Guest or host?

[don_essedi]

For the last three years, maybe 'neighbor'? I can say 'we', rather than 'them'.

[luis_g]

<p>For me, the variety of the responses was very interesting, going beyond the bipolar role thing.</p>

[alan_zinn]

<p><br /><strong><em>Ghost </em></strong>or Host! Half awake I flashed on that. I mentioned the idea, in another topic thread, of seeking to represent to the viewer an <em>omniscient </em>observation. By that I meant that we might pretend to be "all seeing" in order to uphold or dispute the photograph as truth-teller myth. Once you have accepted the absolute falsity of photos you are free to understand what you are doing as a photographer AND a viewer. Our status as guest, host, or pretend ghost IS<em> </em>part of the image. To confirm your question: I am a ghost. Booo!</p><div></div>

[don_essedi]

Alan: "Once you have accepted the absolute falsity of photos..."

 

'Falsity' implies there is a 'true'. What is that?

[inoneeye]

<p>shawn phillips. 'watching out but looking inward'</p>

[alan_zinn]

<p>Don,<br>

"I took a picture of a ghost!" "Prove it." "Here's the picture."<br>

I am aware that in scientific reckoning, whatever is claimed needs to be <em>falsifiable</em>. With no evidence to support a claim, it can't be argued. Picture <em>truth, </em>as I was using the word, IS different than science truth. The only truth used to be optical veracity - the presumed as-taken image on film. But now...?</p>

[albert_richardson1]

<blockquote>

<p>For example, take an abusive husband. One minute his wife is his friend and lover, the next, she's a strange creature who doesn't dispense meatloaf the way he likes it. And back to friend/lover as suits his ... whatever it suits.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>This seems like a dash out the side door for the purpose of making a point. A red herring. To be sure things go wrong in unexpected ways. There are conflicts to be managed and ambiguity to be tolerated in everyday life. Abusive people are real enough, but most of us don't have to deal with them on a daily basis. For some people though life is a continuous hell full of snares and traps that can make even the most commonplace remark go awry. This person is neither a guest nor a host in his/her own skin. This can't be the kind of experience you mean when you describe a change in perspective from host to guest. </p>

<p>Could you look at a photo and tell for sure that the photographer is abusive (or not)? I'll venture to say that there are photos that would show this sort of thing pretty clearly, but wouldn't you have to know something of the photographer's biography to reinforce your conclusion? The guy photographing derelict homes in Detroit isn't trying to say that he lives in one.</p>

<p>I was a computer software engineer back in the day. I have to admit that the Firth of Forth Bridge looks a little like a column of dinosaur skeletons holding each other by the tail. I'm sure it represents an awe inspiring solution to a huge engineering challenge. </p>

<p>So Julie, do you put yourself in your photos or do you find yourself there?</p>

[don_essedi]

Alan: "The only truth used to be optical veracity - the presumed as-taken image on film. But now...?"

 

In the 19th century artists were contemptuous of the claim of optical veracity for a photograph. They could point to all the errors in perspective, especially foreshortening, for example. What I find significant is the idea of the optical veracity of the photographic image propagated with the growth of the photographic equipment mass market. As some put it, photography was "democratized". The technical (or, as you may prefer, 'scientific') approach to comprehending optical veracity has nothing to say about the optical veracity of photographs as it has been the experience of the mass of users and viewers for a long time. In a sentence: optical veracity is the way people think things look like. Something that can be normalized by the human visual brain. Or another way: it is consensual. I think this norm of optical veracity changes with the times. It's not an isolate; it subsists in a cultural matrix.

 

In another discussion some photos were referred to as fakes. What 'true' was 'faked'? It didn't seem to me that any kind of optical veracity was in question. It seems to want to appear here, so there it is.

 

NB: ghost photos are their own genre, afaik, not recognized by the MOMA, yet.

[Julie H]

<p>Albert, that was no red herring; it's about the deliberate suspension or retreat from understanding, but I'll try a less inflammatory analogy. Take a gymnast. She will know, understand, have learned, practiced, grown into the genre of gymnastics. She has, in her mind, what it is that she wants, intends, might be able to do. Her success or satisfaction will be in the performance, but she's working from understanding. Obviously her understanding is of the concept, not the performance which is always contingent on many things, but primarily her body/embodiment. Nevertheless, all feedback guides, corrects, nudges the performance to the existing understanding.</p>

<p>Compare that to the hiker (or the flâneur?; Anders, what do you think?). He/she goes out. That's the concept -- going out. It seems to me that this hiker/flâneur puts himself into the condition of not knowing. There is a deliberate if not reversal than at least suspension of understanding. Choosing to keep the view wide, to not understand, to un-understand, if necessary so that there is arrival, reception. That arrival or first reception seems to me to be what the hiker/flaneur is ... doing. He's interested being perpetually arriving, feeling stuff spreading out across the mind. Experiencing, tasting, the blind man feeling the elephant -- even though he may already know it's an elephant. Deliberately erasing and dilating the mind so it can get a clean reception.</p>

<p>The hiker isn't going to start doing triple axel dismounts (gymnastic twirlies) in mid-stroll; nor is the gymnast going to stop in mid-flip to take a look at the ant colony on the floormat (or she shouldn't; I would). However, obviously these two extremes feed off of each other. Understanding motivates exploration; exploration leads to understanding. I'm curious about how a photographer chooses, and uses (consciously or unconsciously) his approach.</p>

<p>Albert, you ask where am I in this description? My composites are pure gymnastics but they originate very strongly in my constant hiking in the mountains where I live. I don't usually even have a camera during my hikes, but the mountains work on me.</p>

<p>Your description of what you see in that bridge is very much like my own (I was thinking more of prehistoric monster caterpillar or insect). Which is a nuisance becasue I was counting on you to have the engineer's perspective (which you have, however, sniffed out). Which is that <a href="http://www.bridgemeister.com/pic.php?pid=1674">that great ugly thing</a> (though I see lots of interesting dynamics; its ugliness is magnificent) is beautiful to those who know its history, the way it works, what it can do and the reason it is so massively overbuilt (the recent, nearby collapse of the first Tay Bridge). Your and my lack of understanding allows us to "arrive," to just see. The engineer will, on the other hand, be looking <em>from</em> understanding. Or something like that.</p>

[luis_g]

<p>This last elaboration is interesting because I hike, mountain bike, and could be accused of flanerie. The view expressed works in a Baudelarian context well, when Hausman's revised Paris was fresh, Modernism on the rise, and first reception a near-norm. It works far less well in the context of the de Bordian postmodern psychogeographer flaneur.</p>

<p>But Baudelaire, as Benjamin pointed out, had an intimate knowledge of his haunts, sensual, familiar, almost conjugal, if you will. This could be construed to be a form of connection.</p>

<p>Or the hiker who hikes over familiar trails year after year. The idea that he disconnects from everything he has experienced and knows is a little extreme. Obviously, he can find his way back home, but from personal experience, I can say that I am not leaving behind everything and looking merely for new experiences/things. I also look forward to and see familiar and transient things. Trees, flowers, grasses, etc., intimately familiar individuals whose taxonomy and layman's names I also know. When beholding a tree, I "see" the process of photosynthesis flows of nutrients and water, phototropism, morphology, ecology, mythology and elegance, etc., and that one tree, as I have known it through the years. Some animals I recognize. I carry, in a manner similar to that of an Australian Aborigine, a kind of Songline about these places I frequent, and they in turn carry me when I am not there.</p>

<p>It is the lack of understanding that separates the cosmopolitan sonambulist from the experienced flaneur. The "arriviste" part when seeing the bridge is simply that sleep momentarily interrupted. Note that Albert arrived with his knowledge and experience well-packed in his mental luggage. He used an analog to a familiar form. In other words, Albert is not just seeing, he is drawing from his visual database and seeing what he knows.</p>

<p>[it looks to me like a Muybridgian sequence of an alarmed armadillo scurrying away while huffing. Then I think it looks a little steam-punky in a Stealth/death star way, and kinda fashionable, but it is, after all, a <em>bridge</em>. More like a designer appliance one would find at KMart or Bed Bath and Beyond than a work of art.]</p>

[alan_zinn]

<p>Don,<br>

The only optical "truth" - empirical or otherwise, I meant was the record of the moment on the negative no matter the optics of the camera. The photograph's broader notion of truthiness is, of course, cultural - subject to infinite revision -and has been my point all along.</p>

[don_essedi]

Alan, I think we are in basic agreement. I'm interested in why people consider the moment you refer to be optically true, or, the fact that they do -- I mean as 'a matter of course', rather than due to analysis or philosophy. Why it is the 'default' view on the matter, interests me. I don't set aside the technical or scientific considerations, and mull over Baudrillard's "The photographic image, by its technical essence, came from somewhere beyond, or before, aesthetics, and by that token constitutes a substantial revolution in our mode of representation."

[sjmurray]

<p>When photographing people (in portraits) I am probably neither guest not host, but more like a voyeur or thief. I am trying to "capture" a moment of expression "between" the posed and self conscious moments of my intended victim in hopes that I am getting on "film" something more direct, that we all can resonate with at at some level, maybe because it reflect us at some level. I feel it as "energy." I steal this moment, capture it. My victims usually like the result anyway, heh heh.</p>

[AJHingel]

<blockquote>

<p>This last elaboration is interesting because I hike, mountain bike, and could be accused of flanerie. The view expressed works in a Baudelarian context well, when Hausman's revised Paris was fresh, Modernism on the rise, and first reception a near-norm. </p>

</blockquote>

<p>Luis, there is no reason in my view to use the negative loaded formulation like: "could be accused of flanerie".<br>

As especially Baudelaire developed it, "flaner" is not some kind of lazy kind of strolling around. Baudelaire clearly explained that the 'flaneur" searches the poetry in the modernism and eternal aspects of transition, from the ordinary one observes in cities. I have in this forum called it the "essence" of a place, of lack of better.<br>

Baudelaire was surely a great flaneur himself, in his Paris of the 1870s, but many others have followed him, as so many others preceded him. One cannot think of Hemingway or Man Ray in Paris without noticing the "flaning" in their Paris of the 1920s. Susan Sontag described herself as a flaneur and made it into one of her main concepts for understanding the relation between the photographic eye and the city (She is buried in Montparnasse cemetery in the centre of the city))</p>

<blockquote>

<p>“The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.” Susan Sontag, "On Photography"</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Seeing it from Sonntag's approach, maybe 'visiter" or "observer" is better terms than "host" of "guest" in order to describe the relationship between the photographer and the "stuff" of Julie. But I would, as mentioned earlier, go beyond such a more passive role and be nearer to the searching for essence that Baudelaire did and that later was taken up by series of sociologists and anthropologists - but that is a longer story that I'm not sure will interest many around.</p>

 

[luis_g]

<p><strong>Anders - </strong>I used the "loaded" wording in humor. Some things to not translate well between languages. Think of it as something akin to "I resemble that remark". However, you are partially mistaken in this: "..."flaneur" is not some kind of lazy kind of strolling around."</p>

<p>Yes and no. Baudelaire himself described the flaneur as both "<em>the perfect idler</em>" and as a "passionate observer". As he is in Walter Banjamin's description also. Besides the observer role, he is typified as an elite and leisurely drifter. This is a more complicated subject than many imagine.</p>

<p>Sontag was clearly not describing the flaneurs of Baudelaire's era, who were walking through a great potential future. I am disappointed to see that Anders did not go anywhere else in my response to Julie. That the flaneur lasted into and through Post Modernism is a testament to the lasting power of the (evolving) role. I wasn't questioning anything but the idea that the flaneur is primarily about going out and not knowing.</p>

<p> </p>

[AJHingel]

<blockquote>

<p>I am disappointed to see that Anders did not go anywhere else in my response to Julie.</p>

 

</blockquote>

<p>Ah ! Luis, I did, I can assure you and I appreciated immensely your description of your touring around in known territory. I should have mentioned it. Going with you would be a great privilege. <br>

However, I do not agree that the flaneur goes out and not knowing. In flaning (if we can use the term as a verb and without citation-marks) there are two dimensions : a "not knowing", that you mention, that implies total openness to discovering, but a second dimension is the accumulation of discoveries made. Photography, like Baudelaire's writings, is a result of both.</p>

 

[albert_richardson1]

<p>Julie I really don't see the connection between the "deliberate suspension or retreat from understanding" and an abusive setting. Sometimes understanding does one no good. I understand that the abuser's behavior is dangerous and makes no sense, especially as it relates to me, but I am powerless to do anything to stop it. What is more off-putting is that I meet people who sincerely try to help me fix my thinking!</p>

<p>Ritualized sports such as gymnastics and ice skating require the athlete spend an enormous amount of time to prepare for the eventual performance. There are rigid formulas and rules to be learned and follow for success. Athletes are expected to fulfill the requirements of their discipline in creative ways. Hours go into developing the muscle memory required to perform complicated physical maneuvers without having to be self-conscious at all during the few minutes given to the actual performance. Understanding what she is to do is only a part of the regimen devoted to the conditioning, discipline and repetition required to actually make a go of it. The problem here is that, in the end, the physical aspect of the sport eclipses the mental at least in so far as what people can actually see. Consider baseball for a moment. It is a mental game for the concentration needed to be constantly alert for the unexpected, but without working it out physically on a field someplace there is truly nothing in baseball at all!</p>

<p>Familiarity breeds expertise! If the flaneur does develop intimate knowledge of his surroundings then he cannot at the same time have the same perspective of someone who is more innocent who might be experiencing the scene for the first time. Fortunately, understanding is fluid. It seems to me that both the innocent wannabe flaneur and the sophisticated one have the opportunity to find freshness in the things they might encounter.</p>

[luis_g]

<p><strong>Anders - "</strong>However, I do not agree that the flaneur goes out and not knowing."</p>

<p>I was referring to Julie's post in the not-knowing, and I agree with you.</p>

<p> </p>

[don_essedi]

We see things after they happen. There is a delay; our visual brain is not in sync, not simultaneous, with the "moment". When we add to it the delay in recognition, in awareness (language, consciousness), in our reflexes, and the 'reflexes' of our kit, if we're lucky and skillful we capture an image, never the "subject", which is simply a lure in a trap set by the idea for capturing the photographer . I guess most photographers hope it is their idea of the image, which means, if they have captured anything, it is themselves. We can hang our trophies on the wall, and tell anecdotes about how we brought down the beast.

[Julie H]

<p>Albert, you said, "What is more off-putting is that I meet people who sincerely try to help me fix my thinking!" LOL! I so completely sympathize! But you have been very brave to try to follow my convoluted meditations. I am very grateful (and not a little astonished!).</p>

<p>As an example of a focused (gymnist type) approach to photography, here is Wright Morris's description of the making of <a href="http://unrealnature.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/wrightmorris_uncle-harry.jpg">this portrait</a>. His process feels very familiar to me; I would think it will to most of you who have been shooting for a while -- as a "type" of picture-making. I've also added a bit about a second portrait that he made at about the same time:</p>

 

<blockquote>

<p>"At the start my Uncle Harry ignored me. I saw him pass with a hoe, with a pail of water, with another inner tube that needed repairing, indifferent to my presence. I drew him in with questions. Would it rain again? He replied that it usually did. Soon he trailed me around, offered dry suggestions, tested me with his dead pan humour. He still smoked Union Leader, if and when he could find his pipe. When I suggested a picture of himself — the greatest ruin of all — he was compliant. Actually, he had been waiting. In the museum of relics the farm had become he was one of the few that still almost worked. He pointed that out himself.</p>

<p>"I had him walk before me, through the door of the barn he had entered and exited for half a century (Plate 1). He had become, like the denims he wore, an implement of labor, one of the discarded farm tools. A personal pride, however, dormant since the Depression, reasserted itself in the way he accepted my appreciative comments. Why not? Had he not endured and survived it all, like the farm itself? Over several days I had remarked that he changed his hats according to the time of day and the occasion. A sporty nautical number in the early morning, at high noon and afternoon one of his wide brimmed straws. In the dusk of evening he preferred an old felt, with a narrow brim, the color and texture of tar paper. All hats suited him fine. The only piece of apparel we both found out of fashion was new overalls, blue stripes on white, that in no way adapted to his figure or movements and gave off the rasp of a file. He was quick to sense my disapproval and stopped wearing them."</p>

<p>"It was Clara’s suggestion that I might look in on Ed’s place. Ed was a bachelor, related by marriage, who had died several weeks before my arrival. His small farmhouse was directly across the road. The bed had been made, but otherwise I found the house as a bachelor would have left it. The bric brack of a lifetime, pill boxes, pin cushions, shotgun shells, flashlights, a watch and chain, a few snapshots. Although the bed had been made, the imprint of his body remained, his feet were almost visible in the shoes beneath it. What I saw on the ground glass evoked in me a commingling of tenderness, pity and sorrow, to the exclusion of more searing emotions."</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Compare that to Kafka's recommendation, " … you do not need to leave your room . . . Do not even listen, simply wait . . . " or this description of the street:</p>

<p>‘I am traversed by people, their existence, like a tart.’</p>

<p>"In anonymous individuals who do not realize they hold a part of my history, in faces and bodies I never see again. No doubt I myself, in the crowded street or shops, am a carrier for other people’s lives."</p>

<p>Or this " … my expectations spring from my availability, my errant desire to encounter everything . . . Regardless of what happens or does not happen, it is the waiting that is magnificent," from André Breton.</p>

<p>Or some questions posed by Michael Sheringham (apologies for the jargon) : "… What, asks Lefebvre, if we adopt another perspective (this is his repeated tactic) and strip human activity of that which pertains to specialized activities,removing all technical knowledge and expertise and simply leaving such everyday factors as effort, time, and rhythm? What is left? For some (scientists, structuralists, culturalists), next to nothing; for others (metaphysicians, Heideggerians), everything (because the ground of human existence — the ontological) is beneath all this."</p>

<p>[Aside to Don Essedi, while searching out the above, I ran across this quote which is James Agee's recipe for how to read Gertrude Stein. It reminds me of you -- I expect you'll hate it (heh!):</p>

<blockquote>

<p>Read it with care, but require no sense of it that it does not yield.<br />Read it aloud.<br />Read it as poetry must be read or music listened to: several times.<br />Read it for pleasure only. If it displeases you, quit.</p>

</blockquote>

[don_essedi]

Julie: "[Aside to Don Essedi, while searching out the above, I ran across this quote which is James Agee's recipe for how to read Gertrude Stein. It reminds me of you -- I expect you'll hate it (heh!)"

 

I've enjoyed reading Alan's comments about optical integrity, and Steve's take on the old 'hunt' analogy.

I'm enjoying reading the discussion of "flaneur" -- must be nice to get a response, rather than a reaction, to not be commented on or referred to as if absent. I'm a bit curious about that. Perhaps I should take a hint from you and quote someone:

 

"The magic of photography is that it is the object which does all the work. Photographers will never admit this and will argue that all the originality lies in their inspiration and their photographic interpretation of the world. As a result they take photographs which are either bad or too good, confusing their subjective vision with the reflex miracle of the photographic act." -- Baudrillard

 

But there's a lot of 'play' in the joints of the "reflex miracle"...perhaps I should quote The Wasteland, instead.

[luis_g]

<p> A few comments...</p>

<p>Unless you're photographing static scenes/subjects, you either settle for being late or you learn to anticipate, and it is this ability to project into the future and make a prediction that is viable in some way, though not necessarily what was anticipated, thankfully there are too many variables for our wee brains to make it boring. Look at how many photographs are posed/crystallized because their makers are unable (or unwilling) to learn predictive abilities or work in a fluid manner. Still photography is much too still for my tastes.</p>

<p>[Disclaimer: No, Don, I am not disagreeing with you.]</p>

<p>___________________________________________________</p>

<p>On the Flaneur thing, my experience, <em>my own personal</em> experience, as related in "This last elaboration is interesting because I hike, mountain bike, and could be accused of flanerie." differs from Julie's descriptions of what a flaneur thinks from the standpoint of the early days of flaning. What I have read about its evolution leads me to think that it went well beyond guest or host (why does that remind me of a Craigslist sex-worker's ad?). It is hard for us to envision it nowadays, but the flaneur was a subversive, observer, provocateur, journalist, and pro slacker as well, and this is just during the Baudelaire - Benjamin - Modernist period. I can cite quotes about how they felt "at home" in the arcades, as trespassers in other places, and as performance artists while <em>walking their tortoises</em>. What I'm not saying is that anyone is right or wrong on this, but that to break it down to guest/host is not so easy. Or to say that they disconnected from everything they knew and went out like reconstituted virgins, although I would agree that the latter is possible in a different way, and from another angle. </p>

<p>___________________</p>

<p>I'm not big on the hunt analogy, and I am a hunter (with gun & bow and arrow, not camera). And yes, I know about HCB's thoughts on the subject. </p>

<p>________________________________________</p>

<p>Lots of the replies to Julie's original questions did not fall under either side of the host/guest dichotomy...I just counted, and five respondents chose either guest or host, while thirteen chose something else entirely. It's not someone trying to change anyone's mind. Almost by 3:1 the respondents did not see themselves in those roles. The other roles are, to me, not just diversions from the guest/host thing, but very interesting ways that fellow photographers see themselves.</p>

<p>____________________________________________</p>

<p> </p>

[don_essedi]

Luis, the delays or gaps are physical; they occur in time. Prediction or anticipation hope to jump the gaps, but it is still a leap into their dark silence. A skilled model can move, fluid, gracile, seemingly not holding a pose, like a Geisha dancing. It is held, though, but only long enough for the photographer to journey through time and capture his or her idea of the image.

 

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

 

 

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

 

 

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

 

 

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

 

 

 

-- The Wasteland

[luis_g]

<p><strong>Don E.- "</strong>Luis, the delays or gaps are physical; they occur in time. Prediction or anticipation hope to jump the gaps, but it is still a leap into their dark silence."</p>

<p>True, and we do it all the time, when our lives and those of our families are at stake. Driving is a good example, as is crossing the street, trusting a stranger, etc. and we in fact jump the gaps correctly most of the time. In other facets of life we do the same. I have worked with models who were expert at doing what Don describes above. But in real life, nothing waits unless we halt it, and then it's halting. That seemingly insignificant ability to predict and/or anticipate in the midst of innumerable variables is extremely rare in photography (although the subconscious does it for us autonomously).</p>

<p>“It will do you no harm to find yourself ridiculous. <br />Resign yourself to be the fool you are... <br />...We must always take risks. That is our destiny...”<br>

T.S. Eliot, <em>The Cocktail Party</em> <em> </em></p>

[thomas_k.]

<p>From Iggy Pop song:<br>

"I am the passenger<br>

And I ride and I ride...<br>

I am the passenger <br />I stay under glass<br />I look through my window so bright..."<br>

It's a great song and somehow photography ralated.</p>