Mereological Investigations

"Whole and part—

partly concrete parts and
partly abstract parts—are
at the bottom of everything.
They are most fundamental
in our conceptual system.

...

Whole and unity; thing or entity or being. Every whole is a unity and every unity that is divisible is a whole. For example, the primitive concepts, the monads, the empty set, and the unit sets are unities but not wholes. Every unity is something and not nothing. Any unity is a thing or an entity or a being. Objects and concepts are unities and beings.

...

In materialism all elements behave the same. It is mysterious to think of them as spread out and automatically united. For something to be a whole, it has to have an additional object, say, a soul or a mind. “Matter” refers to one way of perceiving things, and elementary particles are a lower form of mind. Mind is separate from matter."

- Kurt Godel (1906 - 1978)

Expanding a bit on my past blog post (in which I describe the "Fox-like Hedgehogian" style of photography I tend to engage in - mostly unconsciously - whenever I am on "vacation," consider the image at the top of this post. This is a rare (possibly unique?) instance in which I lead into my commentary by sharing a completely unprocessed image; save that for my opening it up in Photoshop using Photoshop's default raw filter conversion settings. I do this not because I think this image merits a moment of attention - indeed, I should immediately emphasize that IMHO it does not (i.e., I am responsible for capturing this landscape, but do not think this is a good picture) - but because I wish to use it to illustrate one of the points I was struggling to make clear in my previous post.

The short version of my last entry is simply this: that when I am "on vacation" - typically, but not always, somewhere I have never been before - my photography inevitably steps through three partly overlapping stages: stage-1, the "spray paint" stage, denotes a short time during which I engage in the vain hope of capturing majestic "Wagnerian" landscapes in the vain hope of "showing it all"; stage-2 consists of my "slowing down" and engaging the landscape on its own terms (whether it is vast and majestic, or more intimate); and (my much preferred) stage-3, that appears only after I remember to view landscapes not as "objects" to be captured, but as ambient experiential backdrops to my own state-of-mind (wherein the compositions I make are less about conveying aesthetic impressions of specific things captured in a given place and time, and more about revealing aspects of how I experienced specific things in given places and times while I was taking pictures of them).

And so, in this context, consider the "raw" image that appears at the top of this blog post. Since it was taken within a few hours of gathering our luggage at Iceland's Keflavík airport and heading out on our first day of exploring the country, it is not surprising (at least to me) that its quality falls decidedly into the "stage 1" category. Why is this image not very good? The most egregious reason (among many others), is that it is unclear what the photographer (namely, me) wants the viewer to look at (or experience)! The mountains? Perhaps, but they are obscured in shadow and require an effort to see beyond the bright foreground and large cloud; the clouds? Maybe, but they only partly cover half of the sky, and the main "point of interest" (cloud-wise) is a dominant blob that draws in too much of the viewer's' attention; or is the viewer meant to look at the waterfall quietly nestled within a beautifully lit foreground? If so, the lighting hardly does justice to the waterfall, which seems as almost a hopeless afterthought buried in deep shadow. 

My point is not to self flagellate (though constructive self-criticism is something I always engage in; just not quite so openly as I'm doing now 😊; but rather to illustrate how I sometimes use otherwise forgettable "stage 1" images such as this to help steer/reorient my aesthetics and (better prepare for) future compositions. While "stage 2" photographs do not - cannot - appear until I've thoroughly gotten my "capture the majestic Wagnerian landscape" instincts out of the way, "stage 1" images also invariably contain vestiges (unconscious reminders?) of what my "eye" was really looking at, even as it was distracted by the "big-picture." I'd like to think that - had I had more time (or, more precisely, had I gotten over my "Wagnerian" instincts before I encountered the landscape in the "raw" image above), that I would have "seen" and composed these more intimate ("Stage 2") photographs from the spot I was standing:

Alas, my "eye" saw these (embedded, latent, additional?) compositional possibilities only after returning home from our vacation; and the post-processed crops you see here hardly do justice to how I ought to have captured them. I did the best I could, and leveraged the relatively high resolution that my Nikon z7 provides. But my heart and muse both know that what essentially amounts to no more than a bit of "melancholy play" with Photoshop may also have produced significantly more meaningful "stage 2" or "stage 3" images had I been in a more receptive "state of mind," and been patient enough to wait for the right light. The one small bit of solace I have is that while my "eye" was unabashedly and myopically focused on capturing a "Wagnerian landscape," it was my "I" that pointed to what "eye" saw; why else was I even looking?

Forging One's Own Path

About 6-1/2 years ago, I blogged about my youngest son's (Josh's) joyous "discovery" of the magic of photography. Having (back then, newly and quickly) acquired a few "old" Polaroids, including the venerable SX-70, and moving on for a time to Canon's AE-1 Program (a model I learned from in the late 1970s!) before settling on a more modern Fuji XT-2 that he never leaves the house without, Josh's honeymoon with photography has never ended. I had no way of knowing any of this would come to pass when I wrote (back in march, 2015): "Of course, I have no idea how long Josh's enthusiasm will last. It may die out, it may intensify, or it may transform into some other related art form. But if these early indications are a valid data source, he has clearly been very deeply bitten by his creative muse. May they forever more remain inseparable." Prescient musings, indeed!

What a sincere joy it is - as a photographer and loving father - to witness Josh's continued - accelerating - maturation as a bona fide artist. He and I (Josh, somewhat reluctantly at first, humbly unsure of his pictures' aesthetic "worth") finally put together an on-line gallery to show off some of his best work. Speaking just as a father, it melts my heart to see this flowering of Josh's artistic passion. But speaking as a photographer, I am simply awed by his prodigious talent. To go from effectively never having "clicked a shutter" before 2015 (and ignoring Josh's very early foray into photography, when he was 5, and played with a Casio QV-10 for a few days before relegating it to his closet, and never touching it again), to the technically and aesthetically superlative images - any of which I would be proud to call my own, but alas, cannot, since they're all unmistakably Josh's! (Josh does all of his own editing, and has never taken a course on photography) - that you will find on his new website, is astoundingly rare. 

Whatever irreducible bias I may have as a father aside, Josh's images are infused with a palpable artistry. While his and my aesthetic spaces do overlap in places (we both love epic" landscapes and run toward magic light without cost to life or limb), the pattern-of-patterns of his images is uniquely his (this, despite, or possibly because of, being exposed to his dad's photography for so many years). To forge one's own aesthetic path is far from easy, but is a clear sign that something special is brewing. Although he is most passionate about taking - and expressing his photographic vision through - macros, his well honed eye for light, geometry, and composition in general is seen in all of his photographs. But enough gushing by an unreservedly - and unabashedly - enthused dad/photographer. Go take a look at Josh's work on his new website. You won't regret it!

Patterns

"To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings.

We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with each other, or transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in."

- Oliver Sacks (1933 - 2015)

Postscript #1. The triptych consists of images I captured one day last summer after my wife parked her car in a garage near a local farmer's market. I was mesmerized by the "organized cacophony" of shimmering reflections off other car's hoods and hubcaps that arranged - and revealed - themselves to anyone interested in looking. Though I lamented not having my "real" camera, I was happy to have my iPhone to capture this lovely visual feast! Yet another gentle reminder that we must always be on alert to the universe's ceaseless wonders. And, though I rarely talk about the "nuts-and-bolts of photography on my blog (and much prefer posting images and musings than highlighting what f-stop I used), here's a small - hopefully useful - foray into the "nuts-and-bolts" department: to better prepare for unpredictable contingencies (i.e., for when I'm out and about without my usual shoulder and/or back-breaking warehouse-in-a-bag assortment of cameras, lenses, and filters), I recently purchased a tiny - almost babyish-looking - camera; albeit one that is fully functioning! Since it is designed to fit in even a child's pocket (!), I've resolved to always have it on my person when leaving the house for any reason. For those of you curious, it's Canon's G1X Mark III, which is best described as an ultra-miniaturized mirrorless version of their (older) 80D DSLR. While its fixed-lens is neither particularly bright nor sharp, the sensor is effectively the same one used on the 80D; yep, an APS-C sensor in a body that fits inside a shirt pocket! So far, I'm loving it, though have yet to post any pictures captured by it. But I suspect that'll soon change :)

Postscript #2. For those of you saddened by not having Oliver Sacks' sage wisdom around anymore (though his books forever enshrine his genius), there is a wonderful new biography available, called Oliver Sacks: His Own Life. Highly recommended!

"This is a Zen camera"

“After dinner I was distracted
by the dream camera, 

and instead of seriously
reading the Zen anthology

I got from the Louisville Library,

kept seeing curious things to shoot,

especially a window in the

tool room of the woodshed.

The whole place is full of

fantastic and strange subjects––

a mine of Zen photography.”
...
“Marvelous, silent,
vast spaces around
the old buildings.
Cold, pure light, and
some grand trees….
How the blank side of a
frame house can be
so completely beautiful
I cannot imagine.
A completely miraculous
achievement of forms.”

...
“Paradise is all around us
and we do not understand...
'wisdom,' cries the dawn deacon,
but we do not attend.”

- Thomas Merton (1915 - 1968)

Postscript #1. The quote begins with an entry that Merton made in his journal on Sep 22, 1963, which marks the first time he refers to “Zen photography.” Four years would pass before his second entry (made after John Howard Griffin, author of the civil rights classic Black Like Me and photographer loaned Merton a Canon FX): “The camera is the most eager and helpful of beings, all full of happy suggestions: 'Try this! Do it this way!' Reminding me of things I have overlooked, and cooperating in the creation of new worlds. So simply. This is a Zen camera.” 

I had seen a few of Merton's wonderful photographs through the years, but have only recently stumbled on two stupendous collections of his oeuvre, the first being Beholding Paradise, edited by Paul M. Pearson (and, literally, just published). For those of you into "Zen Photography" (which I expect make up a sizeable fraction of my kind readers), I strongly recommend you get this volume. It is replete with insights into how a deeply felt presence of world - of spirit - may be made manifest in visual form. 

It is said that photography, in its purest form, offers a path toward self-discovery, helping reveal how you perceive the world and who you "are" as an observer / participant living in it. But Merton discovered (and immersed himself in) photography only a few short years before his death (he was barely fifty at the time he took his first images, and died a short five years later). His "lens" was therefore immediately pointing outward from within an already well-formed core. Oh, and what a core. Quiet, gentle, and humble pointers to a spirit infused world. 

Merton's approach to photography is eloquently summarized in another fine collection of images, A Hidden Wholeness, edited by Griffin (though affordable copies are hard to come by, as this book is long out of print): “His vision was more often attracted to the movement of wheat in the wind, the textures of snow, paint-spattered cans, stone, crocuses blossoming through weeds – or again, the woods in all their hours, from the first fog of morning, though noonday stillness, to evening quiet. In his photography, he focused on the images of his contemplation, as they were and not as he wanted them to be. He took his camera on his walks and, with his special way of seeing, photographed what moved or excited him – whatsoever responded to that inner orientation. His concept of aesthetic beauty differed from that of most men. Most would pass by dead tree roots in search of a rose. Merton photographed the dead tree root or the texture of wood or whatever crossed his path. In these works, he photographed the natural, unarranged, unpossessed objects of his contemplation, seeking not to alter their life but to preserve it in his emulsions. In a certain sense, then, these photographs do not need to be studied, they need to be contemplated if they are to carry their full impact.”

Postscript #2. I should mention how the triptych of images that appears at the top of this post relates to Merton. The individual photos were all taken during a "meditative retreat" my family and I took back in November (which I wrote about briefly here). We rented a cabin nestled somewhere in the beautiful woodland of southern Virginia (not too far from Natural Bridge State Park); whose babbling-brooks-infused grounds and old storage sheds beckoned quiet walks and contemplation. It may not have been Gethsemani, and I certainly had far less time to ponder - and immerse myself in - our lodge's storehouse of humble riches than did Merton in his Abbey, but it gave me a glimpse of Merton's experience. Less Wagnerian-sized operatic landscapes, and more - much more - simple unassuming delights of everyday miracles and mystery: a vigilant cross protecting a decayed entrance, magic light dancing its way around an "ordinary" bathtub, and a mysterious portal into the ineffable.

Rejuvenative Pleasures of Sauntering

"I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks — who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived 'from idle people who roved about the country,' in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre, to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, 'There goes a Sainte-Terrer,' a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea."

- Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Walking

Postscript: Little did I know back in November of last year (in this post) that the word "saunter" would come back and haunt me - haunt all of us; unexpectedly, to be sure, and not in a bad way, but mindfully and full of joy. For what better way is there of dealing with today's unrelenting virus-induced stressors than succumbing to the gentle pleasures of Thoreau-ian sauntering? And so, my younger son (having now advanced far beyond his early Polaroid experiments and maturing quite nicely as an budding-artist with a Fujifilm XT-2 in hand) and I have been taking daily saunters to rejuvenate our sequestered souls. The impressionistic image above (which captures the gentle swaying and swirling of reeds of grass in a shallow creek along a footpath near our home in northern VA) may not be a Wagnerian panorama of, say, the Scottish highlands, but it is no less able to depict the ineffable effervescence of our lives. Though I started our saunter in a decidedly dour mood (minus my normal commute time, my "work days" are now effectively 3 hours longer!), it took but a few precious moments immersed in a gentle forest breeze, the soft burbling of water and the glimmer of the day's last sunlight on a tiny reed of grass to put smiles back on our faces. Thank you, Mr. Thoreau, for reminding me of the timeless - and rejuvenative - pleasures of sauntering!

The Extraordinary Ordinary

"Quit trying to find beautiful objects to photograph.

Find the ordinary objects so you can

transform them by photographing them."

- Morley Baer (1916 - 1995)

Postscript. When I do photography (that is, when I am lucky enough to have some time to squeeze photography in between my day-job responsibilities), I am decked out with the usual "photographer's paraphernalia" (i.e., camera + vertical grip, tripod, an assortment of lenses, filters, ...). For subject matter, almost without exception, I find myself either perusing landscapes in a local park (that I know the trails of about as well as I know the layout of my home), or exploring color light abstractions in a make-shift studio I've built in my basement. The exceptions are when traveling with my family (when I do essentially the same thing anyway - photographically speaking - but just don't know the trails as well:), and when not in possession of my "real" camera or the bag-full-of-paraphernalia that accompanies it. 

While all photographers strive to transform the "ordinary into the extraordinary" (ala Morley Baer's admonition, and in deference to Minor White's dictum to take pictures of "what else" a thing is), it is often the case that just recognizing that something is sufficiently "ordinary" to warrant training one's camera on is itself hard enough, let alone the task of transforming that "ordinary thing" into something "else." A (far from original) trick I use is to force myself into a more receptive frame-of-mind by deliberately not having my camera at the ready. When the (clichéd) "best camera is the one you're carrying" is not my usual "go to" camera of choice, my mind's eye is free to discover (perhaps otherwise invisible?) patterns, realities, and the myriad extraordinary ordinary things we spend our lives immersed in.

And so, the "rest of the story" behind the images you see assembled in the 3-by-3 polyptych shown above, is that these are some recent examples of the magical "extraordinary ordinary" reality that my iPhone - not my Nikon D810 - consistently and generously reveals to me. The more banal descriptions of what these images are really images of, are, in no particular order: staircases in the building I work in 5 days a week, lights at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (in Washington, DC), the ceiling at a Department for Motor Vehicles service center, light fixtures at a local Mall and restaurant, and a skylight at a supermarket. The extraordinary ordinary indeed.

Masterful Meditation on Art, Photography, and Life

"It is easy to take a photograph,

but it is harder to make a masterpiece

in photography than in any other art medium."

- Ansel Adams

To Ansel's sage words I can add my own corollary that it is easy to write a book about photography, but it is harder - much harder - to create a masterpiece in this genre than in any other "here are my musings about..." creativity-centric medium. That Guy Tal has not only done so - that is, created a masterpiece of a "book about photography" - but has also seamlessly and additionally woven in a commensurate degree of timeless wisdom on art, creativity, and life, is nothing short of breathtaking.  To paraphrase Martin Gardner's often quoted (essentially one-line) 1979 review of Godel, Escher, Bach ("Every few decades, an unknown author brings out a book of such depth, clarity, range, wit, beauty and originality that it is recognized at once as a major literary event"): every decade or so, a book of such stunningly original beauty and elegance appears that it self-evidently redefines how the essence of a creative life may be communicated with 'mere' words. Tal's book is, arguably, this decade's book, and is one to which I happily give my highest and unqualified recommendation.

With the publication of More Than a Rock, Tal joins a small pantheon of preternaturally gifted guides to the core truths that underlie all aesthetic yearning and creative expression. My personal list includes: Doug Beasley, Nicloas Hlobeczy, Brooks Jensen, George DeWolfe, Freeman Patterson, John Daido Loori, Deborah Dewit Marchant, and (of course) Minor White. Yet, even among even these elites, Tal is unique in his ability to use the simplest intuitive language to express ineffable truths; his graceful style gently leads the reader, never pushes. Even those who have rarely if ever pondered "deep" questions while putting their eye behind a camera's viewfinder will inevitably find themselves eagerly and effortlessly tagging along on an amazing journey of ever-widening discoveries; including ways of finding art (in everything around us), of making art (alongside discovering ways of communicating what we have found and wish to share), and of discovering oneself by losing the ego to the creative process. This is not just hard to do; I had thought it impossible to do, before "eagerly tagging along" Tal's unpretentious, sage-like insights.

A dry recitation of the book's layout and content hardly does justice to what it really contains, but for those interested: it is broken into 4 sections (on art, craft, experiences, and meditations), and each section consists of short essays (most between 2 to 5 pages long) on specific topics, accompanied by a selection of photographs. What you will not find, unlike what typically makes up the vast majority of photography books (including those that purport to "reveal hidden truths") is any discussion about f-stops, lenses, or why Canon is so much better or worse than Nikon. These concerns, for Tal, are (and ought to be) as unimportant to serious photographers as discussions of the proverbial pots and pans are for chefs (and for those who aspire to become chefs). Each essay begins with a short quote - sometimes attributed to a well known artist or photographer, but just as often to a poet or philosopher - which sets the stage for brilliantly concise meditations that simultaneously leave the reader both in wonderment about how much has been said in so short a space, and a compulsion to just keep reading, looking, absorbing. 

My advice is to take Tal's book in slowly, contemplatively; take time to digest and assimilate what it has to offer. Though your mind will initially digest its contents, the book's real message speaks directly to your soul. Of course, the book can also be perused simply for Tal's imagery, which is masterful.

It is no coincidence that Lenswork magazine (perhaps the preeminent fine-art photography publication available today) has commissioned Tal to contribute an essay for each of its bi-monthly issues. He is a unique talent, and this book - and his essay/column in Lenswork - are precous gifts for this, and future, generations of photographers. It is available via Amazon and Barnes & Noble (in both print and eBook forms; though my review is based on the print version); and from Tal's own website, which rewards the customer who takes this last option by shipping a copy of the book that includes the author's signature.

Full disclosure: I have never met Guy Tal in person, though I have (on the heels of purchasing his book from a local Barnes & Noble) "friended" him on facebook. As readers of my blog know, I am also a fellow alumnus of Lenswork, but my mention of Lenswork has to do only with the fact that - as ought to be clear from my review - I am simply delighted as a reader of the magazine that I can look forward to Tal's column each issue.

An "Old" Technology Sparks a "New" Generation

I will dispense with my (by now, probably tiresome) apologies and excuses for not posting regularly, and will simply resume posting as time (and muse) permit. On this occasion, the subject is both old and new, on multiple levels. Specifically, old technology - as in Polaroid cameras and Polaroid-film-like one-step processing - and a new generation of photographers, exemplified by my 12 year old son, Josh, about whose discovery of - and burgeoning passion for - a bygone era of imaging I'd like to wax poetic about as both an admiring dad and "objective" observer.

Before we get to Josh, we need to first take a few steps back in time for context. A telling sentence that I have for years included in my artist's statement reads: "Photography became a life-long pursuit for me the instant my parents gave me a Polaroid Instamatic camera for my 10th birthday." This is indeed where my (now, 44th! year of) love of photography was born. While that old first camera of mine has long ago been relegated to an old dustbin, I have for years been  trying to find another camera I was convinced still existed and to which I have an even deeper attachment. After I moved away from long Island in 1988 to start my post-graduate life in northern VA, I gifted my dad a Polaroid Spectra camera so that he could continue archiving his art in my absence (a blessing that, years later, resulted in the book my mom and I wrote on his life, art and legacy, in the years following my dad's death in 2002). Ever since he died, I have regularly searched my mom's home for his camera, but to no avail; until, that is, my mom excitedly called me up one day to announce that she had finally found it. Miraculously, it had been tucked away in a quiet corner of the top-most shelf in her bedroom closet!

The timing, as it turns out, could not have been better, for two reasons; one technology related, the other very personal. From a technology standpoint, were it sometime in 2008, I would have been crestfallen, since Polaroid - after a sad, tragic even, downfall, in the years after its visionary genius founder and chief scientist, Edwin H. Land, left just before the landmark Polaroid vs. Kodak patent infringement judgment - stopped making new film. Happily, an extraordinary new effort - called the Impossible Project (named after Land's famous aphorism, "Don't undertake a project unless it's manifestly important and nearly impossible") - was founded (by Florian Kaps and Andre Bosman) to recreate polaroid instant film; albeit using a different recipe, due partly to the fact that details of the Polaroid's recipe had been destroyed, and partly to the fact that even had all of the details been retained, many of the required chemicals were either no longer available or, in some cases, illegal to manufacture. Though the young company's challenge was formidable, just two years after the project got going, it started producing reformulated versions of classic Polaroid instant film formats, including SX-70, 600, and Image-Spectra, as well as 8x10. As of this writing, the Impossible Project has announced Generation 2 of its 600-type B&W film, which promises to be even closer to the classic Polaroid film than its first generation recipes: image formation within 20 seconds, and a fully developed photo within 5 minutes!

And so we get to my 12 yo son Josh, who, after waiting patiently for the 30 or so minutes that needed to elapse before a ghost-like image formed after his dad took his first test shot with the rediscovered vintage Spectra (using a Gen-1 B&W film pack from the Impossible Project), stood utterly transfixed with his mouth open and proverbial jaw slackened. "Wow!" he genuinely and loudly gasped, "The image is forming by itself! That is SO COOL dad!" To emphasize how slack jawed I was at Josh's sincere, from-the-heart, reaction, I need to point out that none of the other tens of thousand images I have taken during his young life with my digital SLR (the creation of many of which he witnessed first hand, whether at the instant of capture - and instant display! - post-production in Photoshop, or via the final print) elicited so much as a peep! Indeed, I had surreptitiously probed Josh's possible interest in photography a few years ago by gifting him his own digital point-and-shoot, which he enjoyed for a time but was decidedly less than enthusiastic about. But his reaction to the polaroid was different; very different. 

In the roughly two months that have gone by between Josh's unabashed awe at witnessing what he later described as a small miracle ("I can hold the image in my hand!"), Josh, at his own request and partial payment using his own savings, has acquired a Polaroid Spectra, an SX-70 - the extraordinary SX-70 that many, myself included, consider among the finest art/science/technology blends of the 20th century), a shoulder bag and tripod (well, those were gifts from dad), and enough film to last a few months (though he is burning his way through his store like a photographer possessed). Speaking as a father, it is a joy to see such pure, unbridled passion. Speaking as a photographer (albeit, admittedly not quite an unbiased one), I take an even greater joy in witnessing an unmistakable talent anxiously bubbling up to the surface. The sample images you see sprinkled throughout this page are some early - very early (all were taken using his first 4 or 5 five film packs) - samples from Josh's eye and camera. I am impressed by both his choice of subject matter and composition.

For example, where most people (young and old, doesn't matter) inaugurate a newfound interest in photography with obligatory snapshots of friends, family, pets, and their impressions of the front lawn, Josh almost immediately turned his attention to slightly more esoteric subjects. Case in point, the picture at the top of the page (a "self-portrait of an SX-70"). Recalling a photography-related discussion he and I had about lengths of exposure, sharpness of image, and what is and is not necessarily captured on film, Josh - by himself - decided to set up his SX-70 on a tripod, so that it faced itself in a mirror in a slightly darkened room without flash. He did this so that he could take a long enough exposure so that the fraction of a second during which his hand needed to be in view of the lens (in order to click the shutter button) was too short for the film to record. The result was the beautifully crafted picture reproduced here. It is a deliberately "seen" image, somewhat reminiscent of Ansel Adams' self-professed visualization of "Monolith, the Face of Half Dome" (which is a remarkable accomplishment for someone so young). But I was equally astonished at the aesthetic elegance of Josh's composition. The image is essentially an ode to rectangles and other linear forms; with a beautifully placed Polaroid One-Step camera (my wife's, who is also getting into Polaroid photography in our family as a direct result of Josh's infectious enthusiasm) in the lower left corner, as a quiet echo of the "star attraction" of the overall image. This is just beautifully seen, especially by one who has taken so few pictures in his life. While Josh swears that his sole focus (no pun intended) was in capturing a self-portrait of the SX-70, and not composing a picture, I sense that an unconscious - but confident - will-to-order is in play and am impressed.

I am also impressed with Josh's first "abstract series," two samples of which are seen here. Josh has recently been enjoying the remarkable Space Engine program that is available for free for PCs (Space Engine allows the user to essentially navigate the entire cosmos; I have neither the time nor space ;-) to do justice to this truly visionary work. I encourage all readers with an interest in space to download this amazing simulation and explore its vast potential on their own). Thus, "naturally" (though, perhaps this does not come so naturally to everyone), Josh almost immediately pointed his SX-70 at some Space Engine screens he found during his explorations of the cosmos - and deliberately composed the appearance of specific shots to his liking. His captures show an ineffably beguiling beauty; not to mention a Zen-like compositional elegance. Once again, this is astounding for one who barely two months ago hardly ever touched a camera.

Finally, Josh's sheer exuberance with his new found passion for Polaroid photography is captured by my wife (with her iPhone) as he is unexpectedly gifted his third Polaroid on a visit to his grandmother in Florida. This kind of joy comes straight from the heart, cannot be faked, and just radiates sincerity.

Of course, I have no idea how long Josh's enthusiasm will last. It may die out, it may intensify, or it may transform into some other related art form. But if these early indications are a valid data source, he has clearly been very deeply bitten by his creative muse. May they forever more remain inseparable :-)

References: readers interested in exploring Polaroid's history (and, in particular, the biography of the great Edwin H. Land), can look at any of these sources: (1) history of the SX-70, (2) a 1970s commercial for the SX-70, (3) (short) biography of Edwin Land (at the Rowland Institute, which he founded after leaving Polaroid), (4) (video) Edwin Land's retinex theory of color vision, and (5) Time Zero is a wonderful documentary on the rise and fall of Polaroid, and the recent emergence of the Impossible Project; as of last month this documentary was available for subscribers to Netflix. Some of the better books include: (1) Insisting On the Impossible : The Life of Edwin Land, (2) Instant: The Story of Polaroid, (3) Land's Polaroid: A Company and the Man Who Invented It, and (4) A Triumph of Genius: Edwin Land, Polaroid, and the Kodak Patent War. For those of you who would like to dive a bit deeper into Land's work as scientist: (1) parts one and two of Land's 1959 papers on color vision for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, (2) a 1971 paper on his retinex theory of color vision, co-authored with John Mccann in the Journal of the Optical Society of America, and (3) a semi-technical paper (in Adobe pdf format) he wrote for Scientific American in 1977. Finally, a wonderful 16-min long film, The Long Walk, made in 1970, that shows Land giving a tour of Polaroid's offices and factories in Massachusetts.

Postscript: it is not a coincidence that Apple has often been called the latter-day Polaroid. At the top of Steve Jobs' (very) short list of visionary heroes is Edwin H Land. As Christopher Bonanos points out in his book, Instant: The Story of Polaroid, and confirms with published photos, the Ikea-like small but stylish tables that Land and Jobs both used on their respective stages (Land, while introducing the SX-70 to share-holders, and Jobs while demoing the iPad) were essentially the same model. Hardly a coincidence ;-) An hour-long talk that Mr. Bonanos gave at Google in 2012 is available here.

Yesteryear Versions of Today's Magazines - Part 2

In my last post, I recommended a recently published book that collects some early articles and portfolios that appeared in Aperture Magazine while under the editorship of Minor White. All the articles appearing in the new book were first published between the years 1952 and 1976, and - as explained in the previous post - are very different in subject and content from what typically appears between the covers in the current incarnation of the magazine.  

I promised to introduce the second of two anthologies I've recently enjoyed of this type, to which we turn to now. The difference this time is that both the reprinted articles and the book itself are "old," the articles dating back to its inception through 1977 and the first (only, so far as I know) edition of book itself to 1979! The magazine is Popular Photography, and has been around since 1937. The anthology I'm recommending is called The Best of Popular Photography, edited by Harvey V. Fondiller, and available from Amazon in used form (which is the form I bought mine in) for as little as $0.85; new ones starting at $9. Barnes and Noble also lists "new" versions, but they seem needlessly expensive (running from $24 up to $130.00).

To say it has been a long time since I've done much else than inattentively flip through the heavily-laden-with-advertisements modern variant of this once-wonderful magazine at Barnes & Noble is an understatement. Rarely offering more than a few paragraphs that contain general musings (if you can find them in the thicket of adds!) - about how "one should not forget to take a tripod on a trip," or "here is yet another lens you absolutely need (that reads like the review of last month's lens-of-the-month, which reads like..," to "you too can become an Ansel Adams with a few easy steps " - the magazine IMHO contains effectively nothing of use to anyone even remotely interested in the art of photography.

But, alas, this was not always the case, as in the early decades of this once fine magazine some very memorable prose, reviews, insights - and even art! - found their way into its pages. The anthology contains 392 thick semi-gloss pages - which is good because a thick stock generally ensures that used copies will likely have stood the test of time and use (mine is old, but in very good condition) - is broken into 8 sections (that range from retrospectives, to personalities, to techniques (most of which are just as applicable to today's digital world as they are to the analog world they were spawned in), to photojournalism, to careers, to history. There are also short but interesting color and black&white portfolios.

There are articles by Margaret Bourke-White, Ansel Adams, W. Eugene Smith (on Dorothea Lange), and Beaumont Newhall; essays on Andre Kertesz, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Robert Capa, Arnold Newman, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Weegee (among a host of others); retrospectives on the early years of photojournalism; early "debates" on the differences between snapshots and "real" images, and speculations on "what makes a good photograph?" (that are typically deeper and more probing than many of today's sound-bit bits of "wisdom"); and essays on emerging technologies like holography (one article had the prescient audacity to ask, by its title, "Holography - Is It Art? ;-). To give you an idea of the loving detail most essays provide (in stark contrast to the "we'll give you all you need to know in a moment or less of your time" approach followed by most of today's glossy-magazine editors), an essay on Arnold Newman (first published in November 1973) runs 8 pages and contains 6 images (including a wonderful full-page reproduction of his famous portrait of Picasso); the essays on Alfreed Stieglitz (published in September 1946) and Cartier-Bresson (published in May 1967) run 8 pages each and contain 7 and 3 reproductions, respectively; and the one on Paul Strand that appeared in April 1972 runs a full 12 pages (with small type!) and contains 7 reproductions. A mini-course on portrait lighting - again, just as relevant today as in 1973 when first published - runs 11 pages and contains more useful information that most of today's magazines seem to publish collectively over the course of year.

An added bonus in this anthology is a sprinkling of pages in which yesteryear products and advertisements appear. You can read about what the Polaroid Land Camera cost in 1949 ($87.75), the "new Leningrad" SLR from Russia in 1958,  and the Polaroid SX-70 (introduced in 1972). The book concludes with a useful index of all authors and pages on which discussions about a particular photographer appear. Pages 91-103 contain the results of a 1958 international poll  (of 243 critics, teachers, editors, art directors, consultants, and photographers) on the world's "10 greatest photographers." I'd give away the results of this poll, but that would be spoil the fun;-)

This anthology is highly recommended, for reference, for consultation, or simple joy of reading with a warm drink in hand in your favorite easy chair on a cozy rainy Sunday afternoon.

What Else a Thing Is

Since the beginning of the year, I have posted about a dozen and a half images from a (still evolving) portfolio with the tentative title Synesthetic Landscapes. The concept for this portfolio actually dates back to Thanksgiving 2009 (which my family and I celebrated in my in-laws' home in Coral Gables, Florida, and which I can date so precisely because it is the time my eye was first drawn to color-infused reflections in my mother-in-law's Nambe-like metal salt and pepper shakers). So the portfolio by now contains many more images than those I have had time to post. Indeed, I will likely self-publish a selection using Blurb. What I wish to explore a bit in this post, however, is - if you, kind reader, will indulge my usual predilection for philosophical musings and/or ramblings - is what my experience of capturing images for this portfolio reveals about the fundamental nature of "what a thing is, is-not, and may-be."

Let me start with this beautiful image of a print by Hanabusa Itchō (1652–1724):

It depicts a story that has many variants and reaches back into Jain, Buddhist, Sufi and Hindu stories. The poet John Godfrey Saxe immortalized the core idea for the western world in his poem "The Blind Men and the Elephant," that starts out...

It was six men of Indostan

To learning much inclined,

Who went to see the Elephant

(Though all of them were blind),

That each by observation

Might satisfy his mind

...and (eventually) has the men "see" the elephant as a wall, snake, spear, tree, fan or rope, depending on what part of the elephant's body they touch and probe...

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!

A wikipedia article highlights some of the many uses this story (in all its myriad forms) has had as a metaphor in physics, biology, and religion. I view it as a provocative stepping stone for asking (for the moment, in the context of photography, but ultimately probing something rather deeper): "What is a 'thing' really?", or - better - "How fundamental an understanding of 'reality' does our privileged 'view' of it provide us with?"

Suppose you are asked to take a picture of a water glass (say, from the kitchen). What would you do? The simplest, most obvious, approach is to point your camera in its general direction and go "click." The result is a photograph of a glass, but - like the blind men groping at the elephant - the glass will have been captured from a single vantage point, using a fixed aperture and exposure time, with perhaps a filter sandwiched between the glass and our lens (maybe a polarizer to "cut out" some of the glare). Assuming the photograph is technically well executed, it can certainty serve as an adequate representation of  the glass, and others may use your image as a "symbol" to denote the "real" glass. But what - and how much - of the "glass" (and everything it "means" as an object in this universe) have you actually captured in your photograph? Your image is less an "image of the glass" than it is an "image of the glass taken by [substitute your name] taken on date D under conditions C using camera X with setting S." Your image - any image - is but one possible image of essentially an uncountable number of possible images that could have been taken of the glass.

Which image 'best' represents the glass? None, all, and one, depending on one's point of view and ontological predilections. The answer is none, because "privileged observers" are an anathema (at least to physics). There can be no "best" observer, or "best" image. Images may contain more or less useful information (for a certain goal), but - absent such an externally imposed constraint; i.e., an external aesthetic - no one image is "better" or "worse" than any other. The answer is all, because if an objective measure of "better" or "worse" cannot be defined, each image must be treated equally, and the set of all possible images - collectively - objectively defines (the visual representation of) the colored glass. And the answer is one, because there is always at least one aesthetic at play, namely that of the photographer. The photographer is a de facto privileged observer, and the "best" image is the one that best reflects the photographer's aesthetic. 

The caveat is that the resulting picture is not necessarily a picture of a "glass" (since the photographer may wish her image to convey something entirely different). Rather, it is a "picture of a glass taken by photographer X (at time t) for purpose P." This ontological distinction is often overlooked. Because an image is itself a physical thing and conveys information about another physical thing, we tend to interpret what we see in pictures literally: "this image shows a glass, and now, having seen it, I 'know' what this glass looks like and therefore what it is." And yet, this is so obviously not so. Taking a cue from the blind men and their elephant, we ask: What other "views" of this glass could we have, under what conditions (of the glass and our own inner thoughts and feelings), such that we gain a fuller, more complete, understanding of what the glass really is? 

What does all of this have to do with images on this page and kitchen glasses? These images, along with the last 16 or so Synesthetic Landscape images that I've posted on my blog in the last few months, are all "privileged views" of colored water glasses borrowed from my family's kitchen (captured using either Canon's EF/100mm or extraordinary MPE/65mm macro lenses, and using only naturally reflected, transmitted, and refracted light, no "Photoshopping"). Yet none of them depict a "glass" as such (indeed, I hope that for most viewers this will come as an unexpected revelation of what the images "really" are ;-) They are all attempts to pay homage to Minor White's well-known credo to take pictures of "what else" a thing is. Pictures of colored water glasses they all may be, but they are also each fleeting glimpses of other-wordly realms, of wild aurora borealis, arctic seascapes, sunsets, spring and summer meadows, and deserts. And, as well, they are - collectively - all snapshots of my ongoing efforts to grope my way toward understanding what a "water glass in my family's kitchen" really is.

I also imagine that somewhere in these synesthetic sunsets and meadows there is an image of the very same water glass that got me started on my aesthetic journey. And deeper still lies an image - only an image? - of my own eyes staring back at me. What is "more" or "less" real: the glass, the meadow, or the photographer? And are there - really - truly meaningful distinctions to be drawn among the three? Or is the universe but a vast, ineffable, self-created, ouroborian broth of nested self-perceptions? A recursive loop of void and substance? The elephant groping for its own meaning? A cosmos observing itself observing?

Morrison House Photography Talk

I am delighted to announce an upcoming slide presentation in Alexandria, VA, 6:00 to 8:00 pm on August 2 (Tuesday). The talk will be given at Alexandria's historic Morrison House (116 South Alfred Street, Alexandria, VA 22314) and is sponsored by the Torpedo Factory's Art Center.

From the press release:

Photography, Physics, and Complexity: Strange Bedfellows or a New Aesthetic?

Morrison House Presents: Andy Ilachinski, Photographer and Physicist

Physics and photography have always been inextricably linked: by chemistry, light, diffraction, refraction, reflection, polarization, etc. But these are only the most obvious and superficial of connections. This talk uses complexity theory – which describes the fundamental relationships between parts and wholes – to point to a vastly deeper, resonant level on which physics and photography – any creative art – are linked, and offer a possible glimpse of a new fundamental aesthetic grammar. In the end, it is argued, the outwardly-directed journey toward objective realities, and the inner passage toward subjective truths are revealed as but two interrelated aspects of a single creative thread of self-discovery.

Born in 1960 on Long Island, NY, and the only son of an architect and artist, Andy's life has always straddled left– (analytical, logical) and right– (creative, artistic) brained worlds.

On the left-brained side, he earned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics (specializing in complex systems) in 1988 and has over 20 years experience as a research analyst and project director at the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) – a federally funded research and development center headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia – where Andy has pioneered the application of complex adaptive systems theory to military operations research problems. He has authored two graduate-level mathematical physics texts on nonlinear dynamics and agent-based modeling, co-authored a book on artificial-life models and contributed to Springer-Verlag's 10-volume Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science, and is on the editorial board of two physics journals.

On the right-brained side, and both by temperament and inner muse, Andy is a fine-art black-and-white photographer, and has been one for far longer than his Ph.D. gives him any right to claim an ownership by physics. He has delighted in taking pictures ever since his parents surprised him on his 10th birthday with a Polaroid camera. Andy has won numerous awards (in both print and on-line juried contests), has exhibited in many juried solo and group shows, appeared in Lenswork (a preeminent fine-art journal of black and white photography), Focus magazine, both U.S. and U.K. Black & White magazines, and won a photo-magazine sponsored book contest. He has received multiple awards at the prestigious Black and White Spider Awards, and was one of the founding juried members of Lorton Art's Photography Workshop (in Lorton, VA). In 2010, Andy's work was featured (alongside two other artists) in a four month exhibit at the American Center for Physics (in College Park, MD).

More About the Series

This series of monthly talks is sponsored by the Torpedo Factory Artists’ Association, the Alexandria Archaeological Commission, and the Morrison House Hotel. The talks take place on the first Tuesday of each month. Cocktails will be available for purchase through The Grille at Morrison House Hotel, and dinner reservations can be made for guests who would like to continue their experience following the event.

About Morrison House

The Morrison House, a Kimpton Hotel, is an elegant boutique hotel located in the heart of Old Town, Alexandria. Named an outstanding hotel on Condé Nast Traveler’s 2008 Gold List, the hotel exhibits the romance of Europe and the charm of Early America through its decorative federalist-style reproductions. The architecture blends into the historic surrounding of Alexandria, while its warmly lit rooms, soft music, and outstanding cuisine define an experience that is graceful and effortless. The AAA Four Diamond property also features The Grille, an intimate restaurant that serves a menu of relaxed American fine dining. The hotel is located at 116 South Alfred Street, Alexandria, VA 22314, (703) 838-8000.

How Many Unknown / Undiscovered Artists Walk Among Us?

History is replete with lists of names and memorable biographies of the many gifted and talented artists that have graced our world. Indeed, these lists are so long and voluminous (and only growing ever more so), we may sometimes wonder if there are perhaps too many names already on them! But, of course, though not every artist is a Picasso, and not every photographer a Cartier-Bresson, each of us has our own story to tell. Still, very few of us who have - publically at least - accomplished "little" - will ever get mentioned on learned lists that include such names as Picasso and Cartier-Bresson. But what of the "Picassos" that share in Picasso's pool of talent but who no one knows by name, because the output of their creative life was / is confined but to a handful of family and friends? What of the prodigiously talented but utterly unrecognized Uber-geniuses that walk among us? As history also attests, the only real difference between "known" and "unknown" is luck.

I recently ran across a remarkable story about a nanny - and prodigiously talented but utterly unrecognized (until very recently) street photographer from the 1950s - named Vivian Maier. In 2007, real estate agent John Maloof bought a box of 30,000 of Maier's negatives for $400. Having soon realized what a "find" that box was, he has, by now, acquired over 100,000 of Maier's photographs! (only a thousand or so of which have so far been made public; see here and here for a sampling of her images). An exhibit of her work opened at the Chicago Cultural Center earlier this month. Sadly, Vivian Maier did not live to see her day; she died at age 83 in 2009.

It is hard to do justice to the quiet, soulful, graceful, and poignant (and sometimes spontaneous, funny) images that flowed from Maier's eye (and "I"). Using a Rolleiflex camera, Maier would head out into the Chicago streets on her days off as a nanny for rich North Shore clients. What she captured was nothing short of extraordinary! Her best work - IMHO (after sampling the images from the links I gave above) - approaches that of some of the "best known" street photographers of the 20th century. Her images (and overall approach) remind me of (in no particular order) Lisette Model, Walker Evans, Harry Callahan, Dorothea Lange, Robert Doisneau, Andre Kertesz, and - the more humorous ones, at least - Elliott Erwitt. I should emphasize that its not just that her images remind me of the best works by these great photographers; it's that her best work is just as good as theirs!

One image (of two boys standing side-by-side on a cobble-stone road) could arguably be inserted into a Diane Arbus portfolio with no one being the wiser. Another, of a vagabond curled up on a street, is a surrealistic fusion of human pathos and Weston's famous Pepper #30. Another (one of many!) exudes a Cartier-Bresson-like "decisive moment" feel. Still another echoes Kertesz's geometric meloncholy. One could go on and on, comparing this image to that, and illustrating how certain parts of her portfolio are similar to this photographer or that (Jacques Philippe has posted an interesting analysis of Maier's work); in the end, Maier's work is uniquely hers, and hers alone, and it is astounding in its breadth, depth, and meaning! The photo-history books, I suspect, are already being appended - and amended - with Vivian Maier's story!

I wonder, just how many other gifted artists are quietly walking - and creating extraordinary works of art - among us, unknown to all but a few lucky friends and family members?

Postscript: Click here for info about a feature-length documentary film about Vivian Maier that is in the works (for a 2012 release); the producers - John Maloof, Anthony Rydzon, and award-winning Danish documentary film maker, Lars Mortensen - are asking for pledges on Kickstarter.

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)