The Vignette as an Expressive Tool

[DavidTriplett]

Just asking if you adapted the term or you'd heard it applied to this kind of photograph more regularly.

It has been so long in my vocabulary that I can't tell you where or when I first saw it used. We also use it in architecture, particularly in school, to describe a drawing or model of a small part intended to represent a much larger construct, so perhaps that is where it entered my lexicon. It's a fair question. I wish there was a more concrete answer. Like most issues in art, it is vague and subject to interpretation. ;)

[Supriyo]

David,

Perhaps this image could be seen as being made up of finite elements that together tells a story (or many stories, left to the viewer). The door bell suggests that its a private space, while the hole may invite voyeur from the viewer. To me, they appear contradictory when seen together and could lead to a sense of mystery and curiosity.

 

[DavidTriplett]

Supriyo, I like the tension, or perhaps even antipathy, represented by the knothole versus the doorbell. Do I look before I push the button? After? While pressing? Or, not at all? Do I look even if I don't intent to knock or buzz? Which, if any is the "right" thing to do? Intriguing, and even driving towards introspection, encouraging the viewer to ask him/herself these questions.

[Julie H]

That is definitely a side-wise eye looking at me in the middle of Supriyo's picture. It's staring right at me. Supriyo, is that you?

[Supriyo]

That is definitely a side-wise eye looking at me in the middle of Supriyo's picture. It's staring right at me. Supriyo, is that you?

 

Good, voyeur staring at another voyeur! See, you imagined something I didn't think of. Thats your truth, which you take away from the photo. You are welcome to do that.

[Supriyo]

Supriyo, I like the tension, or perhaps even antipathy, represented by the knothole versus the doorbell. Do I look before I push the button? After? While pressing? Or, not at all? Do I look even if I don't intent to knock or buzz? Which, if any is the "right" thing to do? Intriguing, and even driving towards introspection, encouraging the viewer to ask him/herself these questions.

 

David, those are indeed some of the questions raised by the photo. One may even look the other way while pressing the door bell, in case the inhabitants think of him/her as sneaking. This was shot in one of the historic missions in LA. The door belongs to a ruin (probably the hole had a handle or knob in it at some point).

[Julie H]

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.

 

I disagree. I think the Muybridge motion sequences are vignettes. But it took me a while to decide that. Because the "whole thing" (the horse, the man) is in the picture, it seems like it's not a vignette. But if you think of the "whole thing" not as the moving horse or man but as "the motion of running" then the "whole thing" is obviously not in the picture. But this still doesn't get to vignette because "the motion of running" is generic. If, as I believe, a vignette needs a core and to be specific, not generic, then this doesn't do it. Notice also that a generic core or "name" for the whole that's being pieced takes us away from a very specific to a generic, non-specific. I think a vignette does the opposite, it takes us to a very specific, personal happening.

 

What is specific, personal and a vignette in Muybridge's sequences is my perception. I think that is his vignette "core." He makes me aware, with each frozen frame, of my whole liquid perception. I feel it. If you've ever watched one of his sequences put into motion picture form (I highly recommend the documentary film, Eadward Muybridge: Zoopraxographer (2016) ) they never turn into movies. They are always, as you watch them, about you watching them, or the act, the feel of watching. You notice yourself in the act, more than you notice the horse or man doing whatever it's doing. To me, this is prime vignette: I am getting a very rich, immediate, personal sensation of something larger from these little shards of vision.

 

We also use it in architecture, particularly in school, to describe a drawing or model of a small part intended to represent a much larger construct

 

Those drawings or models, on the other hand, strike me as not being very personal. You've got some 'splainin' to do, David. I don't think Ikea assembly diagrams qualify as vignettes. Maybe you mean those little architectural sketches with a tree and a few people roughed in to take it from the generic to the specific? To give it air?

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

[PapaTango]

Until David makes his appearance and debates your thesis forthwith and hereto-in (and/or in the case of the final quote, pummels architectural sensibilities into you with a roll of drafting vellum) I will take a two can Java Monster fueled stab at this. :cool:

I disagree. I think the Muybridge motion sequences are vignettes. But it took me a while to decide that. Because the "whole thing" (the horse, the man) is in the picture, it seems like it's not a vignette. But if you think of the "whole thing" not as the moving horse or man but as "the motion of running" then the "whole thing" is obviously not in the picture. But this still doesn't get to vignette because "the motion of running" is generic. If, as I believe, a vignette needs a core and to be specific, not generic, then this doesn't do it. Notice also that a generic core or "name" for the whole that's being pieced takes us away from a very specific to a generic, non-specific. I think a vignette does the opposite, it takes us to a very specific, personal happening.

 

Yes, no, and certainly. o_O I will grant that in my conceptualization of EM's work his "71 Feet in Circumference", or "Captain Jack's Cave" is more the 'defined' take we have been dealing philosophically with as vignette--as they meet the criteria of an abstraction of the gestalt whole. At face value, his motion studies are not really 'in motion' but are as EM stated "Only photography has been able to divide human lifeinto a series of moments, each of them has the value of a complete existence." The intent was to compartmentalize reality into a series of individual vignettes. I think that you make an important distinction in separating the gestalt into a series of 'happenings'. In this we identify with certain elements above others--as they portray a moment that is charged, contains tension, and evokes a strong response and identification. Indeed, interpretation of an emotive vignette is a very personal happening.

 

What is specific, personal and a vignette in Muybridge's sequences is my perception. I think that is his vignette "core." He makes me aware, with each frozen frame, of my whole liquid perception. I feel it. If you've ever watched one of his sequences put into motion picture form (I highly recommend the documentary film, Eadward Muybridge: Zoopraxographer (2016) ) they never turn into movies. They are always, as you watch them, about you watching them, or the act, the feel of watching. You notice yourself in the act, more than you notice the horse or man doing whatever it's doing. To me, this is prime vignette: I am getting a very rich, immediate, personal sensation of something larger from these little shards of vision.

 

Although EM turned the tables with zoopraxidoohicky, it was never his intent for the motion studies to be reanimated--but rather to exist as individual representations of certain frames of reality--a series of 'decisive moments.' Elliott Erwitt completely and eloquently sums up your latter sentence in this quote, "To me, photography is an art of observation. It's about finding something interesting in an ordinary place....I've found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them." There I think we have a very succinct explanation of the process and power of the vignette--whether it is a dynamic entity, or a static object. I also believe that there are different rules and concerns for each--and that is why I disagree over one of your earlier statements that "it is not about objects." For EM's stop motion it is not. For my hinge or hydrant is certainly is, at least IMHO...

 

Those drawings or models, on the other hand, strike me as not being very personal. You've got some 'splainin' to do, David. I don't think Ikea assembly diagrams qualify as vignettes. Maybe you mean those little architectural sketches with a tree and a few people roughed in to take it from the generic to the specific? To give it air? ...........

 

Having spent many years in the academic atelier of a college of design--surrounded by insanely obsessed architectural faculty and earnest, consumed graduate program architects pursuing the 'one visionary truth and ideal" I can tell you without any reservation that you are dead wrong here. Those little sketches and models have a life of their own, and indeed breathes contest against the classicist 'form follows function' paradigm. Once I thought to try to minimize and debate a little model with a Cuban student whilst a group of us in faculty and students were having a late night drinking dialog. He called it a 'reflection structure' and deemed to place it deep into Kentucky's Red River Canyon. I told him that's fine. It looks like an outhouse and people are going to crap in it. This quickly escalated into a fistfight, which later landed me in President Lee Todd's office and a whole lot of explaining and apologizing. Those little sketches and models are indeed charged totems... :eek:

Edited September 13, 2017 by PapaTango

[Julie H]

dead wrong here.

 

They are vignettes? (I love your stories, so please cover my post in your condiment of choice to make it tasty and enjoyable so that you will eagerly return to take more verbal to-and-fro-ery).

 

Because what you describe does sound very useful and meaningful and all-kinds-of-thing-ful but not very vignette-ful.

 

There is showing from the inside, where you know exactly what it is that you are showing via the vignette; and there is exploring, pointing at from the outside, where you are trying to figure out what it is from the outside. That is not vignette. Think of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (thinking of PapaTango thinking of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass makes me laugh). There's something in there somewhere, and it's very, very good, but we couldn't for the life of ourselves (nor could he) say exactly what it is. It's sure not vignette. It is much like a lot of photography, "this!" "this?" "this ... " "no, this!"

 

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

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

[PapaTango]

"There was a child went forth every day,

And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder or pity of love or dread, that object he became,

And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day....or for many years or stretching cycles of years."

 

Gently teased from my 1860 Thayer & Eldridge edition--mystically encased in green and gold--living and speaking things of life and wonder and sadness and laughter. Laugh with me sister, for our time is short--bring your finest and I shall bring mine.

 

But you have created a disruption in the weft of my daily fabric. Now I am left to ponder again just what Walt is doing with his left hand in this evocative print;

 

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Walt_Whitman,_steel_engraving,_July_1854.jpg

 

Shades of Capote and Halma, vignettes of other voices, in other rooms. TILT. The silver orb careens to its beginnings--only to rocket forward once again.

 

This is all too much. I am compelled to forgo meaningful work this morning to take up Mr. Master's plaintive cast (1916 Macmillan Second Edition); wandering the vignetted panels of his Spoon River and the childhood banks of my own time on Spoon River. Where are Ella, Kate, Mag, Lizzie and Edith? On the hill, where I go to commune with them now...

 

P.S. Don't get too large, that's bad for your health and you will not be able to fit into a vignette.

 

[DavidTriplett]

I'll have to be brief, as the day job is cascading in around my ears, but... In my school days we routinely received assignments to create a construct that would be representational of a design principle or a structural concept. These would include such issues as "compression", "tension", "flexibility", "elasticity", "centrality", "linearity", "verticality", "torsion", etc., ad nauseum. As students we would spend long hours, late nights, and weekends, trying to figure out how to encapsulate the idea we had been assigned in an object we could afford to make and transport to the studio for a jury, all within the too-short time available before the next weekly assignment would come. I wish I had photos of some of those projects, but those records are long gone now. (I think I burned them along with a lot of other stuff following graduation. It was an emancipating step.) Like PT said, as students we invested an enormous amount of energy, intellect, time, emotion, and blood, sweat, and tears in the process of bringing concepts to life in material form. Because these projects represented and encapsulated "ideas", I would certainly call them vignettes, though of a slightly different flavor. They certainly were very personal, and directed towards a very specific concept. We also did many, many projects where we would take a building we had designed and construct a small detail component as illustrative of the themes embodied in the building design. This was necessary because we could not, obviously, ever build the whole thing. The kicker was to, first, create a building design that truly embodied the ideas and principles we said it did (There are few more traumatic yet routine abuses of the ego than an architectural jury.), and 2, then extract and construct a detail from that design that successfully illustrates those concepts. This is, in my view, the essence of vignette as I have presented it for discussion here.

 

There is showing from the inside, where you know exactly what it is that you are showing via the vignette;

I proffer that these examples are exactly vignettes, as they respond in whole and in part to Julie's requirement that they self-consciously "show from the inside", with specific purpose and intent. Woe betide the architecture student who comes to a jury with any uncertainty about what s/he has wrought, what it means, and why...

 

As translated to photography, the same principles apply. A successful vignette is meaningful in and of itself, in that it intentionally and knowingly leads the viewer to larger and more complete ideas than only that which is contained within the image. The image is symbolic of the greater whole, even if that whole is open to a certain degree of interpretation, as noted in my discussion of the coiled ropes, above.

[Julie H]

I proffer that these examples are exactly vignettes, as they respond in whole and in part to Julie's requirement that they self-consciously "show from the inside", with specific purpose and intent. Woe betide the architecture student who comes to a jury with any uncertainty about what s/he has wrought, what it means, and why...

 

As translated to photography, the same principles apply.

 

You've been an architect for too long. I mean that in the best possible sense — of inhabiting your field to the point of forgetting the paper design is not real. You've got the language so ingrained, you forget that it is mere lines on paper that you present: to you it is immediately a structure. "What s/he has wrought" is something pointed at by those lines, but it is not "there." In a photograph, it is there and the sinews and ligaments that make it belong to a single core are what the vignette is founded upon.

 

"A poem [or an architectural design] does not come into existence by accident. The words of a poem ... come out of a head, not out of a hat." [Wimsatt] No such proposition applied to photographs, which more or less came out of a box. —

Robin Kelsey

 

[PapaTango, we are sympatico on the ... um ... can we all it a mind? ... that roams. Many, many are the times I have set out to find a book (I can never find the book) and, several hours later, resurfaced having been led from one (other) book to another (other) book and lost all memory of whatever it was that I set out to find (which invariably turns up when I'm looking for a book other than it).]

[DavidTriplett]

"What s/he has wrought" is something pointed at by those lines, but it is not "there."

Julie, now you have definitely taken the role of wisenheimer. A photograph is, by definition, an abstract, visual representation of something else, just as a drawing, painting, a model, or any other representational work is not actually the thing being represented. See Magritte's This is not a Pipe. There is a duality in any representational work, in that the meaning of the work is founded in the thing or idea being represented, but the work itself is an object as well. So, my photograph of the ropes is not rope, but represents rope, and through the rope, a whole league of nautical possibilities. The act of creative seeing and presentation belies Kelsey's assertions. If not, then photography is not and can never be art.

[PapaTango]

David, a eulogy for the 120 hours sketching, cutting, glueing, revising, form through precise physical layers--all to be subsumed in a single, cutting jury; then to suffer the final indignity of demise as a discarded totem too large and now too inconsequential to preserve. To Dempsey Dumpster world with ye....

 

[Julie H]

120 hours sketching, cutting, glueing, revising, form through precise physical layers

That. Is. Gorgeous!!!

 

Julie, now you have definitely taken the role of wisenheimer.

 

LOL. We're losing him, doc! Flatline! Clear! Applying the paddles. WHUMP

 

Come back, David! [that'll heimer his wisen]

 

But is Magritte's pipe a vignette? You will not divert me by offering so many tempting tidbits on which to diverge. Vignette. Vignette. Vignette.

 

 

A photograph is, by definition, an abstract, visual representation of something else, just as a drawing, painting, a model, or any other representational work is not actually the thing being represented. See Magritte's This is not a Pipe. There is a duality in any representational work, in that the meaning of the work is founded in the thing or idea being represented, but the work itself is an object as well. So, my photograph of the ropes is not rope, but represents rope, and through the rope, a whole league of nautical possibilities.

 

Your description now fits all photography. We are all wisenheimers! Wait. We already knew that.

[DavidTriplett]

of inhabiting your field to the point of forgetting the paper design is not real.

On a personal note (for me): Whether found only on paper, or in a computer, or constructed, my ideas are as real as anything else of human creation. The only difference is in how those ideas are wrought in the physical world. I take umbrage with your backhanded compliment. I know exactly what is real, physical, material, and what is intellectual, and how the two are intrinsically connected and dependent one upon the other. A drawing is no more simply lines upon paper than a photograph is simply pixels on a screen or emulsion on paper. The representational content, to the degree such exists, makes both drawings and photographs more than simply the materials of which they are comprised. Neither would exist without what AA called "the 12 inches behind the camera".

Your description now fits all photography.

All photography is representational. What it represents and the degree to which it does so successfully differentiates. Now, back to work for me. I'll be back later.

[Julie H]

I shall withhold all future compliments. It was *not* backhanded.

[PapaTango]

Shades again and shadows....

"Blue, blue windows behind the stars,

Yellow moon on the rise,

Big birds flying across the sky,

Throwing shadows on our eyes."

 

Sing it, Neil. The pungent aroma of Dunhill "Royal Yacht" wafts from Magrittes pipe. A treachery of images--real or imagined--personal or proletarian.

I am a vignette. Or am I a caricature?

 

The blue smoke swirls, coalescing into Gandalf-like ships of mist. Are we wizards--or magicians of place and light?

 

That is a pipe.

 

The reality is sullied by the coarse intrusion of PhotoShop. Must vignettes manifest authenticity? Only my hairdresser knows for sure.

 

Vignette, artistic veritas, or Vicoden? Make mine 10mg of dreams.

 

Edited September 13, 2017 by PapaTango

[DavidTriplett]

PT, are you sure that's Royal Yacht in your pipe?

[Julie H]

[checking very carefully to see if the eyeglassed eye in PapaTango's is the same eye as the spectacled eye in the center of Supriyo's ... and they're both looking at me ... ]

 

 

... adding after careful study: is it PapaTango on the library with a pipe [do you remember Clue?]

 

... or is it (trying unsuccessfully to squeeze PT into Sherlock Holmes's plaid) ... Watson?

Edited September 13, 2017 by Julie H

[Norma Desmond]

[DavidTriplett]

and they're both looking at me ...

We're all looking at you, Julie. You are under constant surveillance. Big Brother (from behind your flat-panel TV), the all-seeing eye of Mordor, and the mouse in the hole in the kitchen baseboard are all looking at you and noting every move... :rolleyes:

[PapaTango]

We're all looking at you, Julie. You are under constant surveillance. Big Brother (from behind your flat-panel TV), the all-seeing eye of Mordor, and the mouse in the hole in the kitchen baseboard are all looking at you and noting every move... :rolleyes:

 

David, would you please PM me the web address for the video feed?

[Supriyo]

David, would you please PM me the web address for the video feed?

 

Papa, thats showing unnatural interest in a woman's private life! What's there to see anyway, except Julie banging her head over our comments, 24/7. :p

[Julie H]

David, would you please PM me the web address for the video feed?

Papa, thats showing unnatural interest in a woman's private life! What's there to see anyway, except Julie banging her head over our comments, 24/7. :p

All right, this has gone far enough.

 

I am going to have to ask both of you gentlemen to go to this thread:

 

Poll jumper

 

.. and place your face very close to option #3 in the poll at the top. Remain there while I check to see if the eye disappears from the eye in the photos in this thread. If it does NOT, then you are free to go. If it does, however, I stand VINDICATED. We have ways of finding you out when you think I don't know that those eyes are up to all kinds of peepery.