The Vignette as an Expressive Tool

[DavidTriplett]

Apologies for my unintentionally long absence. Life and internet disruptions sometimes happen...

 

I had felt criticized by Julie and my ideas categorized as cliche', but the subsequent discussions, including her comments, are so closely aligned with my own ideas that I find myself in the company of friends. Phil's comments, together with Fred's most recent, are particularly encouraging, as I see a very well conceived and communicated concept that conforms closely to my own, and even expands upon it in ways I had not articulated.

 

PT's images I think speak well of the power of the vignette. I find those images particularly interesting from my perspective as an architect, since their subjects contain elements that speak a language with which I am intimately familiar. In particular, the image of the FDC projecting from a crumbling brick wall is of interest. It intrigues on multiple levels. First, the brick wall could be almost any age, from just a few to hundreds of years old, except for the context provided by the FDC. The juxtaposition of these elements provides both tension and context, where the viewer is invited to ask herself why, if the building is new enough to have a fire suppression system, is the brickwork crumbling? Or, is the fire suppression system an addition to a much older structure. Or... almost anything else. The built-in tension invites the inquiry, which makes this vignette so engaging.

[PapaTango]

Indeed David. In this rests the power of your original image--the weathered wood & fittings; strong mechanics to withstand forces of something only hinted at by the snippet of sail--rising breezes and courses to be charted. And in the alternate simply a nice study in forms and function.

 

I spent a number of years as the assistant director for the Center for Historic Architecture & Preservation (CHAP) at the University of Kentucky. An important part of preservation studies is to identify and note the evolution of structures over time--the use of materials, stylistic variances, and changing needs/requirements as time marches along. All carry signatures and character that unfortunately seems lacking in contemporary architecture. I blame Mies, Pei, Kahn, and the other cadre of Brutalists for this plaintive and unadorned stuff--although I admire and have documented the work of each.

 

The built environment provides such a rich opportunity for the vignette. Although a whole bunch of philosoapy has been tossed around in this discussion--one thing gleams bright and remains. Strong and evocative images exist in the everyday--ignored in their native state. But extracted? Oy Vey! I am appreciative of the humanist photographers who accomplish the same effect--as evidenced by his offering. Those that have a knack for the natural environment are a special case, as they are carrying forth in the vignette often the increasingly smaller inhabitants and environment of life.

 

And sometimes the PS vignette gives our conceptualized vignettes a bit more power.

[DavidTriplett]

If the picture flattens out into being anything I want it to be, it loses its vignette-ish impact for me.

Julie, I agree with you entirely in this regard, with the caveat that the meaning to be derived by the viewer will be colored at least equally by his or her own experience as by the content offered by the photographer. Yes, my photos are an offering, an invitation to you as the viewer to partake of this tasty little piece of creativity. I will be pleased if the message received by you is the one I had intended, but, I must be willing to accept that you may bring other, less predictable meanings to my offering.

 

I want to revisit my previous statement that the watch image was essentially meaningless without the ascribed context. This is incomplete. As Phil so correctly points out, a watch, particularly one in atypical condition (in this case, stopped due to obvious physical and thermal damage) can carry a powerful message. It is symbolic of time (as a timepiece), and of human existence (human life and time being interchangeable literary symbols), but time is stopped, or a human life ended, and has been stopped by apparently violent circumstances, though those circumstances are undefined. These perceptions are important, but only reach their maximum degree of impact when we know that the violence that "stopped" (or existence) time in this case was the atomic bomb attack on Nagasaki.

 

So, given the further discussion, and our apparent, if circular, agreement, where does my description of a vignette and its place in representational art cross the line into cliche'? Please clarify.

[Norma Desmond]

I had never heard the term synecdoche, a great word for a great idea, so I've been reading a bit about them. (Thanks, Edwin!) Turns out synecdoche also refers to the opposite, where a generalized term refers to something more specific. So, for instance, when we say Germany won the gold medal at the Olympics, we really mean the individual or team won the medal. We often use the word "society" to refer just to "high society" as opposed to all of society. Same when we say glasses, a more general term, to mean spectacles, a more specific concept. (The word also has other shades of meaning which are interesting.) It was harder for me to think of photos that go from the bigger to the smaller picture, from the more general to the more specific. I came up with THIS ONE-LINK by Dorothea Lange, the landscape and house (and especially because of that lone stick) really leading me to think of the person/s in the house who live in that wide open space.

[Julie H]

.........

Robert Frank's The Americans isn't such a great documentary because it's a neutral record but precisely because it's saturated with Robert Frank's own vision and personality and look on the world.

 

If you're suggesting that Frank's work has anything to do with vignettes, I disagree completely. Because of what you write about Frank, Robert Frank's work is not vignette.

 

Think of murder trial, for example the OJ Simpson murder trial. You are the prosecuting attorney, and you have the bloody glove that was found at the scene of the murder. When presenting it in trial, do you use that occasion to launch into eloquent expression of your "own vision and personality and look on" bloody gloves? Do you speak passionately about the many meanings of a bloody glove that might be conveyed by it? I hope not.

 

Rather you, as a bright, focused attorney with a good grasp of the overall structure of the crime that you believe has happened, would control and steer all of your words and means of presentation to show how, where, why that glove gives us that one crime; leads to that crime and no other. IMO, that's what a good vignette does. It's the evidence for a specific happening.

 

Which does not prevent me from having strong and conflicted feelings when looking at that specific glove and thinking about the drama that it evokes. Which can and did, in turn, lead me to think of many and varied things unrelated to the trial. But the job of the attorney was to control and steer the glove into its subordinate position as part of a very specific whole. This is not 'Bloody Glove'; it is always that particular bloody glove at that specific trial for that specific murder.

 

If David's boatyard ropes are presented as 'Ropes' and/or 'Knots' I can fly off into all kinds of connotations, symbolic or otherwise to do with rope and knots that have nothing to do with boatyards. David's ropes are his 'evidence' that will be used to lead me to find his 'boatyard.'

..................

[Julie H]

...........

In the recent Stephen Shore: Selected Works 1973-1981, he or his editors, had fellow photographers pick the photos from his (Shore's) life work that would appear in it and, if they chose, include some text with their choices. Paul Graham's blurb is, I think, expressive of what Phil has been going for in his previous comments to this thread:

 

"When writing about photography, a constant temptation is to weave a theme from the images, to hitch them together like clanking boxcars tethered to some conceit to suit ourselves, to suit the mood of the times, to suit the author's whim. Yet, though there are a thousand novels in these images, let us not do that, for all narratives are vulgar falsehoods in the end. Simplifications designed to tidy up the threads of the world into a cloth we may wear against the dark. The still photograph on its own allows none of that. It is mute. It is multitude. You or I may see completely different worlds contained within. Its strength is precisely this."

 

Given that many of the other photographers who selected for the book did make up stories from and about the pictures they chose, this comment is a little bit abrasive, but I think we can all nod at least partial agreement to it, as I do to Phil's comments to this thread. And yet ... I will respectively disagree that Graham's way is the only way. It is one, lovely, way (as I earlier described it, against steering and control, as simply giving the viewer freedom — no sharp point). His stridency pushes me to say, wait a minute ... and think about why he's not necessarily right.

 

*****************************************************************************

 

Going back to Stephen Shore, do you think his pictures of after-meal restaurant tables are vignettes? For example:

 

Stephen Shore table top

 

I don't think so. They seem to me to take me in, not send me out to any larger happening. They're not evidence of anything beyond themselves. They're about precisely what they are, not about something larger. I think. But I'm not entirely sure ... What do you think?

................

[Julie H]

I wasn't thinking of Vignettes.

 

Fair enough. My mistake. But ... (going a little OT, here):

good documentary is precisely about the taking of a position and viewpoint on the subject being documented.

 

... I still think Frank doesn't compare to Smith . Smith always knew exactly what his chosen "subject being documented" was. Frank did not: he was documenting himself in the process of trying to figure that out.

.....................

[PapaTango]

So then, are we ultimately talking (in the case of objects) our vignettes as being abstractions? If the artist has an 'intent' to convey some meaning or 'tension' then the object has been removed from the 'concrete' whole and then becomes a representational signifier for something else perhaps? Is this not a process of breaking down a whole into a token or tokens (as the example I provided of multiple vignettes from a single structure that provides the general reality)?

[Julie H]

So then, are we ultimately talking (in the case of objects) our vignettes as being abstractions?

 

It's never about objects: it's about process (if only, in the limit case, time). Because it's (at least) about time, and usually much more (something that is done or doing), then to "get" that larger happening, you have to do-the-clues.

 

Two complicated examples:

 

Chris Marker's La Jetée [movie made from stills]

Redheaded Peckerwook by Christian Patterson [click the Book Tease to see some of the images]

 

There is already a happening; the pictures try to bring you to it.

...........................

[Julie H]

Phil, why won't you bring up Crewdson ... so I can disagree with you? o_O

[Julie H]

................

John Gossage's The Pond maybe?

 

Oh! That's a really good one! Gossage so rarely gives a particular subject or core to one of his projects, but that one does. I'll have fun chewing on that all morning.

 

I was so [please, please ... ?] wanting you to ask me about Crewdson because his pictures are, to my omnivorous mind at least, a fascinating case. I guess I will just have to ask myself. "Julie, what about Crewdson?"

 

If you accept, as I do that a vignette has, needs, by definition, a limiting or defining core (a name, a nucleus, a definition, a crime, a process), then Crewdson is the anti-Christ of vignetters. He gives us all the symptoms, all the evidence of a vignette, but he makes very, very, very sure that there is no core. His are pictures of all those times in your life when, like critical events, things seem to reach a max or min and hesitate in the balance, just for that moment where you feel "Ah!" and know some thing has happened to you, or some ongoing event/process is there (a boatyard). Such are the core of vignettes, but such are also the non-core of Crewdson's un-nameable and unnamed "events." (What I resent about his work is how concrete he makes them, how he sterilizes his specimen events ... but you've heard my complaint before: just ignore it for this discussion. Okay [talking to myself because Phil is too smart to do this argument one more time].)

 

I think many photographers go after this kind of moment, but none of them thought to put it under the microscope by forcing it into anti-vignette exclusion as Crewsdon has.

 

I hope this makes sense to somebody ... I've had so much fun thinking about it.

...................

[Julie H]

in his series Sanctuary

 

Do you like that? I think it's really weak. Oddly, though, I don't think it's bad. It looks almost like the work of an excited amateur, first discovering photography. As if Crewdson has to learn how to swim solo again, after so long working with huge support crews.

[Norman 202]

If you accept, as I do that a vignette has, needs

This made me laugh. The poor little vignettes have needs, do they? Is there a hierarchy of needs for the misunderstood vignettes? Do they want somewhere warm and secure, a bit of tlc, a bit of nooky and some grub from time to time? Ah, poor lambs.

[Uhooru]

.........

 

 

If you're suggesting that Frank's work has anything to do with vignettes, I disagree completely. Because of what you write about Frank, Robert Frank's work is not vignette.

 

Think of murder trial, for example the OJ Simpson murder trial. You are the prosecuting attorney, and you have the bloody glove that was found at the scene of the murder. When presenting it in trial, do you use that occasion to launch into eloquent expression of your "own vision and personality and look on" bloody gloves? Do you speak passionately about the many meanings of a bloody glove that might be conveyed by it? I hope not.

 

Rather you, as a bright, focused attorney with a good grasp of the overall structure of the crime that you believe has happened, would control and steer all of your words and means of presentation to show how, where, why that glove gives us that one crime; leads to that crime and no other. IMO, that's what a good vignette does. It's the evidence for a specific happening.

 

Which does not prevent me from having strong and conflicted feelings when looking at that specific glove and thinking about the drama that it evokes. Which can and did, in turn, lead me to think of many and varied things unrelated to the trial. But the job of the attorney was to control and steer the glove into its subordinate position as part of a very specific whole. This is not 'Bloody Glove'; it is always that particular bloody glove at that specific trial for that specific murder.

 

If David's boatyard ropes are presented as 'Ropes' and/or 'Knots' I can fly off into all kinds of connotations, symbolic or otherwise to do with rope and knots that have nothing to do with boatyards. David's ropes are his 'evidence' that will be used to lead me to find his 'boatyard.'

..................

Reading through this, and I have to respond to this. I just can't imagine "The Americans" being anything but a presentation of personally envisioned "vignettes" of America as seen by Frank. Each photo is carefully chosen and sequenced so together they piece a bunch of small slices from which a much larger story and vision arises not a story such as in a novel, but more of a perception of this country. It seems these fit the very definition you all seem to have chosen to apply to the term "vignette". It certainly was Frank's personally applied vision that allowed or caused him to both see, take and present the pictures he did and how he did it. Probably in some ways more than anyone else had done so in photography up to that time.

[Norma Desmond]

For some reason, reading Barry's post made me think of Muybridge (LINK). Each one in his various series is also a vignette.

[Julie H]

I just can't imagine "The Americans" being anything but a presentation of personally envisioned "vignettes" of America as seen by Frank

It's The Americans, not The America.

 

Think of The Americans as something like Wallace Stevens's Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird:

 

[ ... ]

 

V

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

 

[ ... ]

 

.............

[DavidTriplett]

leading me to think of the person/s in the house who live in that wide open space.

Or, more likely, no longer live there. I was intrigued, like you, by the bi-directional application of synecdoche, and how it might apply in photography in the same way it does in literature.

Edited September 12, 2017 by DavidTriplett

[DavidTriplett]

David's ropes are his 'evidence' that will be used to lead me to find his 'boatyard.'

Speaking to Julie's assertion about vignettes being about something very specific: I chose the images, particularly the rope and rigging images, with an eye to their nautical symbology, their "nauticalness", if you will. In this regard Julie is absolutely correct in her position. A successful vignette will convey the intended meaning to the largest audience.

[DavidTriplett]

Going back to Stephen Shore, do you think his pictures of after-meal restaurant tables are vignettes?

I disagree. I think the referenced example is absolutely a vignette, even if I don't find it particularly engaging. It tells the story of a meal in its aftermath. The meal is the larger, even unique, subject of the image, while the detritus of the meal, as captured in the image, is its evidence. While perhaps not the most powerful in terms of message, the image is quite literal, due being so absolutely referential.

[DavidTriplett]

Barry's post made me think of Muybridge

For Muybridge's various studies of animal locomotion, I would say the individual images are decidedly not vignettes, at least per our (mostly) established definition. They are better understood as small parts of a larger whole, but depending upon the synergy of the whole to establish meaning. Perhaps, if we apply Phil's earlier description of vignettes being considered as interrelated parts, then it makes more sense, but my own position mitigates against this. I want a vignette to be symbolic, in and of itself, of a larger message or meaning. Some of Muybridge's individual images meet this standard.

[Norma Desmond]

David, I'm not sure what led you to use the word "vignette" for this topic. Obviously, the technical kind of photographic vignette, where the corners/edges of the image are darkened or highlighted, is the more common usage when applied to photography. Is "vignette" in the way you're using it your own invention (and I do think it's a good, and creative, word to use) or is it more universally used in the way you're using it relative to photography?

 

Here's a definition of "vignette," more geared toward literature:

 

"a short, impressionistic scene that focuses on one moment or character and gives a trenchant impression about a character, an idea, setting, or object."

 

I think Mubridge's work can be seen differently, actually in the opposite way, from how you describe it. I think the importance of Muybridge's work is that the whole was better understood when sliced up into individual moments so that, for example, a horse's gait could be better understood through stills of moments within that gait. Muybridge proved that the horse, in his running stride, has all four hooves off the ground. In this case, I think it's the whole that depends on the individual stills to get its true meaning.

 

You're probably right that each still could not be seen as a vignette which adheres to your definition of being "symbolic, in and of itself, of a larger message or meaning." But I do think each still helps give meaning to the whole, rather than the other way around. The stills don't necessarily symbolize or suggest the whole, but they do seem to give the whole more meaning.

[DavidTriplett]

Sometimes, my intention is to show the small part by itself, not representing the larger object, other times, it is to capture the spirit of a place or a larger body. I understand, viewers' interpretation of such images may not always follow my intention

I think Supriyo has captured an essential component of the vignette as a creative approach. Crewsdon's work, other than Sanctuary, seems to be diametrically opposed to the concept of vignette, in that the images, through their extraordinary detail and development, seem to leave nothing left to wonder about. There are few mysteries, and fewer questions left unsaid. They are less symbolic and more illustrative. Supriyo's image, by way of contrast, is full of finite detail, but the message is simultaneously explicit and malleable. Perhaps the concept I am looking for is that of telling a larger story via finite elements?

 

The following image is very simple and contains only two primary components:the coiled rope, and the wooden planks on which it rests.

Even these very finite and limited elements have a message, one which is embodied in the rope almost alone, but which is fully accessible to the initiated. The rope is of a type and material typical to nautical applications. The detail of the whipping on the rope ends is explicitly, and almost exclusively, a nautical application. The manner in which the ropes are coiled is a an affectation of rope management routinely adopted by sailors, particularly yachtsmen. The pressure-treated and weathered wood would be familiar to any boater as a typical pier surface. Taken together, these suggest very strongly that there is something maritime in nature attached to the unseen end of the rope. That the thing is unknown invites the viewer to imagine what it might be, and, by applying imagination, expand the image to incorporate a nearly limitless set of possibilities and associations, all directed by the connotation of "nautical". Even the scale of what might be imagined is suggested by the apparent size of the rope, since a much larger hawser would be required for a ship of any size. Hence, imputed meaning and an invitation to imagine in a very tightly framed, small scale photograph of finite content. This is what I believe defines a vignette.

[DavidTriplett]

I'm not sure what led you to use the word "vignette" for this topic.

From the Cambridge dictionary: "Vignette: A short piece of writing, music, acting, etc. that clearly expresses the typical characteristics of something or someone." In my experience I have seen the term vignette applied to small-scale treatments of literary or artistic topics, intending that the small example be representative of the larger whole. This is the background for my choice of terminology. See also the link provided by Phil earlier in the thread regarding the vignette as a literary device. While perhaps atypical, I believe my usage is appropriate to a discussion of photography, particularly in regards photography as a representational art.

[Norma Desmond]

David, I was asking if it was generally used for a detail photograph that symbolizes a larger whole. That's all. Not questioning the appropriateness of your usage of it, which makes sense. Just asking if you adapted the term or you'd heard it applied to this kind of photograph more regularly. Thanks for the answer.

[Norma Desmond]

By the way, David, the reason I had supplied a definition of vignette, which is pretty similar to the one you just supplied, was not to question your using the term relative to photography and in the way you're talking about it, but was to highlight the importance of the moment in giving an impression of the bigger idea, which I think helps make the point I wanted to make about Muybridge.