Timeless Way of Building

"...towns and buildings will not be able to become alive, unless they are made by all the people in society, and unless these people share a com­mon pattern language, within which to make these buildings, and unless this common pattern language is alive itself. 

...

The elements of this language are entities called pat­terns. Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice.

...

No pattern is an isolated entity. Each pattern can exist in the world, only to the extent that is sup­ported by other patterns: the larger patterns in which it is embedded, the patterns of the same size that surround it, and the smaller patterns which are embedded in it. This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of na­ture, as you make it.

...

The Timeless Way of Building says that every society which is alive and whole, will have its own unique and distinct pattern language; and further, that every in­dividual in such a society will have a unique language, shared in part, but which as a totality is unique to the mind of the person who has it. In this sense, in a healthy society there will be as many pattern languages as there are people-even though these languages are shared and similar.

...

Since the language is
in truth a network,

there is no one sequence
which perfectly captures it."

 

- Christopher Alexander (1936 - )
A Pattern Language

Musings on the Creative Process: Left-Brain / Right-Brain Blending

 "It's always seemed like

a big mystery how nature,

seemingly so effortlessly,

manages to produce so much

that seems to us so complex.

Well, I think we found its secret.

It's just sampling what's

out there in the

computational universe."

- Stephen Wolfram (1959 - )

I apologize beforehand for what might seem like a long and bizarre excursion away from photography; but please bear with me as the following musings are very much in the vein of exploring the "creative process" of photography (well, at least, a glimpse of the creative process I've recently been immersed in!). Specifically, those aspects of the creative process that lie at the cusp of traditional left/right brain functions. Leaving aside the reality of such a dichotomy (e.g., see this recent paper), let us posit that left-brain processes focus more on logic and analytic thinking, and that right-brain processes focus on art and intuition more. Of course, all of us continually engage both sides throughout our waking hours, albeit with our own unique rhythms of shifting/combining focus and modulating relative emphasis. In my case, I live in two - usually quite separate - worlds, deliberately broken up into "what I do during my work week" (employed, as I am, as a physicist at a federally funded research & development center) and "what I do during essentially all available off hours" (which, among other things, has resulted in this photography blog and more fun with my cameras, lenses, filters, and tripods than I deserve in the 45+ years I've been doing photography). Occasionally, as I'm about to do here, I combine my two sides; though not always for the better - you, kind reader, can judge whether I've strayed a bit too far in this case.

"Working with mental images activates a different mode
of consciousness which is holistic and intuitive." 
- Henri Bortoft (1938 - 2012)

So many ideas come to mind as I ponder this question: Goethe's Holistic Seeing; Bohm's Implicate Order; and Alexander's (opus on fundamental organizing principles of "life forms") Nature of Order, all come to mind. But I will leave the discussion of these approaches for a later entry. For now, these ideas will have to serve merely as backdrops of my explanation of how I've partly fused my "left-brain/right-brain" activities over the last week or so (I promise to keep it short :). 

At its core, my usual "right brain" approach to photography cannot be simpler: I pick up my camera bag and tripod, head out for a walk to a local park (or just go downstairs to a "studio" I've set up for to experiment with color abstracts), and start shooting. If something catches the eye, I shoot. That's about it. And the less ("left-brain") thinking that is involved, the better (though it sometimes leads to thinking about thinking, which I've written about before). The only important - and almost entirely unconscious - action I take is to choose the time I press the shutter (I've assuming that such minutiae as f-stops, exposure times, filters, and the like are "automatic" and add little to the story I'm trying to tell here). OK, so far, so good.

"So the relationship of each moment in the whole to all the others
is implied by its total content: the way in which it
'holds’ all the others enfolded within it." 
- David Bohm (1917 - 1992) 

This is where my several-week-old left-brain machinations come in. While looking over a portfolio of recent abstracts (including those "discovered" in marble and crystals), I ran across a number that fell into the "whole contains other wholes" pictures I described above. I was sitting at the same PC that facilitates both my left-brain (Photoshop) and right-brain (Mathematica) activities, and reflected the same basic type of question I normally reserve for my left-brain: "How can I find the 'best' image?" - meaning one that best satisfies my desire to show "interesting parts" of an image, but in such a way that the whole is still implicitly within sight, "just barely out of reach." I had earlier experimented with breaking up images into thirds and looking for "interesting juxtapositions" (e.g., exchanging the 1st and 2nd panel interchanged, but leaving the 3rd panel fixed). And, while that did lead to some interesting variations, it was also a painstakingly long process. These preliminary experiments were akin to a kind of improvisational play,  wherein I manually dissected each image and created select juxtapositions of interest. Noting that something interesting can actually be found by following this method, my left-brain finally clicked into action.

While the process is still "simple" (relatively speaking), and can - and will - easily be improved upon in coming days and weeks, I wrote a Mathematica function that automatically breaks an image into thirds (i.e., my 3-word alphabet of 'panels' to be used in  constructing new triptychs); applies all possible combinations of (1) leaving the orientation of a given panel unchanged (or as 'original = O'), (2) flipping a panel in the horizontal direction ('HF'), (3) flipping a panel in the vertical direction ('VF'), and (4) rotating a panel 180 deg (i.e., perform a vertical rotation = 'VR'); and assembling the new panels into a triptych with a bit of white space between and on the outside perimeter of the whole image. (90 deg rotations are not allowed, because in order to retain the same aspect ratio, the panels would all need to be square.) The Mathematica function is constrained to not create any triptychs in which the original panel order is left unchanged, since my goal is to find combinations of individually interesting images - in this case, panels - in which the whole, or original image, is only implicit and not directly observable. A bit of counting shows that, with this constraint, there are a total of 320 possible 'panel exchange + rotation/flip' combinations. This is significantly more than I can create by hand, but is easily doable in a few seconds by feeding my Mathematica function a starting image of choice. More specifically (since it is hard to visually digest 320 images at once), I had Mathematica display a smaller array of 16 random triptychs out of the complete set that my right-brain can inspect - and select interesting variants of - "at a glance." 

"No pattern is an isolated entity. Each pattern can exist in the
world only to the extent that is supported by other patterns:
the larger patterns in which it is embedded, the patterns of the
same size that surround it, and the smaller patterns
which are embedded in it."
- Christopher Alexander (1936 - ) 

Two such arrays are displayed at the top of this post, along with - on the right hand side - one of the images I like best. By design, all of the randomly constructed triptychs share the two most important qualities I am searching for: (1) each of the panels is "interesting" (since this cannot be expected to be true of just any image, the starting image must already be specially selected), and (2) the starting image is visible only implicitly, since the viewer is allowed to see only the juxtaposed panels, not in their original order). As for what makes triptych x more/less interesting than triptych y? That's where the right brain jumps back into the process, as it subjectively selects one out of many - just because; though, because of the way my left-brain constructed the samples from which my right-brain is asked to choose (leaving out the "real" image), the right-brain is faced with - what for me, is - an intoxicating aesthetic tension between parts and an implicit whole. Indeed, the pleasure I get from finding and viewing "interesting images" of this sort are a direct analogue of the creative process by which they are spawned. In the same way as (I've just described) my left-brain helps me sort, dissect, operate-on, and create a multiverse of same-but-different sets of images that my right-brain generated the 'starting set' for (by intuitively capturing the original image) - my right-brain now delights in teasing apart the tension between the parts and wholes of images that my left-brain constructed for me (thus revealing "interesting" sets of images otherwise invisible to my own eye). 

Importantly, at least as far as photography - and aesthetics - are concerned, both sides of this creative process are fueled by search, discovery, and selection. That is, a search for a place and time to take a photograph, discovering an image, and selecting how and when to capture it. The only difference between my usual photography and the (admittedly laborious seeming) process described above is the space over which the search, discovery, and selection is conducted: i.e., a meta-space of images constructed out of images already taken vs. the physical world in which an original set of images is captured. The extra delight (I continue to have as I experiment with left-brain / right-brain blending) is that - at least temporarily - both sides of my brains are actively engaged in pursuit of an unchanging goal: to find "interesting images" :)

Here some additional "discoveries" in my left-brain constructed multiverse of meta-images (with more sure to follow)...

Stasis, Rhythm, and Aesthetics

"Beauty expressed by the artist cannot awaken in us an emotion which is kinetic or a sensation which is purely physical. It awakens, or ought to awaken, or induces, or ought to induce, an esthetic stasis, an ideal pity or an ideal terror, a stasis called forth, prolonged, and at last dissolved by what I call the rhythm of beauty." 

"What is that exactly?", asked Lynch.

"Rhythm," said Stephen, "is the first formal esthetic relation of part to part in any esthetic whole or of an aesthetic whole to its part or parts or of any part to the aesthetic whole of which it is a part."

- James Joyce, (1882 - 1941)

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Symbolic Omniscience

"The basic characteristic of any artistic expression is the ordering of a visual impression into a coherent, complete, living form. The difference between a mere expression, however intense and revealing, and an artistic image of that expression, lies in the range and structure of its form. This structure is specific. The colors, lines, and shapes corresponding to our sense impressions are organized into a balance, a harmony, or rhythm that is is in an analogous correspondence with feelings; and these feelings are, in turn, analogues of thoughts and ideas. An artistic image, therefore, is more that a graph of emotions. It has meaning in depth, and, at each level, there is a corresponding level of human response to the world. In this way, an artistic form is a symbolic form grasped directly by the senses but reaching beyond them and connecting all the strata of our inner world of sense, feeling, and thought. The intensity of the sensory pattern strengthens the emotional and intellectual pattern; conversely, our intellect illuminates such a sensory pattern, investing it with symbolic power. This essential unity of primary sense experience and intellectual evaluation makes the artistic form unique in human experience and therefore in human culture. Our closest human experience is love, where again sensation, feeling, and idea live in a vital unity."

- GYORGY KEPES

Education of Vision

“For some time there was a widely held notion (zealously fostered by the daily press) to the effect that the 'thinking ocean' of Solaris was a gigantic brain, prodigiously well-developed and several million years in advance of our own civilization, a sort of 'cosmic yogi', a sage, a symbol of omniscience, which had long ago understood the vanity of all action and for this reason had retreated into an unbreakable silence.” 

- STANISLAW LEM

Solaris

Luray Caverns Part III: a Harmony of Contrasts

"...an aesthetic perspective is quite at home in the realm of contradictions, for its very nature allows it to transform them into a harmony of contrasts...value entails a synthesis of complexity with order, novelty with continuity, nuance with harmony, richness with stability...the cosmos is such an aesthetic reality. Both in its constituent occasions and in its overall reality the universe is a process of synthesizing and unifying its composite aspects into novel moments of present aesthetic "enjoyment." "

- John F. Haught, Theologian

This is the third installment of a series of blog commentaries on my recent day-long sojourn into the subterranean wonders of Luray Caverns, in northern Virginia (the first two parts are here and here, respectively). In part II I discussed how I have resolved to deal with - though have not yet "solved" - the "problem" of extreme contrasts of light and form.

What makes the caverns unusual, from a compositional perspective, is not just that the contrasts that are there are so strong (and that, really, visually define how the caverns appear to visitors), but that they are both strong and fixed. The photographer's ability to craft an image is thus constrained in two important dimensions of the (typically much more forgiving and malleable) aesthetic space.

Of course, the photographer still has to journey through the familiar landscape of possibilities and aesthetic design decisions: what to focus on, which forms to include, exclude and/or emphasize, what depth of field to use, what tonal ranges to manipulate in what way in photoshop, what to sharpen and what to leave alone (or blur), etc. But the object of this exercise - the "real world" studio in which the original image is recorded; i.e., the cave - is itself fixed and unchanging. This paradoxically renders the aesthetic choices both easier and harder to make.

Aesthetic choices are easier to make in caves because you are assured of the fact that what is front of the lens now is exactly what was there a moment, or hour, or day, ... before! Whether you turn away for a moment or walk away and come back hours later (assuming the caverns have not yet closed for the night), the "image" you first trained your camera on is still there, identical in every way to the first time you framed it. You can "lose your way" so to speak, and always backtrack to "correct" any errors in judgement, or refine a composition by just a bit, able to fully trust in the fact that "everything will be as it was" except for whatever small nudge up or down or to the left you choose to make now. You are, in fact, traversing a completely unchanging reality (at least in limited timeframes, as new deposits accumulate at the rate of roughly one cubic inch every ~120 years or so); this only adds to the surreal feel of wandering around in the caves - a feeling that is especially strong when wandering around alone.

Aesthetic choices are harder to make in caves because one of the most frequently used tools for "finding the best image" - namely, the ability to simply wait for the right conditions - does not apply. Indeed, part of my meditative state that the title of this series of blog entries alludes to (Joyful Medidations...) was induced by an incessant, semi-conscious, whispering to myself of the mantra "ciwis, ciwis, ciwis, ..." (meaning, the "cave is what it is";-) Waxing a bit philosophical, one can say that caves fuse time and space; insofar as they are (implicitly) expressed by - and compel the viewer to experience as - the spatial dimensions alone. Time is rendered inert and irrelevant. Since I cannot totally separate the left (physics) and right (photography) parts of my brain - even when out and about taking photographs! - I often found myself musing about the idea of how the caves are wonderful way to train oneself to imagine what a totally timeless physics might look like, in which reality consists of an uncountably large set of interlocked slices of "nows" (see Julian Barbour's The End of Time).

As I write this entry, I've completed a preliminary look at the 20+GB worth of raw files I recorded in Luray caverns. The aesthetic gestalt that is slowly self-organizing in my mind, is that of a "harmony of contrasts." Interestingly, and perhaps fittingly, as well, this expressive phrase happens also to be the title of my dad's first posthumous art exhibit in Taganrog, Russia; he and I, it seems, still manage to find ways to connect in the timeless realm ;-) In the first page of the flyer for my dad's exhibit (shown below), "Гармония контрастов" is Russian for Harmony of Contrasts:

Yves Klein, Arbitrary Labels, and the "Meta" Art of Displaying Art

This will likely read as an even more rambling blog entry than usual ;-) but there is simply no easier way to fuse the three ostensibly unrelated themes posited in the title than by the words I'm about to type into my iPad stream of consciousness style. So here goes...

Last week, my wife and I had the pleasure of seeing the Yves Klein exhibit at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC (for those of you with iPhones, iTunes has a wonderful app to allow you to experience the exhibit "virtually" on your iPhone). Yves Klein was a French "artist" born in Nice in 1928 and died, tragically young, of a heart attack in 1962. I put the word "artist" in quotes because Klein's "art" was - and is - notoriously difficult to pin down; he used so many different techniques and produced such a diverse oeuvre, that the word "artist" hardly does justice to what Klein really was (and for which I have no ready "label"). Even in describing his more "conventional" works - in which pigment is applied to a canvas - one wonders whether an asterisk (even a question mark!) should not accompany any description (see below). His works are all equal parts object and concept (or philosophy). Klein's works are best appreciated as transient artifacts - as snapshots in time - of a ceaseless process of creative exploration, unconfined to a single genre or single means of expression. Klein was in many ways the physical embodiment of an incorporeal creative force. His life was art, much more so - on a fundamental level - than any of the art works he had time to create.

Which brings us to the second theme of this blog entry, the arbitrariness of labels... One of the techniques Klein employed (often as a public performance to the delight of invited guests) was to have two or three nude women cover themselves with paint - typically a special "spiritually charged" hue of blue ...

"Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not.. ..All colors arouse specific associative ideas, psychologically material or tangible, while blue suggests at most the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract." - Yves Klein (lecture at the Sorbonne, 1959)

...and proceed to "paint" canvases with their bodies. Sometimes the "painting" would be directed by Klein; sometimes it would be left up to the "body brushes" themselves. But in either case, Klein himself was but the creative fire behind a process that, once set in motion and because of the womens' active participation, was not entirely under his control. Which brings up a not so easy to answer question: in what sense can one say that the "finished artwork" (many fine examples of which are shown at the Hirshhorn exhibit, including a few wall-size videos of the process itself) is Klein's alone?

Klein also experimented with the use of fire as paint, was a photographer, and sometimes used the windshield of his car as an "abstract canvas" to capture the dynamic imprints of twigs and insects as the car careened on winding stormy roads.

"I dash out to the banks of the river ... and find myself amongst the rushes and the reeds. I grind some pigment over all this and the wind makes their slender stalks bend and appliqués them with precision and delicacy on to my canvas, which I thus offer to quivering nature: I obtain a vegetal mark. Then it starts to rain; a fine spring rain: I expose my canvas to the rain… …and I have the mark of the rain! – a mark of an atmospheric event." - Yves Klein

My wife (an art major in college) astutely asked whether the same question might be posed of Jackson Pollack, whose art also arguably depended at least in part on the vagaries of paint-globule-trajectories not under his control; or, indeed, of any artist whose works depend on processes not under their direct control (see Chance Aesthetics by Meredith Malone).

Language can be both surgically precise and woefully ambiguous (and sometimes, simultaneously both!) The labels we apply to things and processes are - as often as not - arbitrary, and are rarely more than simple caricatures of the real things and processes they are used to represent. This is never more true than when we apply labels to artists and the works they create. Certainly (?) Klein and Pollack (and Kandinsky, and Picasso, and my dad, Sam Ilachinski) are all "artists." But what does the label convey, apart from the fact that whatever it is their souls and activities share probably has little to do with building particle colliders (though this too is arguably an "artform" so that the overlap may not be as "small" as one first suspects... but we'll leave that discussion to a later time ;-) ? Is a "body art" painting by Klein a "painting by Klein"? Is it a "collaborative work of art" created partly by Klein and partly by his cadre of "body brushes"? Is Klein merely one "creative force" behind a painting that owes its existence (and meaning?) to multiple creative forces (in the case of his body art in particular, Klein is arguably the more passive of the many creative forces at work; or is he)? To what extent does the word "artist" signify what Klein really was (which, even from the brief sketch I've given above, it should be obvious that Klein was not your "typical" artist)? And for that matter, how many - ever more precise (?) - "labels" do we need to begin to capture "Klein as Klein" (and can that even really be done)?

In truth, the best we can do to represent - or to label - Klein, or any other artist (if we're honest), is to append to any symbolic signifier of Klein (a picture of him shortly before his death, say, or merely the word "Klein") Klein's complete creative oevre, from first doodles as a baby-Klein to the last half-completed sketch before his fatal heart attack at 34. Of course, even this is at best an incomplete record, since there are likely to be many more works that Klein had kept to himself, or destroyed, than exposed to public view (I know this to be a fact regarding my dad's lifework); but, certainly, the label "Klein" followed by a catalog of reproductions of his life's work better represent the "artist" Klein than the word "artist" alone.

Alas, even here there is a snag. For even if we managed to reproduce a complete record, we would still have to contend with the nontrivial problem of how to interpret - how to derive meaning - from the record in the manner in which it was constructed and displayed (which adds yet another layer of ambiguity and arbitrariness). Is a linear time-line "better" or "worse" than organizing according to theme and process? While creative works surely accrue in a "linear" fashion (for our hands can create only one work at a time), artists - especially "artists" like Klein - rarely work on a single project at a time, mentally and creatively juggling multiple simultaneous works. How can that complex dynamic inner process be captured in any static "record"? And yet, if it is not - and cannot - be captured, to what degree can any record of any artist's oeuvre truly capture the "artist"? Surely the way in which an artist's oeuvre is interpreted - and therefore how the "artist" is understood through his oeuvre - owes as much to how the oeuvre is organized - usually by someone other than the artist (though the same would be true even in the case where the artist organizes his or her own life's work) - as what is "in" it. Interpretation cannot proceed without both content and context (to which we must also add the context - and current state-of-mind - of the viewer!)

Which brings us to the third theme of this blog entry, the meta-art of displaying art...though we are dangerously close to encroaching on the formal study of semiotics - i.e., the study of signs and symbols (see Handbook of Semiotics by Winfried Noth), I will confine my musings to an observation my wife and I made at the Yves Klein exhibit. In one hall of the exhibit, the curators had beautifully arranged about 25 or 30 of Klein's smaller blue sculptures. It is a large semicircular room (following the circular contour of the Hirshhorn building), brightly lit, and painted a solid white from floor to ceiling. Each work rests on its own modest pedestal, ranging from about two to four feet in height, and relatively positioned in a more or less grid-like configuration, with bases extending from the floor at varying depths (as the main "base" of the exhibit is itself positioned at a slight incline). The effect is mesmerizing, as the roomful of small blue objects reveals itself as you step into this part of the exhibit. The arrangement is both inviting - as a whole - and seductive in compelling one to linger and admire the individual works. The question that immediately presents itself - on the meta-level - is the degree to which the artful arrangement of Klein's works colors and/or defines how one interprets them. Certainly, the effect - and subsequent interpretation - would have been dramatically different had my wife and I stepped into a room in which all of Klein's works were "arranged" in a disorganized pile in one corner. But what if the arrangement had been just as "artful" (why do we so seldom pay homage to the curator's meta-art of arranging other artists' "art"?), but had different lighting? Or a different relative positioning? Or a slightly different choice had been made as to what individual works to include from the exhibit? All of these particular choices would give the exhibit a different feel, and - more importantly - compel viewers to interpret "Klein the artist" in different ways.

However, lest one conclude from all of this that the best, and only, way to "know" an artist is to become the artist (much as Borges describes how a fictional Pierre Menard becomes Cervantes in order to be able to write Cervantes' Don Quixote), remember that the artist's own struggles to create - and which leave a trace of artifacts that others use to "understand" the artist - are also the artist's attempt to understand herself! So who knows the "real" artist?

"The essential of painting is that something, that 'ethereal glue,' that intermediary product which the artist secrets with all his creative being and which he has the power to place, to encrust, to impregnate into the pictorial stuff of the painting." - Yves Klein

Additional Reading. (1) Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers; (2) Yves Klein: Fire at the Heart of the Void; (3) Art and Artifact: The Museum as Medium.

Postscript #1. One more thought on the meta-art of displaying art. Suppose one decides to curate an exhibit of the meta-art of curating. That is, to exhibit not the works of an artist, but the meta-art of a curator. How can such an exhibit to be organized? Does the curator (whose meta-art is going to be on display) do the curating? But then it's not so much an exhibit, as just "another day on the job" for the curator. Perhaps some other curator displays the first curator's exhibit. In which case, how might the viewer of the exhibit tell their "artworks" apart? And, for that matter, what actual physical "artwork" ought be displayed (certainly not the curator's, since the curator has no physically manifest "art" to display)? Or would there - in practice - be little difference between an exhibit of an "artist" and an exhibit of a "curator"? For example, take the roomful of 30 Klein-artworks. This room can be interpreted as both a Klein exhibit (as billed by the Hirshhorn) and as a Curator exhibit (who remains, sadly, unbilled). What if the artist is also a curator of her own art? And what of the architect - and lighting engineer, and floorboard installer, and... - who all play an important part in setting the mood...? Ambiguitity upon ambiguity ad infinitum ;-)

Postscript #2. As an example of "bad" - or "misrepresentational" - curatorship, consider the display of one of Klein's "participatory sculptures" at the Hirshhorn exhibit. The "sculpture" is actually invisible (indeed, neither my wife nor I "saw" it), since it was deliberately designed by Klein to be enclosed within a solid white box (on a stand, about at chest-level), with holes poked in the sides so that the viewer can feel the sculpture with her fingers after extending her arms through the holes. What was amusing is that the Hirshhorn's exhibit includes a sign expressly forbidding any touching. Viewers may admire the outside of Klein's "participatory sculpture," but are not allowed to "see" the sculpture with their fingers as Klein had intended. If all art is an artifact of the creative process, then this particular artifact of Klein's art was, at best, an artifact of an artifact. I suspect that Klein would not have reacted positively to such an "exhibit" of his art!

...and Discovers Synesthetic Landscapes

"A gift exists that is unclear to science.
One hears a sounds but recollects a hue,
invisible the hands that touch your heartstrings.
Not music the reverberations that ensue within;
they are of light. Sounds that are colored,

an enigmatic sonnet was addressed to you
that scintillate like an iridescent poem

by Arthur Rimbaud, their land's conniving crony.
Besides that, there are colors that have sound.
On limpid, melancholy days

in autumn upon the purple of a maple leaf
I seem to hear the tremulous and

distant hollow re-echo of a horn.
The beauty fades, transformed to simple tunes
a crystal ringing in dahlia's fiery facets,
I perceive, on dry grass midst the cobwebs' motley weave."

- (a 19 yo) VLADIMIR NOBOKOV
(writing about summers spent at his family's estate near St. Petersburg, Russia)

Synesthesia derives from the Greek syn = union + aisthaesis = sensation, and means "joined sensation." Such as when something that is ordinarily "seen" is tasted as well. Though, this hardly does justice to the psychological, creative - even mystical - experience of synesthesia. There are well-documented examples of almost all possible joinings of the senses - smelling sounds, hearing colors, feeling shapes, etc. Apart from Nobokov, other well known synesthetes include Wassily Kandinsky, David Hockney, Richard Feynman, and Alexander Scriabin. Contemporary "synesthetic" artists include Carol Steen and Marcia Smilack. In my case, I vividly remember having synesthetic experiences early in my life (up until about 10 or so), when I routinely perceived numbers (and, less frequently, letters) as colors. Sadly, I now only rarely experience this phenomenon.

It is only relatively recently that MRI scans have unequivocally revealed that synesthesia is a real - not imagined - experience, indicating that the senses in synesthetes are actually neurologically connected. Before this time, research consisted largely of self-reports by synesthetes; made all the more difficult by the fact that the experience itself was by no means universally accepted as real (and the people who stepped forward to share their experiences were often either ignored or ridiculed or both). In fact, modern research suggests that as many as 1 in 100 people may have some degree of synesthesia. Two excellent references on the subject are Wednesday is Indigo Blue by Robert Cytowic and David Eagleman (a video of Dr. Eagleman discussing synesthesia may be seen here), and The Hidden Sense: Synesthesia in Art and Science, by Cretien van Campen. There is also a recent catalog of artwork that appeared at the Synesthesia: Art and Mind exhibit at the McMaster Museum of Art (held in 2008 at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario); and curated by Greta Berman and Carol Steen (who, as mentioned earlier, is herself a synesthete). So far as I know, this is the only art exhibit to focus exclusively on synesthesia!

To the extent that an important part of art - any art, including photography - involves finding ways of communicating one point of view (or "sense experience") - namely, that of the artist - to another (the viewer) - a "mixing of senses", in a sense ;-) it should come as no surprise that, conceptually speaking, all artists implicitly strive to induce synesthesic experiences. To be sure, the resulting experience is usually hardly even noticeable and impure at best, if for no other reason than the fact that the "experience" as such is diluted between two internal worlds, that of the artist and viewer (i.e.,, there is no direct commingling or "joining" of simultaneous senses). Still, I've often wondered just how far the analogy may actually go? Perhaps the fact that the universe so obviously delights in having so many conscious creatures around - that themselves delight in sharing their collective experiences and inner-states via art - is an indication that nature herself is an accomplished synesthete of the highest order (and that we are her senses)?

Might it be possible for an artwork, W, created by a visual artist, X (where W is thought of as a manifest symbol of X's original experience e(X) that motivated X to create the artwork in the first place), to evoke a similar experience / inner-state e(Y) ~ e(X) in Y by synesthetically activating certain of Y's senses other than the purely visual (the latter of which is ostensibly the only sense required to "observe" X's artwork)? One could argue that this is just a complicated way of stating what all (good?) art has always done. Namely, to act as a visual stimulus (catalytic agent?) that activates all (or most) of a viewer's senses to induce a desired experience, or state-of-awareness. I am not suggesting that one must directly (or consciously) "hear" or "taste" a Pollock to fully experience one of his paintings. But it is interesting to speculate whether (and/or to what extent) all "deep experiences" of visual forms of art involve synesthetic intermingling of senses (perhaps on the unconscious level). Perhaps the same MRI studies that are used to discern the physiological basis of synesthetic experiences in synesthetes can be applied to studying the neurological processes underlying a deep immersion in, and experience of, art by ordinary (i.e., non-synesthete) viewers?

I have assembled a small portfolio of what I call Synesthetic Abstracts (a smaller sampling is also available as a portfolio on Facebook). It is an experiment in applying photography of the small and mundane (technically, macros of diffuse reflections of scattered everyday objects from curved metal surfaces, captured using very shallow depth of field) to evoke an experience of mysterious, ethereal grandeur. The portfolio is "synesthetic" in the sense that, just as synesthetes use two or more senses to represent an ostensible "reality," the images in this portfolio collectively evoke an experience of reality as induced by two vastly different representational forms (one literal - reflections off curved metal - the other implied - ineffable landscapes of the imagination). Although this "explanation" may inspire more confusion than insight into synesthesia, at least I'm finally paying attention to my infinitely patient muse ;-)

Postscript #1. Here is an additional link to a thoughtful paper on synesthesia and art: Art and Synesthesia: in Search of the Synesthetic Experience, by Dr. Hugo Heyrman (this last link contains a motherload of references to research on synesthesia), a lecture presented at the First International Conference on Art and Synesthesia (25th - 28th July, 2005 - Universidad de Almería, Spain). Finally, here is a link to Synesthesia List, which is an an international e-mail forum, for connecting synesthetes with each other and with those researching synesthesia. Among the links provided there is a four part video of a lecture Dr. Cytowic recently gave at the Hirshhorn (here is Part 1).

Postscript #2. See Sensory hijack - rewiring brains to see with sound and a Kandinsky-inspired synesthetic game called Rez.

I took How Many Pictures on Vacation?

As is obvious from the post dates of my blog entries, there has (yet again!) been quite a dry-spell of late as far as my blog-posting goes. The culprit, as almost always, has nothing to do with lack of interest - if anything, my ever-patient muse and I are bubbling over with creative ideas - but lack of time, owing to "day job" pressures. So, on the heels of many more papers, study proposals, meetings and briefings that I can count (while staying nominally sane), my wife and I finally found a few days of solace in beautiful Siesta Key, Florida. In a strange (nested) synchronicity, as I was completing the book I took for our trip that dealt with the psychology and physics of synchronous events (Deciphering the Cosmic Number, by Arthur Miller), the DVD my in-laws were watching upon our return to Coral Gables (where they were kind enough to look after the kids while we were away) was Koyaanisqatsi. Koyaanisqatsi, which in the Hopi language means "crazy life, life in turmoil, life out of balance, life disintegrating, a state of life that calls for another way of living", is a remarkable film made in the early 1980s on that general theme, and scored by Philip Glass. It also perfectly describes the inner discord I currently feel: a profound lack of balance between the two worlds that define me; one of the intellect, which is filled with equations and computer code, the other of art and other aesthetic sensibilities, which has been getting the short-end of the proverbial stick these days. Seeing the hypnotic surreal-like images of the film as we stepped into my in-laws' house instantly crystallized for me the conflict that has been brewing inside of myself during the last few months, as more and more of my energy has been channeled into purely "intellectual" pursuits (sans art).

While the imbalance unfortunately persists, its complementary part has at least been nourished in a small way by our brief 4-day sojourn to the Gulf waters. To say it was a joy to walk around with my camera strapped to my neck (something I have not done for well over two months, and one of the longest such stretches in recent memory), would be a deep understatement. Which brings me to the actual point of this blog entry, whose title recounts the words I silently uttered to myself when I looked at what I downloaded from my compact flash cards after getting back home to Virginia: "I took how many pictures on vacation?" (A clue to the answer lies in the number of images that make up the "quintic" shown above.)

The interesting part is that there are two correct answers to this question, and that each is both surprising and not. Most importantly, the answers together have given me an insight into my style of picture taking, which I now realize has undergone a bit of a transformation. Allow me to explain.

On the one hand, objectively speaking, I came home with quite a few images (in the relatively brief time I had to actually wander around, and as witnessed by the total number of files on my cards), about 1000. On the other hand, the actual number of distinct images - by which I mean a set of images such that all "loosely similar" photos are counted as a "single image" - is considerably, and suggestively, smaller. By this reckoning, I came away from our trip with exactly five distinct images!

Apart from a few unimportant and eminently forgettable "just grab the shot" shots, by far the majority of the remaining ~980 shots I took on this trip are so similar to one of the five illustrative images above that what I was effectively doing - albeit unconsciously - was simultaneously working on five mini-portfolios. Which also represents a mini-transformation in the way I "do photography" nowadays.

My wife was the first to notice (a few short day-trips ago) that I spend far less time taking "indiscriminate" shots than before. That is, if strolling in a park, say, I am much less inclined to pause to take a picture of something (and even less inclined to bother setting up a tripod) than I was a few years ago. On the other hand, on those occasions where something does catch my eye, I am also much more likely to spend a considerably longer time setting up, composing, finding alternate angles, waiting for better light, and so on. Of course, nothing in the second set of activities is anything new per se (for this is the common "work space" that most photographers naturally live in). What is revealing to me is: (1) that I am doing so much less of the first kind of "snap and shoot" photography while in the company of others, including my wife (as normally, when out and about with my camera, I both desire to take pictures and not bludgeon others' patience), and (2) that my wife has noticed (even before I did) that when I pick now up my camera, it almost always presages a long local photo session, focused on a specific subject, and is rarely about "taking that one shot." Even a few carefully composed shots of the surf on a beach at Siesta Key simply will not do anymore; I need to spend a few hours taking over a 100!

What is perhaps even more revealing (to me, anyway, as I reflect on what else this says about my own ever-evolving creative process), is that I am not trying to find the proverbial "best shot" of a sequence that will serve as the "keeper" of the group. Rather I am deliberately (in hindsight;-) methodically stitching together a multilayered view of my experience of a single moment. Each image is recorded not because I think it will merely serve as an added "exemplar" of a set from which I'll eventually select a representative "best of" series. Rather, each image is taken in the belief that not only will it almost surely be a part of a "keeper" set (imperfections and all), but that - in and of itself - it represents an important element of a broader multi-image view of the interval of time during which my attention was focused on revealing something about my experience while taking this set of pictures. By way of analogy, my pictures are slowly taking on the character of words and sentences (intended to convey richer tones and meanings, and used as grammatical components of a larger, hopefully more nuanced, body of work, even if that body of work is only about a relatively short experience at one location), rather than paragraphs or completed "stories" (as before). Even more succinctly, I am finding myself taking far fewer images than ever before as intentionally isolated images, captured solely for whatever purpose a single image may serve to convey some meaning. Again, there is nothing strikingly new in this observation, as photographers do this sort of thing do all the time; at least if we examine the final body of work they produce to complete a given "project" (it is also the Lenswork "model" of focusing on themed portfolios rather than "greatest hits"). What is new - to me - is that this process has apparently now become so innate a part of my creative process, that it occurs, naturally, even within the rhythms of an otherwise routine photo-safari.

So, what better way to convey the "essence" of a wonderfully relaxing, much needed, break from work, than by a portfolio of quintics that reveal glimpses of the five - and only five ;-) photographs I took on my vacation?

Postscript #1: For those of you interested in exploring the fascinating life-long relationship between C.G. Jung and Wolfgang Pauli (one of the 20th Century's great physicists), additional references include: Pauli and Jung: A Meeting of Two Great Minds (by David Lindorff) and The Innermost Kernel (by Suzanne Gieser). Moreover, if you are in any way interested in Jung, you will surely want to find a place that has a hardcopy of a truly extraordinary (and extraordinarily expensive!) book, Jung's Red Book (I recently saw one at a local Barnes and Noble). An on-line perusal of sample pages simply cannot do justice to the magic contained therein. Jung had worked in secret on this book for decades, and it has only now been released (for the first time) after another two decades' worth of scholarship. You can read about its story in this New York Times book report. I would go so far as to say that even if Jung did nothing of value in psychology, and the Red Book were stripped of all its wondrous prose (and there is a lot of it, agruably including some of Jung's best) to include only the images Jung drew to illustrate the dreams he explores in it (so that we judge Jung's lifelong oeuvre by nothing other than the pictures in this one incredible book), Jung would go down as an artist of the highest caliber. Even if you have only a casual interest in psychology, dreams, and/or Jung, I would urge you to look at this magnificent book for its art alone!

Postscript #2: In case there is any confusion, the five images (or image series) are, respectively (from left to right in the samples above): (1) beach/sand plants and vines, (2) close-ups of my mother-in-law's knick-knacks (as viewed on her dining-room table), (3) surf abstracts, (4) cracks in the painted lines (defining lane-boundaries on small roads in Siesta Key), and (5) close-ups of patterns on paper weights and easter eggs.

Blurred Distinctions

A set of Nambe-like metallic salt and pepper shakers (featuring shiny reflecting metallic surfaces), assorted pots and pans and formal serving trays, and the backdrop and decor of my in-laws' dining room (in Coral Gables, Florida), all mysteriously conspired - during the Thanksgiving break - to teach me a lesson on the art of making blurred distinctions. I mean this both literally - as in exploring (what for me) is an unusual range of bokeh-inducing f-stops (f~2.8; compared to the range I "normally" work in: f11 ~ f16) - and metaphorically - as in the lesson the "abstract experiments" I will describe below has taught me about the blurry distinction between "photography" and (more traditional forms of) "art."

“In the sky, there is no distinction of east and west; people create distinctions out of their own minds and then believe them to be true.” - GAUTAMA SIDDHARTA (563-483 B.C.)

The context, and lucky trigger, for my lesson, was my (day-job-related) physical and mental exhaustion that I've accrued over the days and weeks before the Thanksgiving break - which effectively barred me from going outdoors with my camera, as I normally do when on vacation. I was simply too tired to go on any of my usual photo-safaris. But not too tired to pick up a camera, of course ;-) I took the normal mix of family photos, and photos of my in-laws' garden plants and flowers.

And then we had Thanksgiving dinner! The silverware was out, the serving trays were on display, and those precious Nambe-like salt and pepper shakers were teasing me with their compositional possibilities!

I spent the next few days playing with the macro lens I brought with me, Canon's 100/f2.8. This is the same lens I'd used previously for both my "Micro Worlds" and "Whorls" portfolios, and remains one of my favorite lenses to turn to when my muse keeps me indoors. I trained my lens on the reflections of objects in the dining room that appeared on the salt and pepper shakers as I moved them around perched atop one of my mother-in-law's metal serving trays.

What I found was both a revelation and a source of illumination on the nature of photography and art (with a smattering of insight into the nature of life itself).

"Thought is creating divisions out of itself and then saying that they are there naturally." - DAVID BOHM

First, the revelatory part... since, at f~2.8, the macro lens renders everything with an extremely narrow depth of field, the "distinction" between otherwise separate objects is either difficult to discern or is effectively invisible. Indeed, different "things" are mostly blurred into fuzzy indistinct clumps of overlapping shapes and color. And, speaking of color... precisely because of the paucity of recognizable "things" - that normally provide the backdrop of "compositional primitives" with which a photograph is aesthetically organized - color becomes as integral a component of a composition as shape and tone (this, coming from a black and white photographer - hence a revelation!).

The resulting images of reflected objects are (almost absurdly) minimalist abstractions of fuzzy fields of overlapping colors. My usual argument for preferring not to use color is that my "eye" tends to focus on shape, tone, and texture alone. Color (at least in the context of this particular aesthetic approach) is thus unnecessarily intrusive, distracting, and - often - overbearing. In my post-Thanksgiving experiments, however, with texture virtually gone, and shapes and tones reduced to their bare essentials, color reasserts itself as an important aesthetic tool. In side-by-side comparisons between the color and black & white versions (not shown here), I strongly favor the color versions.

As for the illumination part...it is often argued that the fundamental difference between traditional art (such as watercolor) and fine-art photography is that where photographers must search for (and find visual approximations of) what they wish to print as a "photograph" (and thereby use to communicate some "idea" or "feeling" as photographer-artists), traditional artists create what they see in their mind's eye (or inspired by what they see). The artist intentionally adds things in his "mind's eye" to an initially blank canvas; the photographer intentionally wanders around the world looking for something "out there" to add to an initially data-lacking CMOS sensor (or undeveloped film) that the lens can record an image on. One adds information from within; the other adds information from without.

But is that really the case? My post-Thanksgiving macro experiments reminded me that - on the deepest level - there is little if any meaningful distinction between what artists of any kind do. All artists create; that is what they do, and that is what describes how they behave. But it is the process that defines them; not the tools they use, not the methods they employ to create their finished artwork, not even the conventional "categories" that others use to label what kind of artists the world perceives them to be.

"What is needed is ... to give up altogether the notion that the world is constituted of basic objects or building blocks. Rather one has to view the world in terms of universal flux of events and processes." - DAVID BOHM

The usual art / photography distinction is blurred by what I found myself doing with my camera to "create" my images (a few of which appear in this blog). Rather than simply moving my camera left, right, up, and down on my tripod "looking for pleasing compositions" - as I normally do when doing macro photography (and which, in particular, I employed for both the "Micro Worlds" and "Whorls" portfolios), I found myself also intentionally repositioning the metal tray on which the salt and pepper shakers were standing, intentionally moving various colored objects on the table that were reflected in the shakers and tray, intentionally moving objects on the adjacent walls, and intentionally changing the room lighting.

On the one hand, none of this is out of the ordinary, and - to a degree - is something that I, and all photographers regularly do. On the other hand, there is a crucial difference: in this case, I was making all of these changes not just so that I could find a pleasing composition (that would, as if by magic, appear before me); but because I deliberately wanted to create just the right combination of objects and light for a particular composition of color, shape, and tone - that I had previsualized in my mind's eye - to appear in my viewfinder! In short, I was using a camera, but I was creating the image as though I was a traditional artist!

To be sure, I had no brushes and was not using paint; but the effect - and, more importantly, the intent - was exactly the same. To make the distinction - or lack of one - even more self-evident, consider a simple thought experiment. Suppose I create an image, such as this one...

...in the way as I've described above: I use my macro lens set to f2.8, and deliberately and willfully create a local "environment" (consisting of a particular configuration of things, light, and color) previsualizing the image that forms in my viewfinder to look as it appears in the image above. I press the shutter, and process the file as I normally do (except skip the step of converting to black and white). Call the resulting image, image-A. Now suppose that I instead start with a paint program - say ArtRage (which, BTW, is a magnificent little program that does much of what more sophisticated and expensive programs do for a fraction of the cost: check it out!) - and paint the same image. I then grab my camera, take a shot, and again process as I normally do, winding up with image-B.

Here's the obvious question: are these images different in any meaningful way? And, if not, then why? Assuming I've acquired a modicum of painting skill before opening the paint program, let's for sake of argument accept that I've managed to create a passable doppelganger for Image-A. We can safely assume that - apart from some minor cosmetic differences - Image-A is essentially equivalent to Image-B; i.e., the two images are effectively the "same." But we must ask, why are they the same? Clearly, the processes that led to the two images are very different. In one case, an image has been photographed; in the other, it was created directly in a paint program. The constant in both cases, of course, is the artist, and the previsualized image the artist had "within" before initiating the creative process that leads to the physical creation of either of the two images.

Is the "artist" a photographer or is the artist a traditional artist? And does the distinction really matter in this case? On can also argue that the deliberate "repositioning of objects" to yield specific color-forms in the camera's viewfinder is merely a "complicated label" that designates a different kind of "brush" used to apply a different kind of "paint" to a different kind of "canvas" (albeit a more involved and complex one). Whichever way one argues, though, in the end, I'm left with the conviction that - at least in this case (of post-Thanksgiving macro experimentation) - I'm both photographer and artist, and I'm neither a "photographer" nor am am I an "artist."

So what am I, really? Ahh, we've now truly come back to basics. What else, but the blurred distinctions between the sounds of one hand clapping!

"Whether you are going or staying or sitting or lying down,
the whole world is your own self.
You must find out
whether the mountains, rivers, grass, and forests
exist in your own mind or exist outside it.
Analyze the ten thousand things,
dissect them minutely,
and when you take this to the limit
you will come to the limitless,
when you search into it you come to the end of search,
where thinking goes no further and distinctions vanish.
When you smash the citadel of doubt,
then the Buddha is simply yourself."
- DAIKAKU (Zen teacher)

A Photographer's Self-Organized Patterns and Categories

In a certain Chinese encyclopedia called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge - perhaps imagined, perhaps real - Jorge Luis Borges writes that "...animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies."

The list is both absurd and profound. It is absurd - or so we think at first glance - because it excludes so many "categories" we (the readers) likely take for granted. Where are the "things that are shaped like spheres or boxes"? Where are the "things that are red"? Where are the things that "make us smile"? (Of course, perhaps these "obvious" categories, and others like them, might also strike you - kind reader - as being equally inept at containing reality).

The list is also profound (though we may come to appreciate it as being so only upon careful reflection) because it reminds us that all categories, however a priori "obvious" and intuitive - are arbitrary, except for the meaning they possess to us as individual observers (and even then, only in the brief instant during which our minds muse on the transient patterns percolating in what the world presents to our senses).

“The division of the perceived universe into parts and wholes is convenient and may be necessary, but no necessity determines how it shall be done.” — Gregory Bateson (1904 - 1980)

The subject of categories, partitions, and patterns has recently come up as I look forward to the opening reception of a three-artist exhibit entitled Worlds Within Worlds at the American Center for Physics (One Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD, 20740). The reception will be held monday, November 16, 2009, between 5:30 - 7:30, with a gallery talk and short presentations scheduled for 6:00pm.

"The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later." - Joan Miro (1893 - 1983)

As I wrote in an earlier blog entry, this exhibit consists of hand-picked works by all three artists (a sculptor, a traditional artist, and yours truly - ostensibly a "photographer") that are all someway related to science; physics in particular. All three artists were selected (by curator Sarah Tanguy) with an eye toward either the artist or his/her work having some connection to physics. In the case of Julian Voss-Andreae, who is both a physicist and artist/sculptor by training, both his background and art are obviously appropriate for the exhibit. He is not only a card-carrying physicist (having earned a Masters degree at the University of Edinburgh), but creates works that are directly inspired by the principles and laws of physics. The artist Cynthia Padgett, while not a scientist by training, has works on display that are also inspired by science; in her case via the exposure she has to astronomy and astronomic images through her son's study of physics.

But what of my own oeuvre, both the small cross-section on display at this exhibit, and my still growing body of work as a photographer? Yes, I too am a card-carrying physicst (having earned my Ph.D. at the University of Stony Brook, NY in 1988). But, unlike Julian Voss-Andreae, my work rarely has any direct connection to physics. To be sure, many - perhaps all (?) - of my works on display may be interpreted in the context of my being a physicist: my "Entropic Melody" series, for example, is clearly labeled by a term - "entropy" - used by physicists to denote disorder; similarly, the title of my "Whirls, Whorls, and Tendrils" series is an homage to terms often used in the study of nonlinear dynamical systems to describe certain self-organized patterns. Being a physicist, I cannot help but "see the world as a physicist"; though I honestly do not know what that means other than "seeing the world as a physicist." And my pictures are the best - and only - evidence of what "seeing the world as a physicist" really means.

What of the works themselves (sans titles)? They are, after all, simply pictures of things: windows, rocks, water, flame, ice, etc. Consider a single image (not a part of the exhibit, but a part of "Entropic Melodies"):

Objectively speaking, this "abstract" is nothing but a shot of a window (you can see the latch at bottom center), where a small pane of glass remains in the lower left corner, a torn piece of fabric adorns the upper right, and the "foreground" is really the corrugated sheet-metal pattern of a building about 30 feet away from where I am standing inside an old barn. What does this have to do with physics? Nothing, and everything (though one would be hard-pressed to explain why either response is appropriate without knowing a bit more about who I am, as a human being, and my body of work, both as a photographer and as a physicist.) I took this picture for a reason, but one which I can neither articulate to others (any better than simply showing them the picture), nor fully understand myself (on a conscious level). It is as though the picture is but one "word" of an unknown language, expressed in some foggy half-formed grammar (parts of which may be of my own choosing and/or creation, and parts of which are wholly alien to me). Paraphrasing an old cliche, it is as though the act of capturing an image pushes me one step closer to understanding why I bother capturing images at all. And how this process unfolds, from picture to picture, is as much a function of "who I am as an artist" as it is of the "parts of the world" I decide to focus my - and my camera's - attention on.

"Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world." - Albert Einstein

Of course, anyone could have taken this picture, were they standing on this spot, and if they had a more or less similar set of aesthetic predilections to mine (independent of how those predilections may have come to be: physicists may be drawn, as I, to the entropic "feel" of the window; artists to the simplicity of the uncluttered composition; and farmers to an unconventional view of a place they spend much of their time immersed in an otherwise very conventional way. The same is true, I would argue, of any other single image. Anyone can, and has, taken more or less the same picture of a tree, or a leaf, or a waterfall, or a dog, ...

But where things start getting interesting is when we focus our attention on a larger body of work, beyond just a few images of this and that. To be sure, individual images in any larger body of work will always still be just that, individual images (the tree, the leaf, the waterfall, and so on). But a body of work tells a deeper, richer story; indeed it tells multiple, and multiply interwoven, stories. A body of work simultaneously serves as diary (of places, events, and aesthetic predilections, among other things), as narrative (explaining how one set of "places, events,..." evolves into others), and - most importantly - as an evolving database of categories that provide an amorphous glimpse of a photographer's self-organized patterns of selection.

"A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face." - Jorge Luis Borges, Afterword to El hacedor, 1960

The more extensive the body of work, the deeper an artist immerses herself into the theme (or themes) that define it, and the more "sincere" (i.e., ego-less) the attention the artist gives to its creation, the more indistinguishable the artist's soul becomes from her work; and more meaningful become the aesthetic patterns and categories that otherwise, more typically, lie dormant, in latent form, waiting to be discovered by some discerning eye (not, necessarily, that of the artist!). In the purest sense - as Borges reminds us in one of my all-time favorite quotes from him above - we are what we devote our attention and lives to. For an artist, this can only be described - at least, by someone other than the artist herself (whose only way of "understanding herself" must come from doing and not reflecting on what she has done) - by the body of life's work produced by the artist. Every photographer, from Fox Talbot to an as-yet unknown "latter-day Ansel Adams" (that may born sometime, somewhere, tomorrow) has taken a picture of a "tree." But the pictures of trees that belong to Fox Talbot's body of work as a photographer are, and cannot be anything other than, uniquely his; as are the trees captured by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Galen Rowell, or scores of other famous and "unknown" photographers. We all weave an invisible, fantastically complicated trail of images in a vast multidimensional aesthetic landscape. While short trails can be expected to overlap with many other trails, both long and short, and are unable to define a unique presence - the longer the trail (i.e., the richer the body of work), and, more importantly, the more sincere the effort of the artist as she forges it - the less important becomes the distinction between the artist and the patterns and aesthetic categories of the body of work the artist has produced. In the end, they are one and the same.

"To create one's own world in any of the arts takes courage." - Georgia O'keefe

So, what patterns and categories of my work, as a physicist / photographer, are on display at the "World Within Worlds" exhibit at the American Center for Physics in College Park, MD? What qualities are inherent in these images that reflect my training as a physicist? What "excursions" do they represent on the trail I'm still in the process of forging in some multidimensional aesthetic space? All I can say for sure, is the images displayed at this exhibit represent what one particular physicist - who happens to also be a photographer - has focused his eye/I on during a short, two-year thick "slice" of time in his life; a very small slice indeed! There are 18 pictures in all, 3 each in 6 "arbitrary" categories. Hardly a sampling that qualifies as even the tiniest of tiny points in my "aesthetic landscape." Could others have created the same set of images? Other photographers, not trained in physics? To an extent, of course, though all would also probably be "different" in ways both meaningful and not. Truthfully, it is as much of a mystery to me what any of these images say or do not say about "how I understand the world" and/or "how I understand myself" as it must surely be to those viewing my work for the first time. But somewhere, embedded within the microscopic strands of an invisible aesthetic fabric, are clues to the self-organized patterns and categories that will, in time, inevitably define the soul that is still weaving them together.

"I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail leaving its trail of the human presence... as a snail leaves its slime." - Francis Bacon (1909 - 1992)

Postscript #1: There is an interesting new book called Photography in 100 Words. It is a sampling of 50 photographers' works, along with a short four word summary of their "style." The author carefully selects four words that - in his opinion - best describe a given artist's oeuvre, viewed as a gestalt. The words are selected from a "master list" of 100 words (that are provided at the end of the book). The book may therefore be viewed as a zeroth-order approximation (as physicists like to say;-) of self-organized meta-patterns in a multidimensional aesthetic space. It would be an interesting thought-experiment to apply this "four word" distillation to one's own body of work; and compare it to how others perceive what we've created. (I did a similar thing in one of my self-published books - Sudden Stillness - using 10 words, out of a total of 100, to describe each of the images in the book.)

Postscript #2: The "information field" at the top of this blog - where keywords provide links to associated blog entries, and the size of the font of a given keyword denotes the number of entries that are associated with it - is also a crude form of visualizing the emerging aesthetic space.