Gesture (symbols)

[Norman 202]

or, my favourite, lips and hands

 

[Norma Desmond]

yeah, teeth

Edited June 26, 2017 by Norma Desmond

[sjmurray]

Gee, thanks for your generous comments, Tim! I mean that. On my first post I did state: "The spontaneous, natural "pose" seems to be an unconscious act of the subject which conveys something about them, which is for us, the viewers to guess." We are are now guessing as to what these poses represent in my photo of the two women.

Back story: I worked with the one on the right. I was attracted to her and was hinting at going out together. Instead, I was invited to their apartment and I guess I promised to do a portrait, so I brought my Yashicamat. I never really knew, but I have a feeling they were more than just friends. I get that feeling in this photo too. This was the 70's, so sexual identity issues were a bit more private. They were very comfortable with each other and some of the tension of their positions was because they were sitting on top of a coffee table, if i remember correctly. I never did end up going out with her.

[Norma Desmond]

"The spontaneous, natural "pose" seems to be an unconscious act of the subject which conveys something about them

First a question, did they just naturally and spontaneously sit on the coffee table?

 

Then a note. I don't necessarily believe so-called spontaneous, natural poses are always or even often acts of the subject which convey something about them. Many of our supposedly natural poses have been ingrained in us by Hollywood. Watch smokers on a street corner and lovers in the park. Often right out of the movies. I'd say, If many natural and spontaneous poses are conveying something about the subjects, it's how influenced by culture and ingrained symbolism they often are.

 

On the other hand, sometimes getting someone to adopt a forced pose encourages them to reveal something about themselves or their character or persona. Sometimes, of course, not.

[Norma Desmond]

I think gesture can't be limited to limbs and can't, in isolation, be said to reveal much of anything. It's the context in which the gesture is given, the gestalt of the picture, the gesture combined with expression and environment, with color, with contrast, with light and shadow, that reveals something if anything. Lighting itself can be taken on gesturally. Gestures in photos are often revealing things about human nature even while they're often not revealing things about the individuals viewers assume they're about. Taking a photo to be about its individual subject can sometimes risk missing the significance of the photo.

[Norman 202]

I think gesture can't be limited to limbs and can't, in isolation, be said to reveal much of anything

i agree. look again at migrant mum and you will see much more than a gesture.

[sjmurray]

Fred asks: "First a question, did they just naturally and spontaneously sit on the coffee table? I believe this was their idea. To me, "natural and spontaneous" includes unconscious influences from culture. Milton Erickson the famous psychiatrist, maintained that "a person cannot 'not' communicate." He was referring to body language, gestures, talking or refusing to talk, etc. Yeah, even when a person assumes a conscious pose, it conveys something about them because they are unique, and what they even consciously choose to do is a reflection on their personality, along with the unconscious stuff, IMO. Edited June 26, 2017 by sjmurray

[Norma Desmond]

I believe this was their idea.

I'm not just nitpicking. I think this is important to understanding photos and spontaneity. That it was their idea does not make it either spontaneous or natural, likely just the opposite. It was a quite deliberate artifice they chose. Which, in my mind, doesn't make it any less revealing than had you come across them quite spontaneously sitting on the coffee table, which could have happened for any number of reasons.

 

I think what's generally revealing is how the photo looks, as much if not more than what the reality was when it was taken or how posed or spontaneous things were. A photographer can work with spontaneity and get it to reveal stuff (again, not always particular to the individual subject of the photo as much as particular to human nature) and a photographer can work with artifice (as you did with the two women) and get it to reveal stuff.

 

For me, it's rarely about specific ingredients and more often about how the ingredients wind up being or get combined.

[sjmurray]

Fred, I think we are pretty much in agreement. Everything a person does, consciously or not, reflects something about them. Here's a photo I did of my brother in the 70's. I just asked him if I could take his picture, and he chose to sit on the grass in front of the vines and sit in that manner.

[Norma Desmond]

And I think it's a good picture but I don't find it revealing ANYTHING about your brother to me. That's not how I look at this picture. It reveals something very human and very relatable and it's got a lot of photographic texture for me to sink my teeth into. But I'd find it a distraction to wonder about your brother. I'm more interested in the guy in the picture who, to me, is not your brother, but a guy in a picture.

 

[i would expect people who know your brother to probably feel differently.]

[Norma Desmond]

I want to try to articulate this better. When I view a photo of a person I don't know, If it's a good one that reaches me emotionally, the prime relationship is between me and the photographic entity, not between me and the living, breathing entity who was photographed. One of the reasons this has developed for me is because of all the wonderful, imaginative things people have said about the folks in many of my own photos, many of which I think are profoundly true of the photo and the entity to which we attribute personhood in the photo but are not true of the person who stood before me when I took the picture. So I try to achieve some sort of reasonable counterpoint between not projecting stuff onto the living, breathing subjects of photos while still recognizing the power and immediacy of the camera to capture some very real stuff about those same subjects. In short, I don't think it's clear cut or simple what exactly we're capturing and that makes it all the more intriguing.

[sjmurray]

Thanks for your input, Fred. Very analytical! Interesting how people differ in how we respond to art. Its impossible for me to see the picture of my brother as a stranger, obviously. However, the image to me does show a rather self-possessed, confident young person. In fact, he is a prodigy intellectually and musically which was recognized at a very early age. Graphically, I love the triangle theme that is all over the place: in his arms and legs, and coincidentally in the leaves behind him. A nice serendipitous touch to something I would not have known to do had I been directing everything!

[Tim_Lookingbill]

Its impossible for me to see the picture of my brother as a stranger, obviously. However, the image to me does show a rather self-possessed, confident young person. In fact, he is a prodigy intellectually...

 

That's the exact impression I got of your brother, but mostly confidence and intelligence. Not surprised he's a prodigy. Though I have to say his looks do fit the Hollywood stereotype often pictured in '70's "Paper Chase" styled movies of that era.

[Norma Desmond]

A nice serendipitous touch to something I would not have known to do had I been directing everything!

Yes, different. I see it as kind of a shame you wouldn't have known those things had you been directing. Why do you think you wouldn't have?

 

I love serendipity both in life and in art and am happy whenever it occurs. I also love accidents and the things my unconscious has me do without my deciding them overtly. But that's not enough for me. I like learning from all that so I can direct both my life and my art to the extent I want or at least somewhere in the vicinity of the extent I aspire to. I have little desire to simply float through life or art as a passive or unconscious observer, waiting for serendipity and accidents to happen. If I found something compelling about a serendipitous triangle theme that appeared in a photo of mine, you bet I'd not only notice it, but I'd think about it and consciously try to do something with it again sometime. I find it really beneficial, fun, and expressive to know things to do when photographing, especially when that knowledge easily flows because I've internalized something by thinking about it when I'm not photographing.

 

Again, yes, different.

Edited June 27, 2017 by Norma Desmond

[Norma Desmond]

Though I have to say his looks do fit the Hollywood stereotype

I think you're onto something quite important!

[sjmurray]

To answer you Fred, had I been directing the shot, I probably would not have had him sit on the grass cross legged with his chin on his hands. That was entirely his idea. Hence, the triangles appeared! It was all done very quickly, as many of my shots are.

[Norma Desmond]

It was all done very quickly, as many of my shots are.

You'd probably be surprised how quickly some direction can be done! ;-)

[sjmurray]

Fred, I do some direction of course, but even in my bio here I have made it clear that my particular mode of working is to be observant and catch people in their element, so to speak. It works for me quite well! Other people do if differently. A studio photographer can spend hours arranging lighting and backgrounds, and then take hundreds of shots, and this can work quite well. Worked for Avedon! As I said, my particular "art" is the snapshot. I'm good at keeping my eyes open and mind in "open" mode too. BTW I will be out of town the rest of the week at a family reunion, so I will be "off line" for a while until next week.

[Julie H]

my particular mode of working is to be observant and catch people in their element

 

 

This goes back to something I touched on in an earlier post:

 

Using two other photographers to give examples, first:

 

Nicholas Nixon, Joel Geiger-Perkins School for the Blind

In that one, I think the obvious symbolism, picked out by the photographer, completely dominates the (beautiful) face of the boy. Or to put it another way, it uses the boy's face to its ends.

 

Compare to this one:

 

Jerome Liebling, Blind Home

In this, by contrast, I think the symbolism is in perfect concert with, is generative of, supports and amplifies, the conception of the man's character.

 

Siegfried Kracauer had a horror of photographs:

 

[in a family photograph] he saw something more absolute than death: total erasure. To his horror, his grandmother, just a young showgirl in the image, was buried alive in a litany of banal detail. She became an "archeological mannequin" into which memories of the grandmother had "dissolved." But it wasn't actually her absence he confronted, but Kracauer's own memory, his own history. For Kracauer the impenetrable surface of things was the wasteland of the photographic image. ... The lens pillaged this sense of the personal, the real, reducing it to a catalog of things, textures, and shapes. Memories and histories were successfully obliterated under the weight of its descriptive power. —

Walead Beshty

 

Steve's "catch[ing] people in their element" for the kind of portraiture that he does seems to me to be an effort to avoid what Kracauer describes. It seems to me to be an attempt to catch the fish in its water, to keep it alive rather than preserve or use it.

[Norman 202]

Steve's "catch[ing] people in their element" for the kind of portraiture that he does seems to me to be an effort to avoid what Kracauer describes. It seems to me to be an attempt to catch the fish in its water, to keep it alive rather than preserve or use it

 

do you really think Steve is capturing people "in their element" or are you just sh1t-stirring? c'mon Jools, don't b shy.

 

how does photographing his super intelligent brother, sitting cross-legged in a field support that? is the out of date hair, specs, clothing and rural setting supposed to make us think of Newton.

 

are the two girls really "in their element"? they look pretty uncomfortable to me and a few others

[Norman 202]

It seems to me to be an attempt to catch the fish in its water, to keep it alive rather than preserve or use it.

beautifully and originally put {barf, barf, barf}

[Norman 202]

don't you think when one person is relaxed and the other isn't will create tension especially when they are that close.

 

in this instance i think both girls are uncomfortable because of their gestures and poses

[Julie H]

Who is gesturing?

 

Hans Bellmer, 1935

[Norma Desmond]

in this instance i think both girls are uncomfortable because of their gestures and poses

They both look stiff to me, which I don't necessarily see as uncomfortable.

 

The tension I'm most conscious of is how one is looking so directly and pointedly at the camera and the other is looking so directly and pointedly somewhere else. That seems to distance them from each other as well as from me.

[Supriyo]

That seems to distance them from each other as well as from me.

 

Fred, I agree, the lack of codirectional gaze implies some tension between them, but to me, it also makes the overall picture more interesting to look at (which is not to say, it doesn't for you). I feel, Steve's picture has tension as well as dynamism in it due to their different gazes and body orientations. I like the pose of the woman on the right ... her legs pointing opposite to her face, one shoulder up, one down, fiddling with the fingers, her unbuttoned shirt. I feel (just my subjective opinion), if she was also looking at me like the left woman, then I would notice the details of her pose less, and it would be more face-centric. That would make a more happy picture for sure, but I can't resist wondering, would that happiness appear as a facade.

 

I think, if both of them were looking at the camera, there may be more tension between the subjects and the camera (not between them). As if, the camera is pulling their attention, and that pull leading to tension. This is not to say, that attention always means tension, but here in the context of her (right woman) overall body orientation, I felt a straight gaze at the camera would imply some tension in looking at the camera. As of now, I feel a relaxed invitation to look at the right woman, which may be lost had she been looking directly at me.