How does one capture an emotion?

aplumpton · February 2, 2016

Lannie, a fellow photo.net photographer, Drew Bayless, has some quite evocative and emotive images. I suggest you have a look at this one.

http://www.photo.net/photo/18099317

Norma Desmond · February 2, 2016

Lannie, from your OP and from all you've said and posted here, I get the impression you have no trouble picking out which photos are evocative for you and that you've seen and can point to plenty of them. The question seemed more personal. "How does one do it?" It seems a direct and sincere question.

Lannie, does vulnerability ever come into play for you when you're photographing, your own or that of your subjects? If so, how?

I was just watching a fun old Ernst Lubitsch movie, The Smiling Lieutenant. (By the way, if you haven't seen a Lubitsch movie, watch Design For Living as soon as you can.) Anyway, at the beginning of Lieutenant, Maurice Chevalier and his best friend are both interested in Claudette Colbert. His friend approaches her first and is very gentlemanly. Chevalier kind of swoops in and captures her emotions by being flirtatious. How might flirting transfer to taking a picture?

Flirting may not work for you and photography. But along with all the looking has to go some kind of imagining. Make something up.

Landrum Kelly · February 2, 2016

Flirting may not work for you and photography. But along with all the looking has to go some kind of imagining. Make something up.

</blockquote>

That sounds interesting alright, Fred. For that matter, capturing any kind of interpersonal interaction sounds interesting. Is it risky? Have you tried it? I can't run as fast as I used to.

--Lannie

Landrum Kelly · February 2, 2016

Arthur, that's a good one. <a href="/photo/18063869">Here</a> is another by Drew that I like.

--Lannie

Tim_Lookingbill · February 2, 2016

Lannie, does vulnerability ever come into play for you when you're photographing, your own or that of your subjects? If so, how?

</blockquote>

Fred, I keep seeing this word vulnerability used to describe actors style of acting and other creative mediums and I have yet to know exactly what vulnerability looks like especially in a still photo. I know what it means from the standpoint of the fight or flight response on whether a human or animal can defend them self from attack by a predator. But I still don't know what vulnerability has to do with emotions? Is it to draw out sympathy from the viewer?

And maybe you can explain from an example posed by what I've experienced as feeling sympathy toward another's vulnerability. I have this thing about hands. I call it "sad hands" syndrome where in a movie or just observing people on a bus where someone positions their hands in a way that evokes a sadness. I was thinking someone has got to have photographed hands in a manner that could bring someone to tears. I remember the painting of the old man praying with only a small loaf of bread as his only meal but even that doesn't do it for me. http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61qzgxode9L._SL1100_.jpg

And sense you mentioned flirting I have two images I shot observing a father teaching his daughter how to swim and another showing them just hanging out getting some sun where the daughter taunts and teases her rather big and imposing macho cool headed father by fluttering and flicking her hands at him. I thought these two images evoke an emotional response and uses hand gestures where the first one of the swimming lesson shows the father's outstretched hand taking on a protective claw like but caring hold.<div></div>

Landrum Kelly · February 2, 2016

Lannie, does vulnerability ever come into play for you when you're photographing, your own or that of your subjects? If so, how?

</blockquote>

Fred, I am not sure if I have ever deliberately tried to capture a sense of vulnerability, but emotional vulnerability definitely makes a person more approachable. I can imagine of lot of possibilities that might work in that regard. I probably should try to get more shots that have people in them.

As for my own vulnerability, I am not sure how it affects my photography, but that is certainly something to think about.

--Lannie

Julie H · February 2, 2016

Lannie, I have it from no less than Minor White that:

1. Nobody else can teach you how to visually convey your own experience in photographs, but;

2. ... if you are constantly "tormented by the feeling that there is more," then you're at the doorstep of making those very photographs ...

:)

aplumpton · February 2, 2016

Julie, thanks for the insightful Minor White quote which I find both comforting (torment explained) and slightly hopeful.

Lannie, here is an image that I think exhibits emotion in the viewer, at least its quiet beauty and look of the flower incited a spontaneous smile.

http://www.photo.net/photo/18131599

Landrum Kelly · February 2, 2016

These things are so subjective, Arthur. Here is one by Anders that evokes something in me, although I don't think that "emotion" is quite the word:

<a href="/photo/6588960">http://www.photo.net/photo/6588960</a>

--Lannie

Norma Desmond · February 2, 2016

These things are so subjective

</blockquote>

It's funny, but in the context of this discussion and photography's way of evoking emotions, I tend to think of all the non-subjective aspects of emotions, of which there are plenty.

Uhooru · February 3, 2016

Capturing other's emotions is tricky, because a lot of time its just the viewers projection of what the emotion might be, while other times it can be very real. Example that many of us of a certain age may remember, would be the naked girl in Vietnam during that war (forgot who took it), but that was obviously real if I ever saw "real" in a photo. However generally, the camera recording an instant and the framing etc. can often suggest feelings and relationships that exist only in the photo, but were not really what was happening at all. Stopping motion creates its own world in some ways. And yet us street/docu photographers are often looking to catch that "feeling". This also includes creating a mood, which is maybe more towards the example Landrum started off with and more of a projection of the photographers emotions, or idea of emotions than capturing the emotions of others. Rambling further with this, I think setting mood has a lot of formalistic concerns with light, composition etc., but a mood toned photograph usually uses what the camera captures and then is brought out by processing. Where as Landrum's example is more of conceptual play by an artist using photographic process but trying to create emotional response symbolically, which I find kind of tortuous. Now when someone like Frida Kahlo did it, especially after you discover somethings about her life, its amazingly powerful. But then her symbols strike pretty true and graphical to what she was really experiencing. To contrast that with the "De-Selfing" series it seems that Wang's photos "work" in that they function to show what the artist tended to show, are skillfully shot, but to me, totally fail to evoke any feeling in me. They look like some one drew up photographic diagram's showing ways to represent "break-up" and distraughtness from it, but to me don't really do it. It's probably my issue, as I never really was moved by modern dance interpretations of the same type of thing, it just looks too contrived. Sort of like watching student design contest, "your task is to give me 20 photos representing emotion". But they are pretty good photos so I will look at them a few more times as some of them are pretty good, but I just wish they hadn't described what they were trying to depict. < taking a virtual breath>. So here's a couple of photos depicting mood, and one capturing or showing emotion...I guess :) <img src="https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7512/15715659274_29d120b975_o.jpg" alt="" /> <img src="https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5319/14154509741_368776173a_o.jpg" alt="" /> <img src="https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5504/12169366564_d0f513079d_o.jpg" alt="" />

Uhooru · February 3, 2016

Julie, I think those photos are really cool, my response is a crowd of sticks but they seem human and, especially the second one, well, you know how people express attitudes from posture, they both have that quality. Your branches have tudes!

Uhooru · February 3, 2016

Last, one more I think shows a sense of alienation though when I took it I wasn't feeling that way at all, but I knew the photo might embody that and I was quite happy to take it.<img src="http://d6d2h4gfvy8t8.cloudfront.net/10287376-md.jpg" alt="" />

Landrum Kelly · February 3, 2016

It's funny, but in the context of this discussion and photography's way of evoking emotions, I tend to think of all the non-subjective aspects of emotions, of which there are plenty.

</blockquote>

Not only that, Fred, but we have been trying to figure out what it is that evokes emotions--some kind of objective way of getting at what makes for a strong photo, or even some objective way to find out how to make strong and powerful photos.

I saw the contradiction as I wrote those remarks to Arthur, but what I really meant in my response to him was nothing more than, "People are moved by different things."

--Lannie

Julie H · February 3, 2016

Lannie* (and I) need (not want) to have our subjective emotions be made objective. Need, not want. This is urgent, necessary, and perpetual in one's life. As it is also for you and you and you, reading this. Without some kind of alignment of emotional understanding, there is no communication at all. Which is not to say that it is always, or often perfectly achieved. It's not. But it remains the only way we gear into each other.

[*here I go again, taking liberties with Lannie's persona ... I like Lannie's persona ]

Julie H · February 3, 2016

Barry, your last picture is really good, and it's interesting in juxtaposition to the one right above it with the beach. Just noticing how the sort of putty-like texture of the beach affects mood one way, while the clear, strong textures of the last one goes the other way.

Tim's upper picture is, to me, kind of interesting because of the fact that more than half of the top of the frame is filled with wild leaves. In b&w I'd think those could be made even more effective. (Tim will be scratching his head ... )

You can tell that I'm too lazy to click on any links ...

Landrum Kelly · February 3, 2016

I love all those photos, Barry.

All that I know for sure is that, although we bring ourselves and our emotional states to the making of a photo, the resulting photo almost invariably has to stand on its own, sometimes totally out of context, and whatever emotion it might evoke in the viewer can be quite independent of what we felt (if anything) when we took it.

Single photos represent a moment frozen in time. If printed, they are two-dimensional representations entirely out of the flow of space-time. The amazing this is that they have any power whatsoever to evoke emotions. If we have two photos made sequentially, then we have more context, and we are back to what I can only call "delta t," a change in the value of t. Make it a movie clip, and the flow of time is even more evident. Context begins to expand and to confer (??) meaning.

Had I seen the little girl running naked from the napalm bombing in Vietnam totally out of context, I think that I would have understood that something was dreadfully wrong--but that is about it. Knowing that it was a shot from the Vietnam War, however, gave it much more power--in this case including even political power, the power to turn more and more people in the direction of wanting to withdraw from Vietnam militarily. Knowing that she was naked because the napalm had literally burned the clothing off her back made it more powerful still, in all kinds of ways.

The thing about photos is that we often do know the context, or else someone tells us the context, and suddenly we find the photo back in the flow of space-time, in the context of real events, events that continue to unfold. Without some kind of context, though, I don't know what we have: "images of an instant," snapshots that mean nothing to anyone at all, not even to ourselves as we take them. Other times we infer the context falsely upon viewing, missing it entirely, but yet responding to our viewing of what we think we saw. Our emotional response will be to the fiction, not anything approximating the actual reality of that moment.

"Whose reality?" one might ask, by which I am referring to persons' emotional reality or realities, since five people viewing the same photo might have five different emotional reactions, in the same way that five victims to a crime will give five different accounts of what happened. I should not quite say "in the same way," but perhaps "analogous to." After all, "What actually happened [at the scene of the crime]?" is a very different question from "What did you feel when you saw the photo?"

Sometimes I think that it is quite ridiculous how much emotion we try to imbue "into" this or that two-dimensional representation. The truly amazing thing, though, is not that we sometimes (or often) don't capture the emotional power of a situation. The amazing thing is how often we actually do manage to capture and communicate something of what we feel of felt to others, who might indeed feel at least some of the same things that we feel.

"Everything in context." That is one of my favorite mantras. Indeed, "Everything in context." The more something is out of context, the more it is open to subjective interpretation. Context provides the possibility of giving it some "objective" representation of reality, and, believe me, I do know how perilous the word "objective" can be.

This directs me back to Fred's last comment, a comment also making some allusion to objectivity. Maybe the question at the outset of the thread should have made some reference to "objectivity," but then the moderators would have buried it in the Philosophy of Photography forum for sure. I didn't want this to get buried in that forum, but the philosophical implications of the original question were obvious from the beginning. Nonetheless, I wanted opinions from those who would never go near that forum, for whatever reason. I love that forum, but it drains me. One does not casually tread there.

--Lannie

Landrum Kelly · February 3, 2016

How did I know that Julie would jump in before I could? (I know you, Julie, or at least I think I do, though I have never met you.)

Barry, your photos and comments are too rich to let us let them go by unremarked.

Back to Julie:

Without some kind of alignment of emotional understanding, there is no communication at all. Which is not to say that it is always, or often perfectly achieved. It's not. But it remains the only way we gear into each other.

</blockquote>

All of this is a reminder that sharing photos is about COMMUNICATION--or, all too often, a "failure of communication." I am reminded of the line from Cool Hand Luke: "What we have here is a failure to communicate." I feel one thing when I shoot the picture, or perhaps I feel little or nothing. Someone else viewing it feels something entirely different--or nothing at all. I might as well have not posted the picture in that person's universe. No connection happened.

The more that we can include contextual hints in the photo, the more likely we are to be able to communicate. Alas, that does not often happen quite like we want. (Welcome to the human condition.)

Does objectivity matter in art? Oops, that would have to be another forum thread.

Does communication matter in art? Oops, there's another potential thread.

--Lannie

Landrum Kelly · February 3, 2016

There is emotion, and then there is emotion. So, before you click on the link, prepare to emote:

</blockquote>

--Lannie

Landrum Kelly · February 3, 2016

DEFINITION

A manifestation or practice of the desire to communicate.

Dare I add, "desire to communicate emotion"?

What are we as human beings if we have no desire to communicate, especially where emotions are concerned? Are we even "human" at all?

Julie expressed it as a "need (not want) to have our subjective emotions be made objective." Brava, Julie!

--Lannie

Julie H · February 3, 2016

... transmit (communicate) and receive (here is Lannie; 'I am here; I claim') ...

[<a href="http://www.lost-painters.nl/wp-content/uploads/Levi-van-Veluw-Landscapes-I-II-III-IV-Foto-op-dibond.jpg">the many personas of Lannie</a>]

Norma Desmond · February 3, 2016

Single photos represent a moment frozen in time. If printed, they are two-dimensional representations entirely out of the flow of space-time.

</blockquote>

I disagree with all of this, Lannie. For me, only one small aspect of photos is that they can be seen as a moment frozen in time and that's rarely how I approach them or think of them. I generally think of them as stories, as scenes, as expressions and as encompassing much more than a moment or being something frozen. They are likely to be as fluid as they are frozen, and they are alive. They may be two dimensional but, if they are in part representations they are simultaneously other than representations they're not out of the flow of space or time. They're right in there.

Julie H · February 3, 2016

A story told by Sally Mann:

... From the moment I passed into Mississippi, my time became ecstatic. It is a fact for me that certain moments in the creative process, moments when I am really seeing, become somehow attenuated, weirdly expansive. A radiance coalesces about the landscape, rich in possibility, supercharged with something electric. Time slows down. Time becomes ecstatic.

I once read an account by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollis_Frampton">Hollis Frampton</a> about a man named <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Breedlove">Breedlove</a>, who broke the world land speed record on the Bonneville Salt Flats. Near the end of his second run, at 620 miles per hour, his car spun out of control, severing telephone poles, flying through the air, and crashing in a salt pond.

Breedlove was unhurt. When asked by a reporter to remark on the incident, he spoke into the microphone for an astonishing hour and thirty-five minutes, during which time he described in a sequential and deliberate way what occurred in a period of 8.7 seconds. In this monologue, Breedlove expressed concern that he would bore his listeners and said he would do his polite best to make a much longer story short. As Frampton points out, this “ecstatic utterance” represents a temporal expansion in the ration of 655 to one.

</blockquote>

655 to one. We have our work cut out for us.

Landrum Kelly · February 3, 2016

Sí, soy yo, Julie.

Here's another question: Do the photos below (aka "the video") help to provide the context for FEELING the full impact of the music?

<a href="

[LINK]</a>

</blockquote>

Could it be the reverse?

--Lannie

Landrum Kelly · February 3, 2016

I disagree with all of this, Lannie. For me, only one small aspect of photos is that they can be seen as a moment frozen in time and that's rarely how I approach them or think of them.

</blockquote>

In context, yes, Fred. But, out of context, what are they? Even to define a printed artifact is a photo is to demonstrate that we already have some sense of context.

Some bushman in the Kalahari who had never seen seen a photo would see. . . what?

--Lannie

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