My girl Maggie 1

OK, so here is the premise. I connected the dog lead to the camera and

took Maggie for a walk in the woods. Every time Maggie yanked on the

lead I took this to be her way of telling me to press the shutter.

This was her first time out with a camera and I think it's not half

bad for a first try at self portraiture. What do you think? As always

thanks for your time and comments.

I should have read Maggie 1 before commenting on Maggie 2. I didn't realize you had a dog with such natural talents and razor-sharp photographic instincts. You make a good team, as evidenced by this effective shot.

And this must be one of the most original piece i have seen in a few days here. Even when you shoot these for motion study side, this one draws my attention because that simple element which you present. Looks like delegate nature painting, good capture. Rgs Tero.

Thanks Guys. Please be warned that what proceeds is long winded and quite nonsensical. Do not feel obligated to read this just because you were kind enough to originally drop by and leave a comment.

 

These images sprang from a number of things I have been giving consideration to of late and were sparked by some exchanges here at photo. net last week. I had been trying to give some helpful advice on things to consider before heading out with the camera to shoot a subject. As was quite rightly pointed out to me at the time, I let much more of my personal bias drift into what was supposed to be advice, rather than direction, than I may have initially realized. During the course of these exchanges a comment was made which kept ringing in my ears afterward. I will quote an excerpt here and hope that David Seltzer whose words these are is OK with me doing this:

 

" and sometimes just because it felt like the thing to do, without being any part of any previous conscious thought or planning. "

 

 

The context for this quote was ,reasons to take photographs. This got me to thinking that, maybe thinking itself is something worth trying to subjugate or abdicate or delegate ?

 

Now, at the same time John Mac and I ( of course you both know John's wonderful work ) have been hammering out some concepts and attempting some definitions. In the process John has turned me onto some works that I am just taking tentative first steps in understanding. Umberto Bocioni's "Plastic Dynamism" as an anti-rational, anti-traditional avant-garde as well as Anton Giuilio Bragaglia's " Futurist Photodynamism ". The latter being particularly intriguingly to me at the moment.

 

 

" We are not interested in the precise reconstruction of movement, which has already been broken up and analysed. We are involved only in the area of movement which produces sensation, the memory of which still palpitates in our awareness. "

 

" both photography and Photodynamism possess their own singular qualities, clearly divided, and are very different in their importance, their usefulness and their aims. "

 

 

Both above quotes: Anton Giulio Bragaglia

1st July 1913

 

 

Another important influence on this as yet fully formed approach of mine, is the work of the contemporary musical genius, professor and musician Anthony Braxton. I recently attended a lecture he gave on Tri-Centric modeling in relation to his Extended Ghost Trance compositions. This experience was an epiphany from which I am still gleaning new insights, not only as it relates to Anthony's body of work but to the other arts and life itself. Sitting in the the art center at the University of Guelph listening to Anthony I was struck by how Braxton's radical re-thinking of musical notation and composition could be applied to my own work. Anthony's work references amongst many other notions , John Cage's concept of the " simultaneity of unrelated intentions " . One of the key goals of Tri-centric composition is to introduce enough order into large scale improv music to avoid the large scale random blow-fests for which Peter Brotzmann's Tentet are famous. In an environment with a small number of marginally confining rules it becomes possible to have a large ensemble improvising together as a cohesive unit drawing from a larger body of work, in this case Braxton's nearly 400 previous compositions, in a way that makes musical as well as structural sense, yet remains improvised and in the broader sense unscored. As demonstrated by Braxton's 10 CD box set from The Iridium Club in NYC from 2006, the same point of departure can be used 10 times to create 10 similar yet completely unique compositions, each one drawing from the same broad set of rules but allowing chance and personal decisions of the individuals involved to drive the direction of the composition. The end product is a type of music which has not been witnessed before. The resulting sound can fall somewhere between Edgar Varese and Karl Stockhausen and the most lyrical jazz you could conceive.

I also factor in the " Remove The Need " work of Jim O'Rourke whereby he plays the guitar without actually touching the instrument.

 

Ok, so back to Maggie's budding career as a photographer. What if I impose some constraints such as only pressing the cable release when Maggie gives certain signals? For these experiments I chose two, the first being if she tugged on the lead the second being if she did the opposite and came to a stop. I get to determine the shutter speed and focal length, the camera gets to determine the f. stop. The lead is loosely wrapped around the lens barrel so Maggie gets to determine where the camera is pointed. And off we go for a walk in the woods. Of course a lot of shots end up being of Maggie's butt ( which is fine by her ) and my shoes. Somewhere along the line, a few of those random events within the confines I had set up, did, in my opinion, created some interesting compositions. Now to play fair and also because Maggie sucks at Photo Shop I did very little in the way of cropping and only the usual needed level adjustments. Any thought on all this nonsense would be gratefully appreciated.

 

 

I am reminded of a line from a Leonard Cohen poem which I will have to paraphrase as I no longer have the book. His girlfriend tells him she dreamt last night that they were making love and he responds " at last the soul is taking up some of the heavy work "

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

wonderful image but if this was mine to play with I'd rotate it 90cw and crop 3/8" top and left -- really like the title

I'll give that a try and see how it looks, This is how it came out of the camera with no crop. The vantage point is looking straight down on Maggie's back from above but there is so little in the way of reference points I think you could spin it any way and have it work out. I kind of liked it this way because the leaf was pointing down and the twig was pointing up. Only one way to find out....

Maggie has quite the talent at finding the birdie : )

Sorry, I guess I'm the one who needs to let go :\

You will never have to apologise to me for having an opinion and sharing it. I am always grateful to be able to both share ideas with you and kid around. I do realise that the above load of verbal diarrhoea could easily leave you thinking I'd gone off my nut and decided to suffocate myself with seriousness. Not gonna happen my friend.

verbal diarrhoea was all mine -- I'm still laughing at myself and so tempted to run back over this and delete my comments. What you're having fun with in the Maggie experiment is very conceptual. Namely, to set conditions to the point where the result can't be previsualized and the concept is more important then the artifact. If you want some background on Conceptualism and Photography you might find this article interesting:

The photographic idea: reconsidering conceptual photography

Afterimage, March-April, 1999 by Lucy Soutter

source: findarticles.com

Hi Gordon,,,Have been looking at the picture and wonder,,and read your text. Let me start saying woow for THAT. Actually it complies with the rules for a Casual Shot,,no or less influence on the object (maybe on the subject),,,The remaining qustion: Is the world present,,because of us,,antrophisic one ?,,or

do we first see it, when we let it recognizes "it-self" this way. In the very end you have decided to let us see the result of this "Latent-hidden-world",,

and what do i see,,,no response with K. Stockhausen 12-tone formalism,,rather

an abstract neo-romantic melody, corresponding to something like Arvo Part

or Nicolas Medtner,,now we talk music.

 

I find this picture both beautiful and innovative - regardless of how it has been "born", but in my point of view i still think the world "is"..regardless

our recognition/consciousness or not,,few dare to see even the tip of the

iceberg,,,as well as we have some kind of BIOS inside, telling us what to think

about the illusion,,,, but the cognitive common sence indicate that we will never recognize the end of this,,the seven veils. re niels

 

"to set conditions to the point where the result can't be previsualized and the concept is more important then the artifact. "

 

Yes John, this is precisely where I am headed with all of this, for the moment at any rate. That was the point of all the yattering above about Cage, Stockhausen, Braxton etc. I can find so many examples of conceptual art in the world of music. Braxtons lecture truly did blow me away. His recent music is the result of nearly 50 years of intense artistic experimentation. Up until maybe a decade ago he devised more and more complex ways of scoring music. At one point he wrote a piece for 100 tubas to be played on a football field with the players marching around the audience. Then he decided to completely abandoned this approach, went off and studied native American music and then trance music in general. From this sprang his Ghost Trance work. In the last few years he has gone back to large scale improv. ensemble work. By applying what he learned from the ghost trances pieces he has set up a simple set of rules, a model as launching point.I'm not a musician, so the finer points of his model are lost on me but I have seen several of these performances and each time my jaw was on the floor. You take a set of rules for the players, a couple of bars of notated material, permission for the musicians to reference his entire body of work when and how they see fit and a predetermined time span of one hour. He actually comes out with this huge hour glass and turns it over and the piece begins. Each time you end up with a different composition but each one is clearly connected to the others in sound and structure because of the model used. Once again you have the concept generating the artifact.

 

My Maggie experiment is an attempt at applying some of these musical references to my photography. The more I think about this the more models spring to mind. The whole chaos and order realm intrigues me. My experiments with taping a vibrator to my lens barrel ( see " Dried flowers gathered from the yard and placed in a glass " in my motion studies folder ) was an attempt to add a controlled motion to a random motion and see how they influence one another.

I am hoping to refine some of these experiments and then try to combine them, perhaps randomly. Your previous reference to Miro putting coloured paper in a drawer and repeatedly opening and closing the drawer comes to mind. I could connect a vibrator to my lens, go out and do some drive-by shooting and let Maggie drive the car :)

 

 

As always John thanks for the above link I will give it a look over.

 

Regards Gord

 

BTW I'll be keeping an eye out for those parrot cam shots.

Outside of some internet banter you and I are strangers, which makes any generalizations rash. That being said, I am incline towards the impression that one of the big differences between you and I is that you have much more understanding of, and education as regard art in general than I. For me, sometimes I end up doing some thing simply because for no particular reason I wake up one day and think it might be interesting. It is only after the fact, often by quite some time, that it is pointed out to me that what I did or am doing, fits into some specific school of thought. When this happens I become momentarily amused, however in short order I go back to day dreaming and messing about on my own again.I alway am thankful for your pointers and sign posts they are like letters from the other side.

Thanks for offering your thoughts I always enjoy hearing from you. I have noticed your reference to "casual shots" before and think I understand but I would love a more in depth explanation if you should ever feel inclined.

 

As regards our human view of the universe I agree that it is a subjective view. Maggie, as and example, only sees her photos in B&W, that of course does not mean that colour does not exist for you and I, but it does mean that colour does not exist in Maggie's world. Our attempts to unravel the universe have so far only made us more aware of its complexity. On the sub-atomic end of the spectrum we continue to find smaller and stranger particles and on the astrophysical end of the spectrum the universe is still defined as infinite. We have yet to find either end of the ruler so it is no surprise that we still do not know where we fit into the scale of things. I do know that it is arrogance and pure folly to think that the universe begins and ends with our five senses. String theory, which I am still less than convinced about, suggests the possibility of more than a dozen dimensions.

 

My musical reference was about the structure of the mentioned composers works, more the issue of how they were composed and not a reference to them evoking a sense of the image that is the end result. I do agree that this image speaks more to Arvo Part than any of the composers I mentioned. I often listen to Arvo Part's Te Deum when I am working on images on the computer.

 

A bit off topic but speaking of the 7 veils have you ever read Tom Robbin's novel " Skinny Legs and All" ? In his take on this, the order of the veils is reversed, with the one covering the face being removed last.

Hey Gordon, read over my comments and decided to delete most of them. See you in a few weeks. Regards, John

All the best. See you then.

 

Gord

Talk about being there at the right place in the exact moment; and of course knowing what to do with all of it ;) Remarkable!