Likeness

Norma Desmond · January 23, 2011

Likeness is not replication.

It's interesting to consider photographically engaging with people who are "incidentally" "referred to" in a photograph.

Julie H · January 23, 2011

Likeness is not only not replication, paradoxically, it is found in difference (as Fred so perfectly intuited in a previous post above). To clarify that I'm going to use two quotes. I know Fred hates quotes and I apologize, but I think these two will be really useful here. They are not from artists, they are from an anthropologist and an ethnograpic filmmaker. This is nothing to do with art and everything to do with both of them considering both the value and the difficulty of conveying likeness that includes the particulars of humanity. First from anthropologist Clifford Geertz (talking about ethnography):

"… Whatever once was possible and whatever may now be longed for, the sovereignty of the familiar impoverishes everyone; to the degree it has a future, ours is dark. It is not that we must love one another or die (if that is the case — Blacks and Afrikaners, Arabs and Jews, Tamils and Singhalese — we are I think doomed). It is that we must know one another, and live with that knowledge, or end marooned in a Beckett-world of colliding soliloquy.

The job of ethnography, or one of them anyway, is indeed to provide, like the arts and history, narratives and scenarios to refocus our attention; not, however, ones that render us acceptable to ourselves by representing others as gathered into worlds we don’t want and can’t arrive at, but ones which make us visible to ourselves by representing us and everyone else as cast into the midst of a world full of irremovable strangeness we can’t keep clear of.

… Now when it [ethnography] is not so alone and the strangeness it has to deal with are growing more oblique and more shaded, less easily set off as wild anomalies … its task, locating those strangenesses and describing their shapes, may be in some ways more difficult; but it is hardly less necessary. Imagining difference (which of course does not mean making it up, but making it evident) remains a science of which we all have need."

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Second quote is from ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall:

"It is only through the viewer’s body that the filmic images is restored to its referent. This occurs through the viewer’s sharing of a common field with the filmmaker and the film subjects, common referents in the world. The viewer "fills" or replenishes the image with his or her own bodily experience, inhabiting the absent body represented on the screen. In Merleau-Ponty's view, such responses may even encompass inanimate objects through what he calls an équivalent interne. "Things have an internal equivalent in me; they arouse in me a carnal formula of their presence." By revsersing T.S. Eliot's concept, we might characterize this as an instance of a subjective correlative."

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I think those quotes not only help separate the value of "likeness" from art (where it is only one of many types of connection that may or may not be used by the artist); the quotes may also help explain the difficulty but also where/how "likeness" might be found or at least pursued. (Arthur's description of his quest for "likeness" of his Vermont village very much reminds me of MacDougall's efforts to convey his subjects in their own landscapes.)

Norma Desmond · January 23, 2011

I can relate more to Geertz's words than to MacDougall's. I don't like formulations that consider photographs or screen images as vessels to be filled by viewers, or the subjects of photographs as absent bodies. Just doesn't describe my experience. I wonder if such descriptions do a disservice to those photographed and filmed as well as to the photographers and filmmakers who provide the images.

Geertz's talking about the value of presenting the strange, the different, the unfamiliar rings more true to me. I wouldn't say the familiar impoverishes but I think it does when it is accepted as a default mode of looking or presentation. As transcendence needs a ground, difference needs sameness, the strange needs the familiar to spin off on. Creating a photograph may require a kind of willingness to enter that spiral of opposites and an ability to wrestle them into some sort of harmony, counterpoint, or discord.

In another thread about <a href="../casual-conversations-forum/00Y4qH">what makes a good portrait</a>, someone just talked about the importance of shooting "heartbreakingly beautiful" people to get a good portrait. I think there's probably nothing more familiar (and possibly inane) than this kind of agreed-upon, Madison-Avenue-fed kind of beauty. People look for it. They accept it. It comforts them. It's a default position. The "knowledge" that Geertz is talking about is something altogether different. It comes not from acceptance but rather from willingness. Knowledge often is, indeed, a result of refocusing. The opposite of that is habit.

Norma Desmond · January 23, 2011

Speaking of refocusing, this little scenario from Sartre's Being and Nothingness seems apt. It makes for a nice visual and always seemed a photographic description. Julie, in the spirit of camaraderie, I see your quote and raise you one! Is Sartre talking about the power of Pierre's likeness? The power of the absence of Pierre's likeness . . . which is a presence of it?

"I have an appointment with Pierre at four o'clock. I arrive at the café a quarter of an hour late. Pierre is always punctual. Will he have waited for me? I look at the room, the patrons, and I say, "He is not here." Is there an intuition of Pierre's absence . . .?

...

"But we must observe that in perception there is always the construction of a figure on a ground. No one object, no group of objects is especially designed to be organized as specifically either ground or figure; all depends on the direction of my attention. When I enter this café to search for Pierre, there is formed a synthetic organization of all the objects in the café, on the ground of which Pierre is given as about to appear. . . . Each element of the setting, a person, a table, a chair attempts to isolate itself, to lift itself upon the ground constituted by the totality of the other objects, only to fall back once more into the undifferentiation of this ground; it melts into the ground. . . . I am witness to the successive disappearance of all the objects which I look at—in particuar of the faces, which detain me for an instant (Could this be Pierre?) and which as quickly decompose precisely because they "are not" the face of Pierre.

...

"I myself expected to see Pierre, and my expectation has caused the absence of Pierre to happen as a real event concerning this café. . . . I have discovered this absence, and it presents itself as a synthetic relation between Pierre and the setting in which I am looking for him. Pierre absent haunts this café and is the condition of its organization as ground."

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Julie H · January 23, 2011

Man, we are so in the same vein ...

I see your quote and raise it -- or maybe this one turns your's inside out, inverts it everywhere (quote acrobatics!). From Barthes' A Lover's Discourse:

"Sometimes an idea occurs to me: I catch myself carefully scrutinizing the loved body (like the narrator watching Albertine asleep [in Proust]). To scrutinize means to search: I am searching the other's body, as if I wanted to see what was inside it, as if the mechanical cause of my desire were in the adverse body (I am like those children who take a clock apart in order to find out what time it is). This operation is conducted in a cold and astonished fashion; I am calm, attentive, as if I were confronted by a strange insect of which I am suddenly no longer afraid. Certain parts of the body are particulary appropriate to this observation: eyelashes, nails, roots of the hair, the incomplete objects. It is obvious that I am then in the process of fetishizing a corpse. As is proved by the fact that if the body I am scrutinizing happens to emerge from its inertia, if it begins doing something, my desire changes; if for instance I see the other thinking, my desrie ceases to be perverse, it again becomes imaginary, I return to an Image, to a Whole: once again, I love.

"(I was looking at everything, in the other's face, the other's body, coldly: lashes, toenail, thin eyebrows, thin lips, the luster of the eyes, a mole, a way of holding a cigarette; I was fascinated -- fascination being, after all, only the extreme of detachment -- by a kind of colored ceramicized, vitrified figurine in which I could read, without understanding anything about it, the cause of my desire.)"

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Backing up to the David MacDougall quote, I can really see how that seems almost exactly contrary to the kind of likeness-defined-by-difference that I was trying to get at. I think there may be two reasons for that misconstrual: first, MacDougall has a hard time expressing what he so urgently is after (he's made a career of trying to bring the (live indivdual) person into his films while still or because of that being "good" ethnography) because ... well, I'm having the same problem so I sympathize. Second, because I didn't give the beginning of the paragraph from which I took that quote. Here is the bit immediately prior to the quote given in my preceeding post:

"Intimations of a “second self” in others are reflexive in that they touch us to the quick, but this can only occur when they break through (but without necessarily dispersing) the double surface of filmic depiction (its denotation) and filmic significance (its further symbolic and connotative meanings) to what Barthes calls signifiance. Breaking through the first (depiction) might appear an impossibility, since the images of people we see in a film are but a kind of photochemical imprinting. ..."

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That may even make things worse, but he's struggling with the issue of how we get the person from the photochemical imprint. A very familiar issue in this forum, but, I think, not so much for MacDougall.

Norma Desmond · January 24, 2011

I'm not sure I share Barthes' search for the inside of the other's body. As I've said before, I often feel there's a lot right on the surface, at least visually speaking. And it is the body, in all its wonderful physical-ness, that is the person. I don't really think the person is lurking inside. I think he's right there. I'm looking at him. The expressions show me stuff, the curve of the neck shows me stuff, the curl of fingers, the tassled, bed hair, the slightly open mouth. I think what's inside are more organs, the heart, the brain, the seats of consciousness, etc. But I think the other person is all around me and even is partly me. He may have thoughts he doesn't share with me but I don't think he has a self he doesn't share with me.

I'm not sure I'd make portraits if I shared Barthes' search for so much "inside" the person. It's why I said before that even the person whose physical presence we are in is in many senses a likeness, just like a portrait. A person in our physical presence is more dynamic, more responsive, more active, more animated, able to move, able to change in time differently from the way a portrait changes over time, etc. I think we tend to place the mystery and wonder of all that "inside" and out of reach. But I'm not sure there's any more of what Barthes is looking for inside the actual body than inside or behind the portrait. I think each gives us what it gives us. We project something "inside" because we want a located FACT or a Supreme Being (in this case a self) we can pin all this on. I think, instead, what we have is a continuum of experience, one we are trying to embody in order to grab hold of. But it's grasping at straws.

Julie H · January 24, 2011

I'm not sure he was looking for the inside; it was the outside (only) that he described. He was mystified by his own response to the still versus the animate person, and the vagueness/strangeness of the nature of the space between himself and the other person. In other words, I feel like he (Barthes) was interested in watching himself watching.

Norma Desmond · January 24, 2011

Julie, I am only responding to some of Barthes' words. I have not read Barthes. So I can only riff off the ideas presented in the quotes and cannot know what Barthes actually meant or didn't mean in a greater context. I now see (thanks!) that he does go on to discuss the animated body and how that, too, effects him. I did skim over that the first time. Still, at least from many of the quotes you've provided (and it's completely unfair of me to make a judgment having not read his full texts myself), he's a bit mired in dualistic thinking. Inside/outside. Mind/body. It's hard for me to get past those kinds of formulations. I think they're key to someone's thinking. And, more importantly for our purposes here, to someone's looking.

From the Barthes quote: "I am searching the other's body, as if I wanted to see what was inside it, as if the mechanical cause of my desire were in the adverse body (I am like those children who take a clock apart in order to find out what time it is)."

As far as watching himself watching, well, yes. That may be a problem for all of us. Again, there's a continuum and at a certain point self awareness (which I find helpful) can become self-indulgent self-consciousness. I don't know whether he's crossed that line or not but I will say that I think a lot of portrait-makers and portrait viewers do. I know I catch myself doing it a lot and sometimes the struggle with that line comes through as tension in my work, for good and for bad.

As I said above, right now at least I'm more likely not to watch myself watching but to feel the other guy watching me. The guy with the camera can adopt many perspectives and play back and forth among them. As the camera guy, too much watching myself watching, for me, leads to hiding behind the camera, waiting for something to happen. Allowing myself the vulnerability (again, for me) of being watched by my subjects (and through me, allowing viewers also the sense of being looked at) sets up more of a dynamic that I want to photograph.

Now, of course, if my subject is asleep, I can't get that kind of "watchful" photograph (the kind where the subject looks back) and there are many times where I don't want the subject being so assertive, preferring the viewer to be more active and the subject just to be seen. I just know that, for me, too much self reflection (watching myself watching), especially about what I'm seeing in others, leads to neuroses (probably stemming back to the lovable and mostly benign Jewish guilt I was brought up with). That may be why I take pictures . . . instead of just watching.

aplumpton · January 24, 2011

Most intriguing comments. If and when I finish my work, I will read them more carefully.

Think of the camera and its soul (the sensor is about as much soul as can be afforded a controlled and externally operable device). It gets a split second to record a likeness. That likeness comes from the subject in that very condensed moment or from the subject's interaction with the photographer. The camera imposes on the photographer that temporal limit on the likeness conveyed in/by the image.

But the photographer has much more time than a split second to think about his subject, himself, his other concerns. That can inspire/permit/enhance the discovery of the subject's likeness. However, what we may often be allowed to see as a likeness is not just some split second sample of the subject (with all the uncertainty or variation that that slice can provoke), but rather a likeness of the photographer himself, which gets transferred to his image-making.

I think that a few of my photos are more of an acurate likeness of myself than of my subject, yet that likeness is almost always some small part of most of my images. It may require several images for the viewer to delineate completely enough, but may sometimes be as important as the subject matter itself (At least to the photographer, who may be happy to see his own likeness in his work).

Norma Desmond · January 24, 2011

Julie, getting back to your "likeness as difference" quest. You articulated so poignantly how portraits (and the likenesses of portraits) feel distinct from you, push back against you.

I wonder if (how) this relates to the old question of viewer authority. Is the viewer in control of the reaction to the photograph? Is it hers (his) to do with what she will? Or is something/someone pushing back? The subject of the portrait, the character in the novel? The photographer or novelist? What if something (the photograph/the subject of the portrait/the photographer) is not allowing you, the viewer, to make it your own?

Norma Desmond · January 24, 2011

Arthur, I was posting as you were. I agree that one of the keys comes in series or in more than one photograph. Likenesses are definitely not limited to singular images, though I think they can be found there as well.

I also appreciate your point about the photographer having much more than a split second. The camera's having a split second is a temporal and mechanical matter. What we can get from that split second is a lasting visual, which really doesn't translate (for me) into the mechanics of "split second." The visual has its own relation to time and space, not the same as the shutter's. (I think?) As much as I respect and utilize HCB's concept of "decisive moment," I think there's also an apples-oranges quality to it. The decisive moment gets us the picture, but it is not the picture.

aplumpton · January 24, 2011

Fred, I think so, too. The photographer chooses the split second after interacting with his subject. I was thinking as well about the slice as opposed to the continuous presence of the photographer in the making of a photograph, and how that presence and its effect get transferred to the image as some sort of likeness of the photographer, as well as the likeness of the subject or the photograph.

Julie H · January 24, 2011

Fred asked, "Is the viewer in control of the reaction to the photograph? Is it hers (his) to do with what she will? Or is something/someone pushing back? The subject of the portrait, the character in the novel? The photographer or novelist?"

It happens via the photographer or novelist but whether they make it or just get out of the way, I expect, varies.

I want to say -- because for me it's what comes closest to "getting it" -- that a likeness is like a scent, the smell of a particular person (and every person's scent is unique); it's close; I inhale it; its primal. But I can't get a decent conversion to a visual version of that. Here's the closest I can get:

Imagine yourself looking at a lion in the zoo. You can study it, admire it, wonder at it; look at it and think about it. Now, imagine yourself out on the open savannah looking at a lion that is very close and looking at you. As at the zoo, you are surely also looking at this lion and thinking about this lion and wondering at this lion, but the nature of that looking and that thinking and that wondering are incomparably different from the looking, thinking and wondering that happened at the zoo. The wild lion, is to me, what a good "likeness" ... does. I am unprotected; I am in play, fair game to it. We circle one another.

So, no, no, no the viewer is not in control; no it is not hers (his) to do with what she will. He or she is ... circling. In danger (of terrible or wonderful things). [in this example, I have the "volume" turned way up. This is not to say that "likeness" can't be modulated to the needs of a given subject.]

Norma Desmond · January 24, 2011

How about we go the other extreme, just for fun! What if the portrait (or the likeness, or the photograph) is actually not like the lion in the zoo and not like the lion in the wild? What if it's like a stuffed lion? As artificial as that! As plastic as a doll. And it didn't make you feel like you were at the zoo or in the wild but it made you feel like you were SO looking at a stuffed lion that the stuffed lion was all that mattered and had all the power necessary.

Since I'm going to transcend anyway (sometimes? maybe?), I may be transcending not only the stuffed lion but even the lion out in the wild. What if the safety of not being in the wild combined with the danger of seeing the lion take me to a whole different place? Like music does, without scenarios. A rawness. [This is absolutely thinking out loud, btw, winging it.]

I think it's that combination of "it is this and it's not this" that's so compelling about photographs. I always come back to the artifice part. I think there are a variety of levels at work and so straight metaphors are hard (for me) to draw, because there's so much intertwining going on. I mean, I guess if I really wanted to experience the lion in the wild, that's what I'd do. A photograph of a lion is a different thing. It doesn't smell like a lion and it can't eat me like a lion and because of that the visual experience of the photograph of the lion is somewhat unique, but doesn't fall short. The likeness is just enough but not too much. If the likeness were too much, it would be a lion and not a photograph, and what fun would that be? It's not being a lion is one of its most salient features. It's not being a lion is its lion-like power.

Julie H · January 24, 2011

I've put your post into the slow-cooker; it needs to simmer overnight before I respond to it.

However, I feel compelled to point out that you are addressing a stuffed-lion specialist (aka a compositor). I can stuff the hell out of just about anything. I'm looking to expand my repertoire; the more I know about what being a lion is, the more voodoo I can do with not or not-not or not-not-not being a lion.

Arthur, I have a couple of things I want to say to your posts, too, but it will be tomorrow morning before I get my ideas sorted.

Julie H · January 25, 2011

In the interest of provocation, I'm going to give a bare bones response to the direction Fred is interested in exploring in his last post. These are all "for me" statements; in no way meant as absolutes. I'm not even certain of them myself. Also, I'm sticking to areas of photography that use "likeness" in some way. There are tons of photos, kinds of photos, that don't *use* it (it's always there, in some sense, but its not *used*.)

It's my feeling that that it's rare to get an in-the-wild feeling from a photograph. The vast majority seem to be made by a person who is working in "safe" conditions, whether or not the subject is "tame" or "wild" and with a strong feeling of separation or at least of the conditions of the situation being on the photographer's terms. I don't mean this as a criticism (though I'm not that impresssed by action shots that feel like video game trophies; as if you get more "points" by having things coincide in unusual ways).

Moving on ... I agree that, as Fred suggests, one can go the other way (while still making use of likeness). For example, consider <a href="http://unrealnature.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/hujar_dragqueen01.jpg">this Peter Hujar picture</a>. I think he's made meticulous, wonderful, amazing use of the "photographic" and compositional properties he had to work with (stuffing the lion), and yet, at the same time, there is simultaneously all kinds of "likeness" going on (this stuffed lion is at the same time, alive and in the wild!) -- even though the person is nearly unidentifiable. Figure that one out ...

Second example. <a href="http://unrealnature.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/sommer_jackrabbit.jpg">This very well-known Frederick Sommer picture</a> is simultaneously 1) a perfect likeness of something that we've all seen happen, 2) a "stuffed lion" use of its subject matter 3) that is dependent on, requires for its effect, that we have, in our minds a feeling for the in-the-wild "likeness" of that subject matter that is not in the picture. Likeness can be usefull/necessary in order to *not* use it.

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Arthur, what I wanted to say to your post is kind of complicated, and dry and requires a quote (!) so I'm not sure you'll want to mess with it, but I'll give it anyway.

At the end of Patrick Maynard's book, The Engine of Visualization, he talks about how we have carried over from painting, drawing and sculpture the idea that the work is all there in the thing, that we don't consider that photography really is different in that, unlike those other art forms, photography can/does contain its formative *acts.* He goes on:

"Photography, by radically affecting formative image-making producers, removed some exercises of skill, transformed or displaced others, left still others unaffected. Two things would seem to follow. First, appreciating skill in photography would entail identifying the relevant areas of skilled, intentional activity involved. Second, doing that would entail identifying actions; knowing what kinds of actions are performed, what kinds of things are done, in making various kinds of photographs. We cannot perceive something as skillfully or clumsily done unless we can identify the formative action as an intentional action: that is, know what was done in relation to what happened. The difficulty in identifying formative actions as actions in various kinds of photography is a main cause of misgivings regarding photography..."

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I don't want to go off topic (this is only tangentially related to getting likeness in a photograph), but if you think about the *known* indicators/proofs of the photographer's acts that a photograph includes -- of what/how/where a photographer acted ... it's deeply interesting, I think.

aplumpton · January 25, 2011

Juile, thanks for the quote and especially the reference to Maynard's work. I will have to read him for what appears interesting content and to understand exactly what he means by such terms as "formative image-making producers". He seems to be speaking of what is the basis for skill in photography and how it affects and is recognizable in the photograph.

Perhaps a photographer's likenes is brought out in that way, but I'm not sure of that. Two photographers might apply equal skill (if one can easily ascertain that from the many variables that charaterize it) in providing an image of the same subject matter. They may at the same time produce quite different images and show very different likenesses. The foregoing may sound very simplistic, but the "likeness of the photographer", as seen in his work, may have little to do with his skill and more with his consistent approach or particular personal attributes or position vis-a-vis his or her subjects.

Norma Desmond · January 25, 2011

Julie, I'm not sure that the conditions of the shoot (physical and mental) and what is expressed, conveyed, or captured by the shot would bear the kind of correspondence necessary for the safeness or riskiness of one to be found in the other. Photographs show and don't necessarily tell. I'm always thinking of Aristotle's catharsis. (Well, not really always, but certainly when it's convenient.)

I don't shoot lions, but I imagine there are times when a lion shooter doesn't want to convey the dangers she's feeling. She may want a very benign view of a lion and, though at great risk, she may be after a very safe picture. Same for mountain climbers. The climber may very well want to hide the fear and be successful at that. But I think there will still be likeness at play.

I've been in some emotionally vulnerable (risky?) situations. Sometimes that comes through in the resulting photograph, sometimes not. Sometimes I process (transform, transcend?) that vulnerability or fear into something quite calm, benign, with a different kind of poignance (?). Whether I do that intentionally or intuitively (shoot me now!) varies.

I think emotional states, as they pass from photographic situation to snap of shutter to post processing to hanging on the wall or showing on the screen to being viewed, have a lot of malleability. There's also that fabrication thing going on. Sometimes, for me, the riskiness comes in the post processing stage. I have one sort of postcard-like harbor scene that I worked up in a very Japanese graphic style. That was my risk. The shoot was actually quite pleasant and benign, but when I saw the image on the screen the first time, something very different struck me, something much harder-edged, yet somehow I never disregarded what the scene itself was to me (and what it was usually includes its potential).

I can feel extremely uncomfortable and at risk with some very lovely and "inviting-looking" guys that I shoot. What happens when the look of a scene is so opposite to the feel of the scene for me. Which likeness do I go with? Always a choice, often a blending. Speaking to Arthur's point, do I go with the confidence of the subject or with the photographer's trepidation? Do I get it all in there? Whose picture am I taking? Can it be both? Does it have to be both? And maybe some third thing, a completely unexpected set of emotions or accidents or occurrences will take over at some point before the photo gets to a viewer (some symbol will be visible in the background that I hadn't focused on, some nuance will come out in processing that leads me somewhere). I don't believe I would have "lost" the original angst or loveliness or confidence or fear, but I will have created a new entity out of it, a photograph. How recognizable my original tears or laughter or sexual arousal will be will vary greatly.

Many talk about showing rather than telling (again, Aristotle does). I think part of showing is actually not telling. Some things remain my little secret. But they may nevertheless have an effect that is carried through in the photograph in one way or another, and not always in the way you (or I) would anticipate.

Julie H · January 25, 2011

Fred, this is not so much a response to your above (I'm only just reading and thinking about it) so much as a correction or clarification on my posts. I should have made it clear that I was speaking as a viewer which is not at all evident. Sorry for the confusion.

As of this moment, I'm thinking that I very much agree with what you're saying in that the photographer can have every discretion in what he chooses to use in his pictures -- and that includes himself or evidence of himself. Though that's easier said than done. Things leak in; things leak out ...

In the two examples I linked in my last post, I was speaking strictly as a viewer.

Norma Desmond · January 25, 2011

Julie, I'm glad you said that. For the last few posts, we've been going a little back and forth between viewer and photographer. At the same time, I think a viewer can gain some insights from a photographer's perspective (especially when the viewer is a photographer). Viewer expectations, demands, responses, willingness, resistance, critical eye, etc. will all be affected by knowledge of what different photographers see, how they see it, what they want to show, etc. I suppose sometimes none of that matters, in a really important way. Sometimes you just want to look at a photograph and get what you get and forget all that you know (which is, of course, virtually impossible . . .).

I don't know exactly what happens when swords cross. If the viewer wants a likeness but the photographer didn't want to give her one, where does that leave us? A bad photograph, a disappointing one . . . or a missed viewing opportunity?

I was thinking there may be something literal/non-literal going on here. I may be getting this wrong, but you seem to be talking of something literal coming through to you in the photographic likeness and I sense that I keep going to a more non-literal place. Maybe just to offer something contrary. But I think there is an important literal side to photographs (the connection to the world) which is what Luis and I were talking about above when saying that transcendence requires a ground. Maybe you're simply emphasizing the ground here. I think that's really important, because the search for "art" often gets lost in a search for transcendence without a recognition of groundedness. That, I really believe, can make the search for art futile.

In a more nuts and bolts mindset, maybe likeness has to do with things like the right lighting. I was just making a simple self portrait the other day. I kept noticing how lighting changes made me look like me or not like me (with all the confusion that goes with that concept). Since I really did want a likeness (in the most simple of terms), I used lighting very differently than had I wanted a kind of visual drama that could portray my likeness but in a very different light. (See, we even use "light" to discuss likeness and straying from it.) I think most viewers who know me and most who don't know me will get the sense that this is what Fred looks like and even that this is probably what he is like. Just kind of being himself, as if that were easy.

Julie H · January 25, 2011

This is going to be messy because I'm trying to do other stuff at the same time as I'm thinking about this, but here goes:

Fred said, "If the viewer wants a likeness but the photographer didn't want to give her one, where does that leave us? A bad photograph, a disappointing one . . . or a missed viewing opportunity?" I'm setting that aside. I'm starting with myself simply available. Looking at a picture, and finding likeness or not. Usually not and that's absolutely fine. But where it is, I'm interested in exploring what's happening; why it's there (or at least why I find it there which is not the same thing, I think we've come to agree).

Fred said, "I was thinking there may be something literal/non-literal going on here. I may be getting this wrong, but you seem to be talking of something literal coming through to you in the photographic likeness and I sense that I keep going to a more non-literal place." Heh. As soon as I read that (and what follows in your post) I realized how obviously different my starting point has been. Without thinking about it, because I've been pretty much immersed in this for months and months, my posts were growing out of extensive readings (that I find fascinating) on ethnographic filmmaking, anthropology (and Daston and Galiison's book, Objectivity, on the history of attempts at "objective" image making in science; they have never succeeded ...). So you've presciently located an obvious reason why I'm puzzling you (and Luis).

You mention "different light" in your last paragraph. That reminded me of a bit in Joris Ivens description of the making of his documentary film, Rain:

"You have to catch the distinction between sunlight before rain and sunlight after rain; the distinction between the rich strong enveloping sunlight before the rain and the strange dreamy yellow light afterwards."

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To do a "likeness" (a documentary) about rain, you have to have been in its light. The rain brings its own light. Certainly you can make all kinds of pictures with rain in them, but to do "rain" as "rain" it will bring its own light; you go to it. (You'll know immediately that this is my wild lion in disguise ...)

luis_g · January 25, 2011

Fred - ""If the viewer wants a likeness but the photographer didn't want to give her one, where does that leave us? A bad photograph, a disappointing one . . . or a missed viewing opportunity?"

Or a viewing opportunity awaiting the viewer's hand for a dance? The viewer often has never seen the referent before, so s/he has no way of knowing the degree of correspondence, if any. All the image has to do is convince the viewer, and once that happens, the viewer suspends skepticism and can run with it straight into the literal, the transcendent, or both.

_________________________

Personal note: I used to live close to the first Lion Country Safari, and went several times. When it came to lions, the poor creatures caged at the zoo were my 'real' referent. The fat, well-fed and sexed (they always seemed to be screwing or sleeping it off) lions at the fake preserve were something else, but the lions in documentaries, movies, and even John Henry Patterson's The Man Eaters of Tsavo (which fascinated me as a child, and as fate would have it, I would see decades later, literally stuffed at the Field Museum in Chicago) were what I imagined to be the best likenesses to a real lion in the veldt. The stuffed lions evoked memories from reading the book as a child, and made my hair stand on end.

___________________________

Julie...Post-rain light....specially when the particulates in the air scrubbed clean and the earth cooled off...I've seen it thousands of times having lived in very rainy places...but whether it is authentically in the film/picture or not may not matter to a viewer who hasn't a sense of rain like Ivens' or mine, or one that will accept it through suggestion or a filter.

[bTW, not puzzled, but following your (and others') meanderings with interest.]

Norma Desmond · January 26, 2011

Julie, here's the rub for me: " to do 'rain' as 'rain' "

I'm not sure I know what "rain" as "rain" is and I'm not sure anyone does. That being said, I know I suggested earlier that I could or could not look like "me" as if there were a "me" I could look like. So, honestly, I'm torn. Yes, sometimes rain feels like rain and sometimes it feels faked. Sometimes I look like me in a photo and sometimes I don't. At the same time, rain has all kinds of manifestations and all kinds of different light accompanying it. Strange, dreamy, yellow light following it is only one kind of light. In San Francisco, there's foggy rain, sparkling clear rain, there's the rain in the city and the rain out at the beach, each having its own unique light. The "rain" brings its own light? OK. I get that? But what doesn't. Do we each bring our own light? Doesn't the snow bring its own light? Fog certainly brings its own light. It starts to become a tautology, sounding good but I'm not clear what it actually means.

Who's rain is "rain" as "rain"? From who's perspective at white time? What time of day, what time of year? Who's view of Fred is Fred? Is mine the best or would one of my friends know better because they don't have to look at me in a mirror, reflected and wrong-reading? Is it the Fred who gets up with sleep hair, the Fred who has coiffed and gelled to go out, the one in his sweats or the one in his suit? Is it the rain that washes away tears, the rain that cleanses the soul, the rain of baptism, or the rain that washes mud down the inner city gutter?

I think what Luis is saying is worth considering: that an image can convince, and skepticism can be suspended, and accuracy doesn't have to come into play. I don't think you have to experience the dreamy yellow light after a rainfall in order to offer a likeness of rain. Having seen a child's tears might well be enough to translate to a convincing portrayal of rain. Whether or not that's a document of rain might be a different question.

Julie H · January 26, 2011

Dammit, Fred and Luis. You're not helping at all. We're right back where I started in my original post. All those Who? Who? Who? What?-s in Fred's post are my Who/Whats.

Nevertheless, I'm getting all kinds of things out of being pushed and prodded even if we are just running in circles. Make it a spiral and we're at least destroying new ground.

I'm going to take a short and then a long quote from Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison's book Objectivity. Not because I'm interested in objectivity but ... you'll see why. First:

"... The scientist was both inquisitor and confessor to nature: "Yes, no doubt, the experimenter forces nature to unveil herself, attacking her and posing questions in all directions; but he must never answer for her nor listen incompletely to her answers by taking from the experiment only the part that favors or confirms the hypothesis. … One could distinguish and separate the experimenter into he who plans and institutes the experiments from he who executes it and registers the results." " [the quote within that quote was from French physiologist Claude Bernard]

</blockquote>

We're not scientists, so we are free to choose to abuse or ignore any of those instructions. However, in the search for "likeness," I think that description is useful.

Next quote. In this one Gerhard S. Schwarz and Charles R. Golthamer are describing the making of the plates used to illustrate their Radiographic Atlas of the Human Skull: Normal Variants and Pseudo-Lesions (1965):

… "The lesson we learned in preparing the plates for the atlas was that nature may be depicted realistically only by setting off the uncommon and unusual against the background of the ‘natural’ and common." If one needed evidence that mechanical objectivity no longer could simply be assumed to be the first and only epistemic virtue, the virtue trumping all others, here it is: the "realistic," which these authors wanted, had become the enemy of the "natural," which they subordinated."

[ ... ]

"… Explicitly "theoretical," the new depictions not only invited interpretation once they were in place but also built interpretation into the very fabric of the image – but they did so as an epistemic matter. Theirs were exaggerations meant to teach, to communicate, to summarize knowledge, for only through exaggeration (advocates of the interpreted image argued) could the salient be extracted from the otherwise obscuring "naturalized" representation. The extremism of iconography generated by expert judgment exists not to display the ideal world behind the real one but to allow the initiate to learn how to see and to know.

Along with this conjoint history of scientific self and image comes a reshaping of the presupposed audience for the scientific work itself. For different reasons, both the reasoned and the objective images [of previous epochs] took for granted an epistemic passivity on the part of those who viewed them. The reasoned image is authoritative because it depicts an otherwise hidden truth, and the objective image is authoritative because it "speaks for itself" (or for nature). But the interpreted image demands more from its recipient, explicitly so. The oft-repeated refrain that one needs to learn to read the image actively (with all the complexity that reading implies) also transforms an assumed spectator into an assumed reader."

</blockquote>

This is just getting worse and worse! To make a good "likeness" is to write music before you know the instruments that will play it.

luis_g · January 26, 2011

Julie - "This is just getting worse and worse! To make a good "likeness" is to write music before you know the instruments that will play it."

...and the problem with that is...?

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