of simplification. One consistent kind of simplification is to leave out smaller, more numerous phenomena, and focus on epiphenomena. This kind of simplification makes it possible to study many things on an economical basis, money-and-time-wise, but sometimes it proves to be an oversimplification. For example, for decades what the individual neurons were doing was let go for many reasons, not the least being their numbers, and that they're assumed to be parts of information loops. Recently, an experiment revealed that in one neuron a subject had the capacity to identify one particular human face. This possibility had been overlooked, and discovered by accident. I'm not saying that this is the case with every instance, but that it does happen.</p>

<p><strong>AP - "</strong>You do have me puzzled about your statement:<br /> "There are images made just through the eyes of deceased animals, and they are <em>nothing like what we see, let alone some kind of purified vision."</em><br /> <em>Y</em>ou may be taking this from a quote. Would you care to clarify it, or the source? Thanks."</p>

<p>No. If I had, I would have quoted it. I do not plagiarize. Remember, I'm the guy that used to get accused for quoting too much. The above is mine. There were experiments done concerning taking photographs through the eyes of recently executed men (and animals) for an unrelated idea, that of capturing the latent last image on the retina (used in fictional literature many times).</p>

<p>Of course, we're dealing with at least two things here, one the processing part, and the other being the endemically rewired synapses due to our visual history, genes turning on and off, memory, etc, that determines what we can see. I believe Arthur is referring to the latter.</p>

<p>What I was referring to, which is a sideboeard to this discussion, are optograms and pictures taken through the eyes of deceased humans and animals.</p>

<p>http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F60B13FB395B137B93C1A8178ED85F438784F9</p>

<p>http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/002/004/articles/dogbourne/index.php</p>

<p>http://www.college-optometrists.org/filemanager/root/site_assets/museum/eyes/Untitled789.jpg</p>

<p><a name="00XRgJ"></a><a href="../photodb/user?user_id=934135"><br /></a></p>