Network of Perceptions

"A world of evanescent impressions; a world without matter or spirit, neither objective nor subjective, a world without the ideal architecture of space; a world made of time, of the absolute uniform time of [Newton’s] Principia; a tireless labyrinth, a chaos, a dream.

"Once matter and spirit — which are continuities — are negated, once space too is negated, I do not know with what right we retain that continuity which is time. Outside each perception (real or conjectural) matter does not exist; outside each mental state spirit does not exist; neither does time exist outside the present moment.

"And yet, and yet… Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny … is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad.

Time is the substance

I am made of.

Time is a river which

sweeps me along

but I am the river;

it is a tiger which

destroys me,

but I am the tiger;

it is a fire which

consumes me,

but I am the fire.

The world, unfortunately, is real;

I, unfortunately, am Borges."

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)

"A New Refutation of Time," Labyrinths

Skye: Hidden Beauty

"Poetry lifts the veil from the

hidden beauty of the world,

and makes familiar objects be

as if they were not familiar."

- Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 - 1822)

Postscript: an attribute of which - i.e., of "...lifting the veil" - one might reasonably well also ascribe to photography. It is almost an inconsequential fact that the triptych consists of, respectively, from left to right: some reeds nestled near the shallow end of a small loch near Trotternish's Old Man of Storr, a few pebbles found on the beach near Elgol, and some gentle patterns in water captured by the pier at Portree, the capital of Skye. Paraphrasing Borges' narrator (in "Pascal's Sphere"), who is quoted to have said that Pascal's image for the universe is an infinite sphere, "the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere,” one might say that beauty is infinite, "revealed everywhere, and centered nowhere." And nowhere is beauty made manifest, when visible, in quite as rich and sublime a form than on the Isle-of-Skye.

Mystery

"There is nothing in the world

that is not mysterious,

but the mystery is more evident

in certain things than in others:

in the sea,

in the eyes of the elders,

in the color yellow,

and in music."

- Jorge Luis Borges (1896 - 1986)

A Parable, whose Subject is Time

"'In a riddle whose answer is chess, what is the only word that must not be used?' I thought for a moment. 'The word chess,' I replied. 'Exactly,' Albert said. 'The Garden of Forking Paths' is a huge riddle, or parable, whose subject is time; that secret purpose forbids Ts'ui Pen the merest mention of its name. To always omit one word, to employ awkward metaphors and obvious circumlocutions, is perhaps the most emphatic way of calling attention to that word. It is. at any rate, the tortuous path chosen by the solutions—all devious Ts'ui Pen at each and every one of the turnings of his inexhaustible novel. I have compared hundreds of manuscripts, I have corrected the errors introduced through the negligence of copyists, I have reached a hypothesis for the plan of that chaos, I have reestablished, or believe I've reestablished, its fundamental order—I have translated the entire work; and I know that not once does the word 'time' appear. The explanation is obvious: 'The Garden of Forking Paths' is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as conceived by Ts'ui Pen. Unlike Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform and absolute time; he believed in an infinite series of times, a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent, and parallel times. That fabric of times that approach one another, fork, are snipped off, or are simply unknown for centuries, contains all possibilities. In most of those times, we do not exist; in some, you exist but I do not; in others, I do and you do not; in others still, we both do. In this one, which the favouring hand of chance has dealt me, you have come to my home; in another, when you come through my garden you find me dead; in another, I say these same words, but I am an error, a ghost."

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)

"The Garden of Forking Paths" in Ficciones 

To Dream the World

"We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false."

- Jorge Luis Borges

(1899 - 1986)

Symbols, Dreams, and Transformations

"The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy. A writer or any artist has the sometimes joyful duty to transform all that into symbols. These symbols could be colors, forms or sounds. For a poet, the symbols are sounds and also words, fables, stories, poetry. The work of a poet never ends. It has nothing to do with working hours. You are continuously receiving things from the external world. These must be transformed, and eventually will be transformed. This revelation can appear anytime. A poet never rests. He’s always working, even when he dreams. Besides, the life of a writer, is a lonely one. You think you are alone, and as the years go by, if the stars are on your side, you may discover that you are at the center of a vast circle of invisible friends whom you will never get to know but who love you. And that is an immense reward."

-  Jorge Luis Borges

(1899 – 1986) 

Discarnate Muses and Artists

"To take photographs. Such was the entry point into photography. Along the creek beds and waterfalls seeing was always possession and camera affirmed ownership. Since then other modes, other doors have superseded, for example, to make photographs. The greed, however, has never really disappeared. Ownership seems to be the force that opens all the other doors. Yet, possession is not all. As I become more in harmony with the world around, through, and in me, the varieties of time weave together. Chronological time, the time my psyche takes, and creative time were once always at odds with each other. Less so now that the manifestations of inner growth are seen to be set in my path as if by an invisible discarnate friend. When I have sensed his presence, the photographs, afterward, seem like footprints... his or mine is the question!" 

- Minor White

Rites and Passages

"The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.

Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

I do not know which of us has written this page."

-Jorge Luis Borges

"Borges and I"

The Aleph

"All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass? Mystics, faced with the same problem, fall back on symbols...Really, what I want to do is impossible, for any listing of an endless series is doomed to be infinitesimal. In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency...I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me...I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon -- the unimaginable universe."

- Jorge Luis Borges
Author / Essayist
(1899 - 1986)

Time as an Illusory River

"When you touch one thing
with deep awareness,
you touch everything."
— Thich Nhat Hanh
Buddhist Monk / Author
(1926 - )

"Time is the substance
from which I am made.
Time is a river
which carries me along,
but I am the river;
it is a tiger that
devours me,
but I am the tiger;
it is a fire
that consumes me,
but I am the fire. "
- Jorge Luis Borges
Author / Essayist
(1899 - 1986)

"One"

Having, with my last post, reached 200 blog entries over the seven years that I've been posting - and apropos of nothing in particular - I was curious to see what form a word cloud of my blog would take. There is a site that allows users to link to the URL of any blog (or any other web page that has an Atom or RSS feed) and then automatically generates a wordle. The wordle may be loosely tuned by selecting the font, color, visual layout, and toggling on/off the use of common words.

The resulting wordle for my blog - as of Feb 2011 - appears at the top. It is amusing to learn that - despite (or, perhaps, because of) my predilection for philosophizing, blending art and science, and general musing about all kinds of Borgesian and Kafkian realities, the most common words / phrases that fall out (i.e., are rendered in the largest font size) are, in order:

one
another
image
the whole
spiritual
part
fixed
prison
reality

As to what the cosmic significance of this particular list is, and what deeper truths it reveals - if anything - either about my past intellectual / aesthetic meanderings and/or the likelihood of specific future trajectories, I haven't a clue ;-)

Time, Webs, and Bifurcations

"...This web of time—the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries—embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and yet in others both of us exist. In this one, in which chance has favored me, you have come to my gate. In another, you, crossing the garden, have found me dead. In yet another, I say these very same words but am in error, a phantom...Time is forever dividing itself toward innumerable futures..."

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)
Garden of Forking Paths, Ficciones

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!

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.

Lionel Dobie's Artistic Admonition

"Why do photography?" Or, more generally, "Why do art?" This seemingly "obvious" question is anything but obvious; it is also infinitely far from "simple." Indeed, I would hope that most artists never consciously ask it (of themselves); and never use words alone if forced to answer it by others. For (quickly jumping to the conclusion of this short entry) their life's work is by itself a never-ending, silent but engaged, "answer" to (what ought to be an) unspoken question best left to others - those other than the artist - to ask. What can any artist (apart, from - maybe - one whose art is oratory) possibly say in answer to such a question?

I was reminded of its unintentional absurdity while watching an old (~ 20 yo) film called New York Stories. Or more precisely, while watching the first of three "shorts" that comprise this film called Life Lessons, and starring Nick Nolte (as abstract artist Lionel Dobie) and Rosanna Arquette (as aspiring artist Paulette). Paulette is Lionel's former lover, but moves in with Lionel in the hopes of learning art from him. The movie mostly explores how Lionel's creativity is coupled with the fits of jealousy he suffers through while Paulette dates other men. Paulette eventually leaves, but not before Lionel has gone through enough jealousy to fuel the completion of the art he needs to open a new exhibit. As the movie ends, another aspiring female artist moves in and we are left with the strong impression that this "new relationship - broken relationship - jealousy - creativity" cycle is the meta-pattern that defines Lionel's world and life.

All of which is, for my purposes here, utterly irrelevant and inconsequential (though is a fair summary of the short film for those who have not seen it; it is certainly entertaining enough to watch and enjoy). To me, the one shining moment in the film happens near the end, right before Paulette leaves for good. We are in Lionel's loft studio (where most all of the film takes place), with Lionel listening to some loud music and painting like a madman - very much in the "Zone." The canvas is huge (it looks like to be at least twenty feet on the side), paint is being splattered everywhere, and Lionel is - as any artist can confirm while painting / creating - oblivious to everything around him except his inner state. In walks Paulette, who has been patiently waiting - yearning, begging - for some advice from Lionel, but has yet to receive anything of value. Heck, she is not even sure if she any good as an artist, much less what to do about it. So she confronts him. Then and there.

"Am I any good?" she asks. Lionel's reaction is the best self-contained "answer" to that question I have seen; certainly on film, possibly ever, in any context, and serves as a thought-provoking - even soul-searching - admonition to all artists, aspiring and accomplished alike. (I may have forgotten the exact details of what happens next, but...) Lionel throws down his brushes with an Eastwood-like "Dirty Harry" fury - veins at his temples flaring and throbbing - phlegm unashamedly spewing - frothing - out his mouth as he screams, "Good?!? What the f*** difference does it make whether you're good or not?!? You paint because you need to!"

What a beautifully transcendent moment. They are "merely" actors, and Nolte is not "really" an artist (or is an artist of a different kind, stage-playing an artist). That does not matter. Though I prefer answering questions - even this one - in a slightly more civilized manner than Nolte's character, I confess that I cannot imagine a better, more perfect, response. It summarizes exactly my own sentiments.

Why do I do photography? Is it because I like taking pictures with a camera; reveling in the tactile feel of cold magnesium and pushing buttons? Because I'm shy in public and prefer to hide myself behind a box with lenses? Because I'm really a conventional artist at heart but know I have no talent for drawing or painting and so must make do with an "easier" art? Because I'm a narcissist who thrives on hanging my work in public? Because I yearn for attention and recognition from my artistic peers? Because I am in a perpetual search for the "perfect picture"? Because I'm trying to find a way to express my "artistic vision"? None of these are true, in the purest sense (though some may contain hints of banal, and fundamentally meaningless, truths).

I do photography because it is who I am. As surely as my laughing at Monty-Python; my relishing my wife's cooking; my joy at playing with my sons; my absorption with physics equations and computer code; my night-time ritual of re-reading, for the umpteenth time, some story by Borges; or my fascination with abstract art - none of which I can explain the "reason" for that adds anything to the simple fact that they are all things I happen to love to do, so too I can say the same about my photography. All of these things are their own reason and explanation. Life and work and play and joy and love and ... everything else that makes up my life and gives it meaning, is a self-contained, self-referential soup of nested cause and effect, and experience. And they are all, ultimately and collectively, the only meaningful expressions of who I really am. I do photography because it is who I am. And when I stop, I cease to be. Until I start again...

"All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness."

- Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Experience = f(Photograph; Context, Interpretation)

In a recent blog entry ("Photography as Transcendence"), I presented what I believe is one core component of what distinguishes "fine-art" photography from a "photograph" (even an otherwise technically well executed one). I wrote that the finest photography makes you forget you are looking at a photograph and makes you experience it as if it were real; as if you were a part of it. The example I used was (indeed, the whole blog entry was based on) a nude portrait taken by one of the photographers at the photography Co-op I belong to. As such, it was obviously representational; which prompted at least one reader to ask whether I was implicitly arguing that the "finest photography" must depict something real, since how else can the viewer feel she is "one" with the work?

My answer is that photography obviously need not be restricted in any way in what it represents, or how it represents it. Even the word "photography" is needlessly restrictive. It is useful only insofar as it "points to" something someone has created (which the world calls a "photograph"). But once the physical object is created, the word "photograph" has served its purpose and can be safely discarded. It is the object we care about; or, more precisely, the affect the object has on us, as viewers. Of course, the degree to which one viewer "feels as one" with a photograph always depends on the viewer's particular predilections and aesthetics. Ardent admirers of Andy Warhol generally react markedly differently to a given image (whatever the image!) than admirers of the art of Wassily Kandinsky. But that is the whole point; a point that - upon deeper reflection - may hint at the embryonic stirrings of an experiential equation of aesthetics:

Before I explain some of the (obvious?) parts of this equation, let me quickly get the "f" (= "function") out of the way. Feel free to disregard it. It is inserted merely as a philosophical placeholder, and for completeness. It reminds us that there is "something" that binds and equates the two sides, but its precise makeup is (for our purposes here) unimportant. It is exceedingly unlikely to have a nice, mathematically well-defined definition. In fact, the best description of what it is a placeholder for is a "human observer" (of "photograph"); and no one, so far as I know (with the possible exception of Stephen Wolfram, developer of Mathematica and the soon-to-be-released Wolfram Alpha), has yet been bold enough to posit a "function" for a human being.

"A human being is part of a whole, called by us the 'Universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness." - Albert Einstein

So what do I mean by this equation? I mean that - ultimately - that the only experience that is of any lasting consequence to an observer viewing a photograph (or any work of art; or anything!) is the experience itself. That is to say, after all is said and done, after an observer "views" an artwork, the only thing that matters to that observer, the only thing that is of any lasting value, is how - from the observer's own inner point of view - the observer has changed as a consequence of experiencing the artwork. No one can say what that experience will be like, beforehand. The observer is able to reflect back on what the experience was like - on what the artwork means - only after experiencing it (which involves recursive feedback loops on nested experiences, meta-experiences, and the like; none of which we'll get into here). But the observer will be changed in some way. She may be happy, sad, puzzled, angry, detached, thoughtful, tearful, sardonic, ..., or (though unlikely) she may remain completely unchanged, save for the memory of having physically interacted with the artwork. And it is the way in which our ineffable inner state - our prison-like solitary experience of "I-ness" - changes as a function of our viewing of an artwork that defines what that artwork means to us, as viewers.

The left-hand-side of the equation thus represents the inner experience that a viewer has of an observed artwork. The "Photograph" is the physical photograph, and is perhaps the only part of the equation that may be described with something approaching a mathematical rigor. It represents the tangibly objective properties of an image. The paper it appears on, the color dyes and pigments it is imprinted with, its tonal range and contrast levels, and - to some degree - the "things" it depicts (either representationally or non-representationally, as "abstract" shapes and forms; defined mechanically, as by a digital scanner).

The "Context" refers to (1) the context in which the photograph itself appears (perhaps as one of a series of related images, or some other over-arching portfolio of images; is it hanging in a gallery? is it a stray remnant of a discarded box of old polaroids? a web-only image on some unknown photographer's photo-blog?); and (2) the context in which the observer finds herself in while viewing the image, which itself includes both inner and outer dimensions. Is the observer in a gallery setting? is it a private viewing with family and co-workers (the latter set including people to whom she is not as "close")? has she just had lunch with a friend and is in a good mood? has she recently had a spat with her mom and is feeling sad? has she had a long interest in photography, or is perhaps herself a photographer, or is her interest more fleeting?

Finally, "Interpretation" refers to how the viewer interprets the artwork; or the (inner) meaning she ascribes to the work. Interpretation refers to how she really "sees" the work; not necessarily how the work "really" is (objectively speaking, as defined by its physical dimension, the "Photograph"). Note that the viewer does not have to (and, in general, may not even be able to) "see" any of the objectively-hidden "subjective" dimensions of an image, if there are any. Think of the well-known "Hidden Dalmation" image which consists of black and white patches, and may be "seen" as such by some viewers; or may be "seen" as a dalmation by others. The "Photograph" dimension of this experience is the objective image; the "Interpretation" dimension is either "seeing black and white patches" or "seeing a dalmation" (and its attendant associations: does the viewer like dalmations? is she afraid of them? does it remind her of a childhood incident that, by itself, has nothing to do with dalmations or dogs of any kind?...)

"All our thoughts and concepts are called up by sense-experiences and have a meaning only in reference to these sense-experiences. On the other hand, however, they are products of the spontaneous activity of our minds; they are thus in no wise logical consequences of the contents of these sense-experiences. If, therefore, we wish to grasp the essence of a complex of abstract notions we must for the one part investigate the mutual relationships between the concepts and the assertions made about them; for the other, we must investigate how they are related to the experiences." - Albert Einstein

What the equation E=f(P:C,I) suggests is that whatever an observer experiences by viewing a photograph (or any artwork) is a (likely very complicated) function of (1) the photograph itself, as a physical object; (2) the inner emotional and outer environmental contexts in which the viewer is situated in while viewing the photograph; and (3) the interpretation that the viewer ascribes to the photograph (which, since it is also a function of multiple factors, may be but only one exemplar - true for a given context - of a possibly vast set of alternative interpretations by the same observer).

On a trivial level, we've simply decomposed a single dimension ("Experience") into three. As an academic exercise, it focuses attention on some of the basic factors that influence how we view art in general. Other writers, considerably more esteemed than I (and with deeper results), have gone through this exercise before. For example, the well-known photographer / photography theorist Stephen Shore, in his book The Nature of Photographs, introduces a similar set of factors (that he calls "levels") for interpretating an image: the physical level, the depictive level, the mental level, and mental modeling. Each depicts one of the four core elements of an image: vantage point, frame, focus and time. John Szarkowski, the late great photography historian / curator / critic, in his The Photographers Eye, suggests five dimensions: the thing itself, the detail, the frame, time, and vantage point. But however you slice the dimensions - one can always add or subtract to taste - such decompositions, if done thoughtfully, are useful because they partly disentangle the otherwise messy soup of objective and subjective factors that define our overall experience of an artwork.

But what I am after here is subtly different. Assuming that the experience of an artwork is the most meaningful dimension (though, as we've discussed, it too has an ephemeral nature, and may take on added dimensions as the same observer "views" an artwork at different times and in different contexts), what the equation leaves the door open for - at least formally - is the possibility that the same overall experience may result from many different combinations of photograph, context, and interpretation.

Think about that for a moment. Suppose the "Experience" is "feeling joyful, imagining you are in a field of Gold, without a care in the world, and being suddenly transfixed by the notion of Buddhist impermanence" (or anything else, for specificity;-). What gave you this experience? Perhaps it was looking at Ansel Adams' "Moonrise, Hernandez" at the Smithsonian (where an original print was recently on display, and which induced roughly the same "inner experience" in me as I was viewing it). Although we are conditioned to think of our experience - after the fact - as being synonymous with what we were viewing (when asked, we reply: "I was looking at the Ansel Adams exhibit"), the more personally meaningful symbolic (and literal) token of our experience is the memory of the experience itself. It is the memory of what we felt as we were viewing whatever we were viewing; the state of mind we were in, cognitively, intuitively, and emotionally. (For mathematically inclined readers, this is essentially the art-equivalent of taking a Fourier transform between, say, momentum and position space in physics. The respective spaces represent two views of the same system; and do so in a way that preserves information. In our case, "information" is equivalent to "experience," and the function "f" hints at a Fourier-transform-like "experience preserving" sloshing back-and-forth among three dimensions.)

Now imagine - perhaps in some distant time, when evolution has worked its magic on our cognitive / emotional / aesthetic processing abilities - we are able to recall experiences as readily as we now recall things and events. Were we such creatures, we would not care whether the "thing" was the "Moonrise, Hernandez" by Ansel Adams (or the "event" a showing at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC in 2008); we would care - and remember - only that there was a moment in our lives when we felt "joyful, imagined we were in a field of Gold, were without a care in the world, and were suddenly transfixed by the notion of Buddhist impermanence." But so many other combinations of photograph, context, and interpretation could have put us into the same state! Depending on the person, perhaps Minor White's "Capitol Reef, Utah (1962)," viewed on a computer monitor late at night could induce essentially the same experience. Generalizing further, perhaps the same experience may also be had by listening to, say, Beethoven's Appassionata Sonata with a group of close friends at a local country concert hall.

Getting back to - and expanding upon - the main thesis of the earlier blog entry, I now state the main conjecture of this blog entry: the finest photography consists of those images that - for the broadest possible set of contexts and interpretations - yield the most meaningful experiences in the broadest class of observers. Note that the class of "finest photographs" is emphatically not defined solely by the physical dimension of any one photograph; and - critically - includes the observer. "Moonrise, Hernandez" - arguably a fine example of "fine photograph" in the Western world ;-) may rank somewhat lower among the Aka People of Africa (whose collective "aesthetics" are probably quite different from ours). Photograph and viewer are - must be - inextricably interwoven and coupled. A "photograph" has no more a single interpretation, and entails no more of a single experience, than a human is defined by a single inner state and experiences life as a single event (though some mystics claim that is precisely what life is). What a photograph "is" (to an observer) depends on - and is, in turn, shaped by - how the observer experiences the photograph; which henceforth becomes part of the observer, and helps shape what other photographs "will be" and the manner in which they, too, will shape the observer.

"I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive." - Joseph Campbell

Taking a cue from Campbell, we can rephrase the main conjecture of this blog entry as follows: the finest photography consists of those images that - for the broadest possible set of contexts and interpretations - induce the richest, deepest feelings of being alive in the broadest class of observers.

Thought Experiment #1: What would an artwork that depicts all of the possible artworks, in all of the possible contexts and interpretations that a given observer might ascribe to them, look like, starting with - as an example - Adams' "Moonrise, Hernandez"? How would an observer of Adams' "Moonrise, Hernandez" experience this meta artwork? Is there a Borgesian Aleph of art?

Thought Experiment #2: This blog entry has introduced a formal destinction between a "fine art photograph" and a (run of the mill?) "photograph" as defined for a group of observers. An obvious question is, what does this distinction entail for the individual observer? Folloing our formulation, we speculate that an observer - say the artist herself? - seeks that combination of artwork, context and interpretation (as any other observer does, of course) that induces the richest, deepest feeling of being alive. Here's a thought experiment: thinking only of yourself as observer (no collective "averaging" is being done here!...this is you we're talking about!), what would you imagine that artwork to look like that - out of all possible artworks that you can possibly create in this lifetime, and that you can observe in all conceivable contexts so as to form all imaginable interpretations - is the one that makes you feel most alive? Now go out and create it....

Postscript: the image posted at the top of this blog entry is a triptych of photographs of moonlight, reflected in Lake Saranac, in the Adirondacks NY. The images were taken from a series captured during a single, exceptionally clear night in August, 2008.

On the Art of Discovering Photos on a Drab Day

"I find that if I sit down a minute and relax, a solution always presents itself…." - Professor Henry Jones (from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade)

So there I was, sitting in my car, in the rain, after traveling an hour or so from my home in northern Virginia to a park (I've never been to before) not far from Leesburg: Red Rock Wilderness Park. My wife found the park for me on the web, and read that it has some nice views of the Potomac. I had a few hours to myself - my wife knows well my "Oooh, nice diffused light out there today!" look - and so decided to do a photo-reconnaissance run. And it started out great: no rain, nice cloud cover, nippy but not cold. But soon I found my Sunday fortunes waning. I got lost - twice - started hearing funny sounds from the engine and had the "check engine" light come on (which turned out to be a minor but expensive service for which I also had to lose a few hours from my "day job" in the coming days), and it started raining, hard. There was really nothing to do once I got there but wait; though, because of the time I lost getting lost, I did not have all that much time to waste. Oh, and my iPhone started running out of juice so YouTube entertainment was going fast as well. Dire situation all right! Of course, I expected my Russian blood to kick into high gear and make for an afternoon's worth of angst and brooding ;-) What a mess! But wait...I did manage to snap one simple photo with my iPhone to send my wife to show her my predicament. You see a piece of it at the top of this entry: just a simple snapshot out of my windshield. Looking toward Edwards Ferry road, it shows the parking lot and a part of the grainery and stable ruins that are still standing in the park. Predictably, just as I sent the email with the photo, my iPhone died. So I kept staring out my window, feeling sorry for myself, cursing the weather, cursing the battery in my iPhone, daydreaming a bit, but also becoming increasingly mesmerized by a particular section of wall, outlined in yellow below:

  I saw it as not - as it is in reality - an exposed section of an old wall of a Civil-war-era stable, but rather a fortified section of a phantasmagoric prison cell (a metaphoric echo of my inner Russian angst?). I imagined all kinds of Borgesian tales behind the incarceration of "prisoners" held here throughout the decades (... centuries, millenia, ... just when was it built?). Alchemists imprisoned by Illuminati minions devoted to keeping a lid on secrets best not revealed? Uber-geniuses - long since forgotten in the mists of time - who stumbled upon eternal and shocking truths, and were unceremoniously dumped into locked cells to live out the rest of their lives in abandoned sarcophagi? Perhaps these ruins were even once called home by the "Old One", who quietly inserted himself into our realm to taste life of the flesh; yearning - like many of Kazantzakis' heroes - to just revel in the struggle between earth and spirit. What became of the "Old One" I wonder; and is he - still? - struggling, even after the walls of his prison have crashed down around him so long ago? Or was something even more mysterious once living within these walls - something for which to this day there are still no words, no languages, that adequately describe "it" except in the vaguest, most imprecise terms - something that the prison was never meant to contain at all, but was rather built to prevent everything on the outside of its walls from ever getting in? What happened when the walls came down? Have the strange symbols been deliberately etched onto the textured walls by the creature (or creatures) that escaped? Are they ciphers of clues to what awaits us all? Clues to how we might find a way out of an invisible prison that still surrounds us? That contains our cosmos? That is our cosmos? Such were my (admittedly, slightly bizarre) musings as I watched the stable wall ruin out my window, wondering if the rain was ever going to stop and whether my car was well enough to get me back home when it did. Finally, there was a small break in the clouds, and the rain slowed to a drizzle. I got out my camera, steadied it on the trunk of my car, and took a single shot. I knew how the final image would look even before I pressed the shutter; it would hint - but only hint - of the surreal Borgesian world (just on the cusp between the real and unreal) my mind's eye was lucky enough to briefly glimpse on this otherwise drab "uninteresting" day in the park.

It is a photo of what was in the Red Rock Wilderness Park that day; it is also a photo of what else was in the park that day. Discovering photos such as this is why I love fine-art photography.

The Eightfold Path Toward Self-Discovery Through Photography

A while back, I posted an entry called The Eightfold Way of the Artist, in which I describe the basic "steps" by which most artists - and most photographers (not that there is any meaningful difference between the two;-) - typically develop an aesthetic language over a lifetime's worth of "seeing" and "expressing" their own unique vision. That earlier discussion, however, was fairly abstract; and emphasized how the evolution of one's personal art may be used to reveal, over time, the artist "behind" the emergent work. I'd like to revisit this idea, but from a slightly more practical (but no less philosophically deep) point of view: namely, how the nature of the expressed art form itself changes over time, and what we - as artists - can learn from the forms of change.

In keeping with this entry's more prosaic tone (though, as I glance ahead to what I wrote below, I'm not sure how much "philosophy" I've actually stripped from my earlier post; I'll leave that up to the patient reader to decide;-), I should note that it was prompted by a disarmingly simple and straightforward question my mom asked me a few weeks ago (well, it was straightforward, but only before I realized that answering it - in a meaningful way - would prove anything but). Having just seen my Micro Worlds portfolio, my mom asked: "Andy, these are lovely, but why do you take so many pictures of the same thing? You used to show me such a variety of subjects; why the change?"

My immediate reply was accurate but shallow. I said that I no longer find individual images adequate to fully express what I want to communicate about what I'm seeing and feeling. My mom - who is not used to shallow answers about art, having lived with a rather deep artist (namely, my dad) for as long as I can remember - called me on my flippant reply, and probed for something deeper. I tried again: "I don't think in terms of individual images anymore; and when I see a subject that interests me, I want to explore it more, with multiple exposures and viewpoints." In some ways, of course, that was worse than my first answer...my mom countered with: "Andy, you've restated my question quite nicely. Now, how about explaining why you don't think in terms of individual images anymore?"What follows is a summary of the deeper answer I gave my mom after I took a few hours to ponder her probing question. I concluded that my mom very perceptively discerned a genuine meta-pattern shift in the gestalt of my photography; and that the essence of that meta-pattern shift provides an important clue as to what stage I'm in, in my natural (and still very much ongoing) evolution as an artist. I also thought that it might be a worthwhile exercise to think through, and describe, the various stages that I suspect most (if not all) photographers gradually move through as they mature as artists. While my notes contain the germs of ideas for "stages of artistic evolution" whose numbers range from a only a few to more than a dozen, I eventually settled on eight stages (perhaps an unconscious homage to Buddha's Eightfold Path).

Let me begin by stating up front that my description of the "8-fold path toward self-discovery" in no way implies that I have any special insight into the deepest strata of art or photography; it is offered simply, and humbly, "as is" and is to be read - and understood - purely as an expression of but one point of view (which the reader is entirely free to disagree with; indeed, I hope does disagree, with at least parts of it, so as to foster a dialectic by which we can all collectively probe the meaning of art and photographer even deeper).

"A man's work is nothing but
this slow trek to discover,
through the detours of art, these two or three
great and simple images in whose
presence his heart first opened."
- ALBERT CAMUS

Stage 1: Joyful snapshots of anything and everything. What is the first thing anyone who gets a new" toy" (or serious tool) wants to do? Play with it, of course; see what it can do, learn how to use it - mechanically, at least - and just have some fun with it. The beginning photographer - such as I remember myself being when I was barely 10 and my parents had given me a Polaroid instamatic camera for Christmas - doesn't really care much about anything other than taking pictures of whatever strikes their fancy. And that's precisely what they get: pictures of their dog or cat, their room, mom and dad, their own reflection, snapshots of their friends, a tree, a shoe, a baseball game, an apple, whatever. Everyone begins somewhere; and that "somewhere" for photographers is a joyful - but otherwise essentially indiscriminant - expression of a new found tool that takes pictures. And pictures they will take; all kinds of pictures, with hardly any rhyme or reason. In a basic sense, anyone who is alive and is the least bit curious about the world - and is given a camera, or any other artistic tool - instantly becomes a stage-1 artist.

Stage 2: A passive stirring of aesthetic value. As the photographer evolves from stage one to stage two, she still takes images of anything and everything that strikes her fancy but now finds that certain objects draw a deeper attention than others. Her gaze still falls on most everything that surrounds her, but her embryonic photographer's "eye" begins to discern that aesthetic value is not homogeneously distributed; certain scenes, and certain things, draw her eye more than others. For the first time, though perhaps weakly, some aspect of the environment draws the artist's attention. But the second stage artist is mostly passive, reacting to aesthetic stimuli as they appear and are recognized, but still largely undiscerning as to their relative merit and eager to "take in as much as possible." The stage-2 artist creates pictures in which others recognize that certain things are given more or less visual weight than others; but - because the stage-2 artist is still only a "beginner" - the pictures themselves are not necessarily as aesthetically pleasing as they could be.

Stage 3: Willful engagement of the aesthetic environment. The transition from stage two to stage three is both difficult to see "from the outside" (for observers of the artist's inner journey) and dramatic (as experienced directly by the artist). The transition occurs when the artist finds herself discontent with the merely passive capture of objects, and instead actively seeks objects she deems "interesting." She has started to categorize the world according to her own unique measure(s) of lesser and greater aesthetic value. Objects (or places, or people, or situations, ...) that the stage-three artist holds in high regard become beacons in the environment that both immediately draw the artist's attention, and are "attractors" toward which the artist actively makes her way. If the artist finds trees of particular interest, for example, she is no longer content with leaving a park with a "few stray shots of trees," but now deliberately goes to different parks (and other places that has lots of trees) to "see" as many different tree as possible. The stage-three artist begins to learn what she values most, and then goes out to find it. She also learns to better express what she "sees" and is better able to create aesthetically pleasing images. "Objects" of attention in the stage-3 artist's picture repertoire are no longer appreciated by others merely as objects that clearly "stand out" from the background, but as bona-fide "aesthetic elements" assembled by the artist's growing creative powers of expression.

Stage 4: Recognition of the power of expression. The transition between stage three and stage four is marked by a gradual recognition of the power of using photography - traditionally, a print - to express not the object itself, but what draws the artist's attention to the object. In practical terms, this means that the stage four artist is concerned less with depicting trees merely as objects of interest (in keeping with our "tree" example) - being quite happy to display a set of "shots of pretty trees" that are otherwise unremarkable in any way - and more with finding the one shot (and the one resulting print) that best expresses to others why the artist loves to photograph trees. This subtle (and not so easy) transition represents a very significant worldview shift; as well as a shift in artistic sensibility. Indeed, many artists (myself included) find themselves "stuck" at the boundary between stages 3 and 4 for years, as they patiently develop and explore ways to express meaning, and not just being. Making matters even more difficult is that the stage 3->4 transition involves a gradual recognition of - and increased attention to - two different worlds of reality and expression: (1) attention to using a print to isolate the tree as it "appears" to us, as an otherwise embedded feature of the external environment, and (2) attention to using post-capture tools (either in a traditional or digital "darkroom") to properly express the most "important" features of the tree as captured in a photograph. Again, this distinction is both subtle and deep. It is meaningful only insofar as the stage-4 photographer realizes there is an important aesthetic difference between using tools to render differences between trees and their environment (in order to "make them stand out" better from the surrounding clutter), and using tools to selectively render the inner parts of a given photograph (the first inkling to dodge, burn, and make other tonal "changes" to an image), so that the viewer can better "see" what the photographer is trying to express. The slow and careful learning, nurturing, and refining of these skills can (and often does) take years, if not decades, to develop fully.

Stage 5: One picture is not enough. Sooner or later, but only after comfortably settling into stage 4, every artist yearns to go beyond the "image" - to go beyond just showing a single picture, or at most a few individual prints, of a subject the artist holds dear. More effort and more care are put into every single capture (and its attendant post-capture processing); and more and more finished prints are deemed "worthy to show others" by the artist. But the stage-5 artist also grows increasingly dissatisfied over what she is beginning to perceive as "too shallow" an expression of an inner vision that is slowly trying to make its own voice heard. "I like this tree," she finds herself thinking to herself more and more often, "but it doesn't - can't ! - by itself express why I've been taking pictures of trees for as long as I have." She continues, "Each of my trees is lovely, and I'm proud to show them to others, but I'm somehow missing the bigger picture here. It is as though each of my pictures is a chapter in a book yet to be assembled." The artist may not yet quite know what this nascent "book" is, what form it will eventually take, or what it will "say," but her aesthetic eye has measurably raised its line-of-sight to higher levels. The stage-5 artist no longer thinks (or "sees") in terms of individual pictures. Rather, the world is seen as a patchwork; a tapestry of overlapping images. Or, simply, in terms of groups - or portfolios - of pictures.

Stage 6: Telling a story. Inevitably, the artist becomes interested in not just putting together a set of assorted - but only marginally related - prints (as in collections of "best of" shots), but in carefully crafting and sequencing the images in a portfolio of prints to tell a specific story. If the original interest was (and remains) trees, for example, the artist now wishes to move beyond her ever growing collection of "individual trees," to a new form of expression designed to reveal both how "sets of trees" are related, and a bit of the process by which the artist's perception and expression of her general "love of trees" has itself evolved over time. The stage-6 artist thus naturally steps away from a focus on prints as prints (even if they are otherwise a part of a larger collection) and moves toward an increased focus on portfolios of interrelated images. It is no longer enough to just find that one "good" or "best" image - even if it is one for the ages (though any artist is always happy to find it! ;-) - the artist now first thinks in terms of mutually related groups of images. Ideally, each image both stands on its own and compliments and/or enhances all of the others. In more practical terms, the artist now wishes to express not so much her love of "trees" per se, as represented in the "best possible way" by a single image, but a deeper aesthetic experience of trees in general; as exemplified perhaps by a selection of personally meaningful images captured in a favorite park, or accrued over several weeks or months (or years) even as the artist explores other subjects and themes. The stage-6 artist's attention has moved from "pictures" to projects that culminate in portfolios of interrelated images; all motivated by a growing desire to use sets of images to tell a story about what the artist's eye (and heart) is drawn to, and why..

Stage 7: Portfolios of Portfolios. The penultimate stage typically appears only when an artist has attained a certain level of "aesthetic maturity"; by which time a meaningful body of work - consisting mostly of portfolios (though "individually meaningful" images still pop up from time to time) - has naturally emerged. Each and every portfolio has both a story to tell, and is an element of an as-yet unrevealed and unrealized deeper story; a story about which the stage-7 artist hears the first faint murmurs of. A story concerning the truths of the world "out there" as revealed to the photographer through her lifetime's worth of aesthetic judgements as to what to shoot, what to keep, how to express, what to show, and what to sequence into portfolios. The artist realizes that her art has not only captured an aesthetic impression of the world - an aesthetic that is uniquely hers, though the details may overlap with that of other artists - but is a manifest imprint of a deeper aesthetic order of the external world. The artist begins to understand and appreciate certain universal objective truths by examining the subjective aesthetic order that she herself has "imposed" on the world. By studying her own portfolio of portfolios - as though her life's work was itself a "world" open to capture with an aesthetic eye and camera - the artist discovers universal truths about the world itself. In my own case (though I suspect I am far from moving into stage-5, much less stage-7), I can glimpse some of the feelings associated with a stage-7 worldview by looking inward to my motivation for creating my recent "portoflio of portfolios" called Sudden Stillness. Sudden Stillness consists of four fundamentally interwoven portfolios called Chaos, Order, Complexity, and Entropy. The subtitle of the book conveys the deeper meaning behind (and reason for the particular sequencing of images in) the book: visual echoes of timeless rhythms. Collectively, the four portfolios weave a "story" about the fundamental rhythmic patterns that regulate our world (from this one photographer's point of view, of course). In short, the stage-7 artist uses her own work - consisting now mostly of portfolios of portfolios - to transcend art and begin addressing deeper and universal themes and issues regarding the order of the world around her. Art is no longer concerned solely with the here and now - for its own sake, and regarding limited sets of objects, themes, and contexts - but assumes an added dimension of seeking a transcendent truth about the nature of the world itself. And part of that truth is revealed - to the artist - by the artists own body of work.

Stage 8: Self-discovery. Stage-8 is not all that different from stage-7, at least outwardly, and if measured objectively in terms of the artist's physical output (in terms of images and prints). The stage-8 artist still typically produces portfolios of portfolios, still diligently practices her artform, relentlessly striving toward perfection, and delights with each every "beautiful print" as though it was her first, just as she has always done and will always do; but the artist shows no outward sign of doing anything different from the stage-7 artist. Indeed, paradoxically, the stage-8 artist may even appear to others as being stuck on a plateau (albeit an aesthetically very high one), and no longer willing, or able, to "evolve" artistically. But something fundamental has changed - and in a dramatic way, but one invisible to anyone but the artist at first - in the way the artist understands and interprets her own work. Of course, all of the technical components of image capture and mechanical procedures of post-capture processing have long ago been turned into virtually reflex action on the artist's part. Without this being true - something that requires years and years of dedicated and full immersion in art - no artist can progress to stage-8 (this - namely, the need for total immersion - also appears to be universally true of any creative field, if the practitioner wishes to attain the highest levels of "creative accomplishment"). And what is the fundamental change that occurs? In the same way as we indicated that the stage-7 artist uses her art to uncover truths about the world, the stage-8 artist discovers truths about her own soul. The world, and the artist's own work, have both come full circle: the world revealed through an artist's vision; and the artist's expression of the world uncovering the depths of the artist herself. Seer and seen become one; and the seen brings the seer back to self.

“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