charleswood

<p><em>"no complete portrayal of the essence of a subject may be possible by the limited means of a photograph"</em><br> <em> </em><br> <em><br /></em>So if we generally agree that a living subject's diverse facets don't allow themselves to be distilled into a single essence, do we generally agree that photography is adept at portraying the essence of a facet and/or a set of thematically related fractals?</p> <p>Fred offered a photo (<a href="/philosophy-of-photography-forum/00cfIX?start=50">http://www.photo.net/philosophy-of-photography-forum/00cfIX?start=50</a>) from Line Martel as capturing enough of the essentials of childhood, parenthood, etc., a distillation while being a blend too. An example of mine is a coyote father with it's prodigal son. I think with Line's, mine, there is in those presentations something to relate to, something to empathize with and for my composition it was an accident because the action was taking place too far away for the eye to distinguish the details. If mine is an empathetic presentation it was an accident. Line's is intentional, where the empathy we feel is also Line's empathy toward his subjects. On the other end of the empathy spectrum, from my point of view, are Alan's, Brad's street shots, where if there is something about the subject's to empathize with in the subjects I fail to see it. For some unknown reason, the empathy of the photographer isn't making it into the work at least from my point of view. That lack of response in me may be because of my own limited experience of city life where I don't have within me access to whatever empathetic Avedon like cues that may be present? Instead I just see a collection of unredeemed lost or damaged souls portrayed. There may be more there but I fail to see it.</p><div></div>

<p>Thanks Julie for 'Little Girl with Dead Leaves', love it.</p>

<p>I suppose as to guessing unguided by prior knowledge of a subject: sure, guessing can be an educated guess, a guess educated by prior knowledge; or the guess can be a guess uneducated by prior knowledge. But I think also that the photographers do at times close that distance between guess and reality by providing other educating information in a photograph.</p>

<p>Another thought has to do with whose narrative goes into making the photograph? For example, my portfolio here on P.N: how much is it a narrative about some guy, me, who wanders around taking coyote pictures versus a narrative about coyotes, less a narrative of me and more of coyote essence? Another way to say it is to ask of myself: whose essence is portrayed in my pictures? My own predominately = boring, or am I enough out of my own space that I can incorporate some other essentialnesses?</p>

<p>Right, I wouldn't recognize Gerald as the same person in the two photos that you took. And that isn't an issue only with the camera. Note that with my eye as the recordist I don't necessarily recognize a live person from their profile, and I think a lot must goes on unconsciously in the mind's workings to allow recognition of the person before our eyes. For me Fred's use of the term 'range' works better than the word average.<br /> <br /> So if I wanted to know what my great grandmother looked like and my mother showed me a photograph that she thought bore a good resemblance to her: then I would be satisfied that the photo captured the essence of my grandmother's physical looks and that from the photo I could know something about what she looked like. Do I look like her?, for example, might make me want to know what she looked like. Certainly a photograph doesn't have to be faithful to its subject's looks. Essence in a strictly 'physical looks' context really only means resemblance to something where the something <em>can</em> be called their essential looks because by the definition at hand, there has to be something in an essence without which identity is lost to the point where a photo looks too much like someone else to be identifying.</p> <p>I think that Brad is onto something when he writes of essence generally "I think some are confusing this with the ability of photos of unknown people having power and the ability to release (some kind of) narrative." It might be our faculty for empathy that draws us into such a narrative and creates for us a sense of essence (recognition??) as the term is widely used.</p> <p> </p>

<p>Another way to approach the idea of essence as captured in a photograph is a little harder to convey in words. Let's say that there are of domestic dogs about 400 recognized breeds give or take a few. Yet we can recognize all of those breeds as a variety of dog despite the huge differences. So you can say ah ha, essential dog, essence. And dogs themselves I haven't seen get confused by size and form, hair style, etc. Therefore:</p> <p>There are many times when photography has asked its viewer to recognize our essential humanity. That recognition can really pop for the viewer at times and yet I can't think of any specific examples to link to.</p> <p>So I think the essence is used informally and like Steve says, it's also thought of as an energy. And all I meant by essence of likeness is that pop of recognition of a face in a photograph, where something as incomplex as looks can be arranged in a recognizable form that is those looks' essence. But that's entirely physical. As to character, personality, just to be clear I'm agreeing with Fred, Arthur, et al that, as I would say it, you can't get a representation of essence because essence is not only complex, it also contains unknowns. It's usually symbol that represents an unknown, signage is just a pointer to the known. Snake as symbol is meant to convey something unknowable about 'woman', part of our human mystery, part of the mystery of life although in, ahem, Western traditions snake has a tendency to be interpreted as mere signage which is kind of crass.</p>

<p>Arthur: "(the serpent tells us nothing about Natasha K, but only emphasizes her sinuous and beautiful form;..."</p> <p>The serpent suggests lots more since the snake is "one of the oldest and most widespread mythological symbols." (Wikipedia). Photographic reference is to Nastassja Kinski and the Serpent (Richard Avedon) <a href="http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/photographs/richard-avedon-nastassja-kinski-and-the-serpent-5123241-details.aspx">http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/photographs/richard-avedon-nastassja-kinski-and-the-serpent-5123241-details.aspx</a> . The serpent in that photograph then is a major 'clue' left by the photographer that encourages the viewer to go beyond a particular woman's sinuous and beautiful form to consider <em>woman</em>. The photograph speaks these words "Behold: Woman." But it only asks us to behold, beyond appearance, one aspect of woman. So I don't think we can say that Avedon in that photograph captured the essence of woman by juxtaposing to the form of a woman an allusion to whatever serpents are supposed to symbolize, or the myths told about women and snakes, etc. It is questionably one aspect of woman, that aspect given a traditional voice, without our really knowing what that aspect is all about anyway. To use Arthur's word, it's a fractal and I add it is an ambiguous fractal at best.</p> <p> </p>

<p>Well, let's say a portrait of a person is good if it's a good likeness of the person. If it looks like the person then the photograph well captures the essence of their likeness. If you can tell it's them in the photo then the photo successfully captures the essence of their likeness. A good likeness is a distillation of an average look from varied looks where in the result you can recognize the person from their photo, the essence of their likeness. So by the definition Fred offered the essence of the subject's likeness is "<em>what it fundamentally is, and which it has by necessity, and without which it loses its" </em>identifiability; you've either captured that or you haven't<em>.</em></p> <p>But what is a person like? I can't tell what a person is like from a photograph, but there are clues in a good photograph that suggest what a person is like, suggests the kind of personality they have. I don't think it's possible to photograph an essence of personality because personality is too complex to distill into an essence.</p>

<p>Fred: "The prize was actually capturing the essence of the mask on film."</p> <p>It's incongruous that Karsh would describe a standard to which for the most part Karsh didn't work; in passing I wonder if Karsh was a superficial thinker, e.g., the standard met with a candid of a great person eating a sandwich, 'captured' as just a regular guy.</p> <p>Are there ready examples from others who clearly worked to that standard as most conceive it?</p> <p>(To C Watson - I think more than a few in the USA after WWII appreciated Churchill in wartime and nevertheless didn't want him to be in politics after the war.)</p>

<p>Alan I think Karsch captured those traits you enumerate. Yet can we say those traits were not generally known of him at the time? Probably not. So what I'm wondering about is if Karsch met his own standard of portraiture in the Churchill portrait, and I'm trying to evaluate Karsch according to one of his own standards. That particular standard would hold him to the task of revealing something in the subject that we the viewers didn't already know about the person.</p> <p>Anders suggests that the smiling Churchill photograph better met that standard, the standard of lifting the mask a bit. I think that though to me the smiling one is not as powerful or memorable a photograph: I agree with Anders that it does show something that, speaking for myself, I wouldn't have expected in a portrait of this particular 'great' man.</p> <p>With Mandela it's generally what I would have expected. Yet even so it is a very warm and relaxed Mandela. To me it has an intimate feel to it. Would that sense of intimacy in the Mandela shot be an example of a lifting of the mask?</p> <p>Part of the reason I'm brooding over this point is that I like that standard, yet how do we practically realize it in our own work?</p> <p>And in which particular photos did Karsch meet that standard himself? With the Jung as subject, it's an environmental portrait and to me meets the standard. In an earlier of these weekly discussions many thought the Pablo Casals photograph, also an environmental portrait, met the standard. How about the Georgia O'Keeffe photograph?</p> <p> </p>

<p>The main question in my mind, to restate, is what did Karsch think he captured, mere role or a lifting of the mask? Did he truly think that he captured a lifting of the mask in most of his portraits???!!! </p>

<p>From the OP, Karsch wrote, “Within every man and woman a secret is hidden, and as a photographer it is my task to reveal it if I can."</p> <p>So my question is did Karsch believe he succeeded in that task with the Churchill portrait? In Kennedy's, in Mandela's? In those, or in which ones would Karsch have said he had succeeded in capturing "a brief lifting of the mask that all humans wear to conceal their innermost selves from the world."?</p> <p>I wonder if Karsch simply meant that he was able to connect for a moment in a personal way with great people during a session. Karsch seems to have connected personally with Carl Jung in 1958 <a href="http://www.karsh.org/#/the_work/portraits/carl_jung">http://www.karsh.org/#/the_work/portraits/carl_jung</a>, and to me Jung looks pleasantly amused by him.</p> <p> </p>

<p>Allen - "I cannot help thinking, the honesty of a photograph is lost in the words."</p> <p>Alan I wonder also about the ability of words to communicate honestly. Part of the poignancy of this image is that it shows both strength and vulnerability combined in an action where with words it is often a struggle to juxtapose the same.</p>

<p>Turner "I see them [photographs] as contributors to, rather than records of, our culture."</p> <p>Yet same as to a novel, a painting, and so on with each divorced from the real sequence of life and none <em>just</em> a record of our culture. In that sense, all art, not just photography, is monument on a grave, our chance to eulogize ourselves at our own funerals. Art, like any eulogy, is suspect, and that is part of the fun of it. So Julie is right, we don't usually think of the future in <em>that</em> way as we do art as part of creating culture.</p>