AJHingel Posted February 20, 2016 Share Posted February 20, 2016 <p>Thanks j.d. <br> When it comes to your photo, which has a strong intimidate tale to tell for you and you probably have all the span of emotions and feeling related to what you see in the photo. Such emotional reactions to photos would for me only be a case of nostalgia if you daydream and wish, that you were back there in those days. The photo itself, a polaroid from the 80s, notwithstanding the subject, with the special colors, that we all know from older photos, carry no gimmicks trying to evoke any emotions, that could be called nostalgia when viewing the photo today. </p> <p>Leibovitz's project, when shooting <em>Scarlett Johansson, </em>was very different. I see overdone gimmicky, but that's just me. What is obvious, is that special efforts have been made by the photographer to carry the viewer back in time and surely, as everything Leibovitz touches, it is very well done. </p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Julie H Posted February 20, 2016 Share Posted February 20, 2016 <p>In my opinion, nostalgia is only a good thing when there is -- to use an awful buzz-phrase -- 'cognitive dissonance': something does not mean now what it meant then. What was trivial is now dear; what was dear is now trivial. Therefore, all previous logic makes no sense, or makes different sense, which gnaws at one's foundations.</p> <p>Nostalgia, without dissonance, is, to me, just gooey, saccharine dreck. Present-phobia.</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
inoneeye Posted February 20, 2016 Share Posted February 20, 2016 <p>When I view a photo that expresses sadness I do not necessarily feel sad. Likewise with nostalgia. I don't need to be transported to the same place and time as the photo or long to go back. Or have the same experience as the photographer.<br /> <img src="http://d6d2h4gfvy8t8.cloudfront.net/18190228-lg.jpg" alt="" /></p> i n o n e e y e Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Landrum Kelly Posted February 20, 2016 Author Share Posted February 20, 2016 <blockquote> <p>When I view a photo that expresses sadness I do not necessarily feel sad. Likewise with nostalgia. I don't need to be transported to the same place and time as the photo or long to go back. Or have the same experience as the photographer.</p> </blockquote> <p>Agreed, j.d. Nor does one have to feel sad or nostalgic to <em>make</em> a shot that has the power to evoke a sense of sadness or nostalgia in others.</p> <p>I have really enjoyed your posted photos.</p> <p>--Lannie</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJHingel Posted February 21, 2016 Share Posted February 21, 2016 <p >'Good nostalgia and cognitive dissonance' (Julie)</p> <p>Julie, you are throwing a big stone into the pond !</p> <p>If you were right to the extreme, the commonness of nostalgia among older people, longing to go back to the good old days to join the bygones, they are just all subject to "bad" nostalgia. Let's not go to the extreme, but as I earlier did mention above, you can actually die from nostalgia, and many do. </p> <p>You are right, that "good nostalgia" do exist, and your 'cognitive dissonance' (one of those terms that can turn off most on a Sunday morning !) is at the centre of such "good" going back in time. It is the daily bread of most historians, trying to give meaning to what comes to us from past times in history in the forms of texts, artifacts and images, and among those, from more recent times, photographs. <br> Yes, most meanings are lost when time goes past; They don't mean the same : they do not mean now what it meant then - and mostly they don't mean here what they mean there to add a geographical dimension to i. You are right, that when you experience nostalgia when reading old texts or when looking at old pictures it can be turned into a very positive experience if you admit to be challenged in your certainties and you start questioning the meanings of what you see - and the meaning of your longing back. It becomes a great experience that involves learning and enrichment of your present life. All "good" nostalgia.</p> <p>But how do we use such acknowledgement of what nostalgia can be, not only in our reading of old photos (needs in-depth study of the times when photos were shot), but in our photography of today: "the role of nostalgia in your photos" - in your No Words picture of <a href="/no-words-forum/00dkvi">"group dynamics"</a> for example ? It cannot, as far as I see it, just be a question of making new photos look old, I would suggest.</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Julie H Posted February 21, 2016 Share Posted February 21, 2016 <p>Anders I'm talking about the personal/private, not the political/public. The madeleine cake dipped in tea that suddenly floods your mind with memories of your mother's goodnight kiss. </p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Julie H Posted February 21, 2016 Share Posted February 21, 2016 <p>... or "Rosebud."</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJHingel Posted February 21, 2016 Share Posted February 21, 2016 <p>Julie, I know, or rather I expected it to be the case, but after all personal/private/political/public are not different worlds, but different dimensions of the same present and past. <br> If one is stuck in the personal/private one loses social reality and therefore the "historicity" of pictures, old or new - if I dare use a term like that. Good nostalgia demands it all whether it interest you ar not.</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Julie H Posted February 21, 2016 Share Posted February 21, 2016 <p>Anders, you make a good point. Thinking of how unconscious body language affects diplomacy and how inter-ethnic community flows are flavored by unnoticed accents or use of some trivial phrase or gesture, or ways of eating. But I'm not sure how often that gets 'felt' as nostalgia as opposed to just being noticed as significant to outcomes. The pieces on a chess board are not nostalgic.</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Julie H Posted February 21, 2016 Share Posted February 21, 2016 <p>Personal confession of nostalgia: I never really liked darkroom work itself, the mechanics of the wet and dry work of processing; though I truly loved the magical-ness of what it <em>did</em>; the revelation out of darkness, and all that stuff.</p> <p>Nevertheless, though I left the darkroom for Photoshop and have never looked back, I bought, enjoy and ... feel nostalgic when looking at, the book, <em><a href="http://www.photoeye.com/bookstore/citation.cfm?catalog=PY339&i=&i2=">Developer Trays</a></em> -- which is nothing more than exactly what its title would lead you to expect -- lots of pictures of developer trays of famous photographers. I still have my equally stained developer tray -- which for so many years I dreaded. </p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJHingel Posted February 21, 2016 Share Posted February 21, 2016 <p>Personally, I never seriously worked in a darkroom. I had one in my teens, with an old Agfa photo enlarger, and loved the smell and the magic of black and white images coming to life in the developer basin, and hanging drying, and smell of glossy bank heater.<br> After that I send photos to the developer and print shops for years until the scanning, digital photos and Photoshop made the rebirth of all the magic come back to life - without the smells. No nostalgia involved, just memories.</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Julie H Posted February 21, 2016 Share Posted February 21, 2016 <p>Anders, I think you're getting to the tricky part of nostalgia being shown in pictures -- it's almost by definition deeply personal, a feeling of peculiar familiarity. That can be done in literature and movies by tracking back in search of a source, but in stills, it's hard to fill in the underground rhizomatic connections.</p> <p>That is also why, to my eye, while I very much like j.d. wood's pictures in this thread, they don't strike me as nostalgic. To me, they seem very <a href="http://www.wikiart.org/en/giorgio-de-chirico">de Cherico-ish</a>, i.e. surreal and/or strangely alien -- which is precisely not the 'peculiarly familiar' of nostalgia.</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Landrum Kelly Posted February 21, 2016 Author Share Posted February 21, 2016 <blockquote> <p>No nostalgia involved, just memories.</p> </blockquote> <p>Anders, when we can remember the past without longing for it, perhaps we are over it. The simple passage of time does not necessarily suffice, though. Some of my greatest yearnings for the past are for something that happened fifty years ago, but sometimes I long for something that was a few months ago.</p> <p>I bought a very inexpensive D5200 back in July and put a Sigma lens on it. I then went shooting around town. It was the cheapest Nikon rig in my arsenal, but somehow the pictures I took with it last July and August became very special, not because they were great pictures, but because of the time they represented. Little did I realize that in some curious way they had come to represent the end of an era in my personal life. That little camera and lens are sitting on top of a glass-enclosed case fifteen feet from where I am sitting, as if looking at me reproachfully for neglecting them.</p> <p>A life based on nostalgia may well be a life of illusion, but sometimes in the realm of emotions I cannot distinguish reality from illusion. Perhaps emotion is the ultimate reality, the ultimate experience of life. Nostalgia? Is it a longing for a specific thing or person in the past, or for what we <strong><em>fel</em><em>t</em></strong> in the past when those persons or things were in our lives?</p> <p>Perhaps nostalgia is a remembered emotion, that is, the <strong><em>remembrance of an emotion. </em></strong>It surely pales beside the real emotion that we felt at the time of actually experiencing things or person in our lives.</p> <p>I'm just thinking out loud here, trying to understand the psychology of nostalgia. Perhaps if I could understand nostalgia better, I would make it my servant, rather than be its slave myself. If it were my slave, perhaps I could summon the old emotion at will, the real emotion, the real thing. Perhaps my camera could gain certain powers to help in the summoning of emotions from the past--or, if not summon the actual emotion of the time, evoke a stronger and more authentic memory of it. Could that carry over to power over the emotions of the viewer of the photo? I really don't know.</p> <p>Just trying to manage the past here. . . . It seems to have a life of its own. As Faulkner said, "The past isn't dead, It isn't even past." It lives. Nostalgia is. . . what exactly? What exactly does it have to do with the past that was actually lived?</p> <p>--Lannie</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Landrum Kelly Posted February 21, 2016 Author Share Posted February 21, 2016 <p>When we feel nostalgia when viewing a picture made by someone else of past events in their lives, what precisely are we feeling? Dare we think that our feeling has any points of congruence with those of the photographer? It is absolutely certain that they (our feelings and those of the photographer) are not strict equivalents. Our experiences and emotions are ours. Surely no one else can access them. Nor can we access theirs.</p> <p>What precisely is happening when we feel nostalgic over a picture made by someone else? Does that picture simply evoke a memory of something that is <em><strong>presumed to have been similar in our own lives?</strong></em><br> <em><strong> </strong></em><br> --Lannie</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Landrum Kelly Posted February 21, 2016 Author Share Posted February 21, 2016 <blockquote> <p>Anders - <em>scan</em> - 1987 polaroid spectra - Nevada - ex wife. <br /> It was a snapshot, very personal. it was also intended as more than a memory for a viewer. I had a camera hanging on my shoulder day and night. And I thought often about things like nostalgia, emotions, viewers eye movement, influence of music, expression, tools (<a href="/photodb/user?user_id=1979506">j d.wood</a> , Feb 19, 2016; 08:54 p.m.)</p> </blockquote> <p>Play it again, j.d.</p> <p>If you can't play it again in our minds, then at least post the picture again. Give us another shot at feeling what you felt.</p> <p>Nah. . . We know that that's not possible. Right?</p> <p>Yet, yet, as I said in the preceding post, "Does that picture simply evoke a memory of something that is <em><strong>presumed to have been similar in our own lives?"</strong></em></p> <p>--Lannie</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJHingel Posted February 21, 2016 Share Posted February 21, 2016 <p>Lannie, I you might have noticed I often come back to information and reflections, which grow out of photos, that go beyond the individualized (we are all different and after all we don't know what others do, feel or think etc) and psychological explanations to viewing photos. They are surely relevant, but should not be permitted to become exclusive. This is maybe even more important when discussing nostalgia.</p> <p>Nostalgia is surely a feeling, or emotion if you wish, and therefore anchored in the individual:<br /> "a sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past".</p> <p>But at the moment we discuss how nostalgia can play a role in photos, we need to come to grip with the social, cultural, physical dimensions, that can provoke sentimental longing, if we are not only referring to our personal history. Which are these cultural, social, environmental elements that communicate to the viewer a moment in time, a culture and its its history, an epoch, that the viewer can identify and relate to ?<br> <br /> I think your timber wall above, as well as j.d.'s wonderful beach playing ground are good examples. My lotus plants below could be too.</p><div></div> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Norma Desmond Posted February 21, 2016 Share Posted February 21, 2016 <blockquote> <p>"Does that picture simply evoke a memory of something that is <em><strong>presumed to have been similar in our own lives?"</strong></em></p> </blockquote> <p>It may or may not. It can evoke an artistic response, which is fairly complex, more than a memory and more than an emotion. The photo creates a nostalgic space for me (while, of course, also doing more than that). It doesn't matter to me whether I think I'm having j.d.'s experience or I'm having my own similar experience. What matters to me is that it <em>shows</em> nostalgia and then I feel whatever I feel. <em>Showing</em> is more than remembering and more than feeling. </p> <p>Aristotle had a lot of good things to say about art. Among them is the following. Note the absence of words like memory and emotion.</p> <blockquote> <p>The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.</p> </blockquote> <p>Inward significance. Think of all that means. So much more than simply emotions in kind or similar memories.</p> <p>Whatever nostalgia is, it's very different from what it means for a photo to show nostalgia. </p> We didn't need dialogue. We had faces! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJHingel Posted February 21, 2016 Share Posted February 21, 2016 <p>"Whatever nostalgia is, it's very different from what it means for a photo to show nostalgia"<br> Totally agree Fred. The question is however when a photo "shows" nostalgia, and when a photo evokes nostalgia in the viewer. That's the question ! </p> <p><a name="pagebottom"></a></p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
inoneeye Posted February 21, 2016 Share Posted February 21, 2016 <p>If I were to publish a collection of photos (never just one) around nostalgia this would be my cover.... an academic start. An elderly lady viewing her own past from just a few moments ago - with an sx70. academic. It would be silly to expect a viewer (let alone all) to feel nostalgic<img src="http://d6d2h4gfvy8t8.cloudfront.net/18190502-lg.jpg" alt="" /></p> <p>Like quotes, I view single photographs as a starting point. They set my mind in motion, at best provoke and encourage/ stimulate me to create a thought or work of my own. I think to even attempt to express nostalgia, the emotion, to any real depth (like mockingbird, kane) would require many many photos. and for most would still require words. Even so I did not feel nostalgic reading To kill a mockingbird or watching Citizen Kane. Another day another mood maybe I would have. Yet I did recognize it as a subject and some of the tools used to establish and express it. Nolstalgia is more complex than a single image or single one liner.</p> <p><em>posted before reading Fred & Anders - like talking at the same time</em></p> i n o n e e y e Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Julie H Posted February 21, 2016 Share Posted February 21, 2016 <p>j.d., I think your picture and Kane and Proust are all <em>about</em> nostalgia but don't get me to feel nostalgia. Agree with you on that. What makes me feel nostalgic seems to be necessarily deeply idiosyncratic -- purely personal. Which is a problem if I want to do anything other than describe it in a clinical (not felt) way.</p> <p>I have two more or less random comments: there is a phrase that photography writers sometimes use that applies to all photographs -- "the presence of absence." Nostalgia seems to me to be a particularly aggressive kind of such in that it does funny things to those two words and it is more of the flesh than the mind.</p> <p>Which makes me disagree with Anders definition: ""a sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past." I think nostalgia is actually a little bit insidious, a little bit viral in the way it infects ones feelings.</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Norma Desmond Posted February 21, 2016 Share Posted February 21, 2016 <p>For me, there's a difference between being about something and showing something. A photo's being about nostalgia suggests a kind of distance. A photo's showing nostalgia suggests an intimacy. Regardless of whether or not one feels nostalgia when viewing a photo, the difference between its being about and showing can also be felt. The about-ness part of j.d.'s photo is, as he described it, the academic part. The woman is looking at a polaroid of herself. That's what it's about. But what it shows involves her expression upon looking, involves the strong sunny lighting with the simplicity of the flowers she seems to have been tending to for years, is in the hunched-over stance inherited from time, and is in the simultaneous utilization and picturing of a polaroid and how the polaroid-ness is both part of the content and relates to the content of the photos.</p> We didn't need dialogue. We had faces! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJHingel Posted February 21, 2016 Share Posted February 21, 2016 <p>A photo's showing nostalgia suggests an intimacy." Fred<br> I would rather suggest that a photo showing nostalgia demands an intimacy with the subject. Intimacy to the language of signs and symbols, which are employed in the image. That's why I chose to show a picture of lotus plants in a specific stage of their life circles. The surface value of that image is of course the has-been dimension, but one does only have to master the most simple elements of Far East culture to understand the behind the scene symbolism of the image. It is both an image of nostalgia, "showing something", and a picture evoking nostalgia among those with a minimum of intimate knowledge and experience about this something. </p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
inoneeye Posted February 21, 2016 Share Posted February 21, 2016 <p>"<em>j.d., I think your picture and Kane and Proust are all about</em><em> nostalgia but don't get me to feel nostalgia.</em>" Julie<br /> I would not try to make you feel love or sadness or any number of emotions. Not my job as I see it.<br /> OTH I might attempt to make you feel upbeat or laid back. I also might hope to make you think about nostalgia or love ... or simply feel something, anything (viewers choice) for how I think about it, does it feel genuine does it feel personal. but no I am not trying to get you to feel nostalgic. Maybe later when you are thinking about what does make you nostalgic.</p> <p> </p> i n o n e e y e Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Landrum Kelly Posted February 22, 2016 Author Share Posted February 22, 2016 <blockquote> <p>I would not try to make you feel love or sadness or any number of emotions. Not my job as I see it. . .</p> <p>I might attempt to make you feel upbeat or laid back. I also might hope to make you think about nostalgia or love ... or simply feel something, anything --j.d. wood</p> </blockquote> <p>Why, j.d., would you see any of that as your job? Why have you drawn the line where you have as to what your "job" is as photographer? I confess that, in spite of all my allusions to a photograph's "evoking" this or that emotion (or whatever) in the viewer, I don't think one bit about the viewer when I am either shooting or processing. More precisely, if I should find myself thinking along those lines, I would have to push all that out of consciousness as a potential distraction in the photographic process. Thinking about what other people might think of what I am doing would definitely compromise my concentration and possibly my artistic integrity--or whatever it is that is truly fulfilling about photography in the first place.</p> <p>I don't even think of any of it as "my job." I just take pictures. I enjoy it and thus I keep doing it. I post a few of them (after I have taken and processed them) to show others what I have seen, but that comes after the photography is over. I think that that is what the perfect paradigm of amateur photography is about: doing something for absolutely no other reason than that one loves doing it.</p> <p>I don't think that photography in and of itself is even about sharing or not sharing, evoking or not evoking, pleasing others or not pleasing others--unless one is doing it for hire, or for some other motive extraneous to photography itself. Then one has to think about what the prospective buyer or other viewer might think about the finished product.</p> <p>I have stated the dilemma and the distinction between amateur and professional photography in extremely stark terms, even as "ideal types." I am aware that the reality is often less clear-cut (especially for professional photographers who do love their work), but I do think that the distinction as I have drawn it, overdrawn though it might or might not be, is conceptually useful.</p> <p>For all I know, professional photographers might also be indifferent to what emotions are or are not evoked in the viewer by the photograph.</p> <p>Perhaps the question of whether nostalgia is an emotion needs to be reviewed further as well.</p> <p>--Lannie</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Julie H Posted February 22, 2016 Share Posted February 22, 2016 <p>You are a collector.</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now