Rhymes

"There is no closed figure in nature

Every shape participates with another.

No one thing is independent of another,

and one thing rhymes with another,

and light gives them shape."

- Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908 - 2004)

The Photographer's Relationship to the World

“It is the mystery and splendor 

of photography that the

essence of the art has little to do 

with photography itself. 

The making of the picture 

is simple and quick.

The hard part is everything else:

the whole of the photographer's 

relationship to the world.” 

- Peter Galassi

Chief Curator of the Dept. of Photography

Museum of Modern Art, New York

(commenting on Henri Cartier-Bresson in

 The Man, The Image and the World)

Escher, Paul Klee, and a Turtle, Oh My...

...to which the tagline can read: a snapshot of the corner shelf in the study of a photographer prone to a gentle madness (where the "madness" refers to the deep passion for books, and is part of the title of a book - not shown - that describes that passion). My home, much to wife's dismay, is filled with books; all kinds of books; a veritable (countable) infinity of books, though a demonstrably smaller infinity than, say, the infinity represented by the categories one can imagine by which these books can all be distinguished, and that they collectively represent an intertwined wisdom about. Short books, and long; dime-store paperbacks and coffee-table-sized hardcovers; textured papers and glossy; those with pictures and others with only text; books about history and culture; philosophy, art, religion and Zen; the collected works of Chekov, Ellery Queen, Stanislaw Lem, and Philip K. Dick (with scattered books and tapes by Alan Watts); travelogues about conquests of Everest, Antarctica, and Ayahuasca; biographies of Maxwell, Dirac, and Feynman, as well as Ansel, Cartier-Bresson, and two Westons (Edward and Brett); books on self-organized vortices of consciousness and anything else mused on by Hofstadter; Christopher Alexander's magnum opus; and more books on physics and photography than most dreams can conjure over a dozen or more nights!

Borges famously introduced a ridiculously wondrous taxonomy of all knowledge in his 1942 essay "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" (which he claims to have taken from an ancient Chinese encyclopedia, Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge). The categories of animals alone includes: 

"Those that belong to the emperor;

Embalmed ones;

Those that are trained;

Suckling pigs;

Mermaids (or Sirens);

Fabulous ones;

Stray dogs;

Those that are included in this classification;

Those that tremble as if they were mad;

Innumerable ones;

Those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush;

Et cetera;

Those that have just broken the flower vase;

Those that, at a distance, resemble flies."

And to this whimsical classification I introduce another that leads directly to the title of this blog: an image of the books (and of whatever else might fall onto your camera's sensor) that sits directly in front of you as you work on your images on a computer. Arbitrary? To be sure. Meaningful? Only to the extent that it is a well-formed query that has a definite answer; it may even provide a glimpse of what "interests one" most, right now, as in "I need this and that reference to be by my side." If we are what we read (and eat, and see, and do, ...) then surely our most immediate literary/visual companions are what we are at this moment (so long as they assembled on the shelf by themselves).

So my soul, right now, evidently needs these 15 books to be within easy reach as I muse and ponder and tinker with tones and forms on my computer: 9 are related to photography, 3 to art, and 1 each to mathematics, physics, and an "uncategorizable" category onto itself (best defined by its title: The Art of Looking Sideways); well, these books and an image of an old, wise sea turtle who - like a Zen sage -  quietly reminds me of the transience of all categories and classifications, and that, eventually, even my desire to look sideways will drift into a timeless void.

What do you, kind reader, find on your easy-to-reach shelf of books and memorabilia?

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.

Yesteryear Versions of Today's Magazines - Part 1

Continuing on with my recently started series of discussing / reviewing photography-related books that are a bit "off the beaten" path (i.e., not necessarily those that one would find on shelves at the neighborhood Barnes and Noble store but which would be of interest to the dedicated photographer), we introduce the first of two anthologies of magazines that are still around but containing articles once published a generation (or more) ago.

The first is Aperture Magazine Anthology: The Minor White Years, 1952-1976, edited by Peter C. Bunnell and published by Aperture (the second will be revealed in my next post). As the title suggests, Aperture was founded in 1952, and counted among its founders such luminaries as Minor White, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Barbara Morgan, Dody Weston Thompson, Nancy Newhall and Beaumont Newhall. Inspired, at the time, by the memory of Alfred Steiglitz's long defunct Camera Work (published by Stieglitz from 1903 to 1917), the original incarnation of Aperture continued Camera Work's devotion to quality reproductions, and added a generous bounty of thoughtful essays, commentaries, and reviews. Aperture's appearance coincided with an important crossroad at which fine-art photography found itself at that time, which in a sense mirrored a similar crossroad met head-on by Camera Work. Camera Work was conceived as a publishing vehicle to establish - and promote - photography as something more than "just" a mechanical means to mechanical means of reproducing "images out there, in front of a lens" (see Photo Secession); i.e. it sought nothing less than to establish photography as a fine art. Arguably, and in almost all important respects, it succeeded laudably in this goal. 

When Aperture arrived, some 35 years later, the "fine art" of photography had again come under assault. But this time - ironically - not because people did not accept photography as a bona-fide art form (the efforts of Stieglitz, Adams, Weston, and others had made sure of that!), but rather because so many simultaneous channels of expression had arisen in the intervening years - from the social-documentary-style that came into vogue in the 1930s to the new photojournalism introduced by Life in the 1940s to a new breed of photography that is now called "street photography" and honed to early perfection by Henri Cartier-Bresson - that the focus on "fine art" photography, for its own sake, had started to wane. And so, by the time Aperture arrived in 1952, the photographic world was ripe for a renewed discussion of photography as art.

Under White's editorship, all of the important fundamental questions one might expect to be asked of a still nascent "fine art" medium were asked and discussed, at length, by some of that bygone era's greatest masters. What is the creative potential of photography? What is the relationship between photography and art? What is the relationship between text and image? Is fine-art photography something that can be taught, and, if so, what is the best way to do so? What is the role of criticism? And so on.

Included in the 40 reprinted essays (by such masters as Adams, Newhall, Wynn Bullock, Aaron Siskind, Carl Chiarenza, and Frederick Sommer, among others) are 14 essays by White himself, making this an indispensable resource for admirers of Minor White and his philosophy of photography as a spiritually infused creative medium (a group to which I unabashedly admit my membership). The collection also includes a complete index of articles appearing in Aperture magazine from 1952 to 1976. Since (IMHO, and as I've written a few words about before) later versions of Aperture - beginning with perhaps the very first issue published after White's departure (he died in 1976), and including the run through the most recent issues - took the magazine onto a vastly different - dissonant even - path from the one it would have likely followed had it still been under White's leadership, those readers and photographers who - like me - feel a certain revulsion to the "shock element" that characterizes so much of today's "art photography," will cherish the timeless wisdom of a bygone era contained in this book. My only lament is that this anthology is not (yet?) available as an eBook.

Needless to say - but just to be clear - I am not affiliated with Aperture in any way.

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.

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.

Learning to See from the Blind

Fine-art photography is first-and-foremost a visual language by which otherwise hidden truths and meanings - of the world and self - are revealed by the observer / artist. As such, it is rarely the case that what a photograph shows on its surface is the complete "message" that the photographer wishes to communicate. Indeed, philosophically speaking, one can say that fine-art photographers use images to provide glimpses of a reality that lies behind (and beyond) what the images represent, as things-in-themselves. Just as letters and words provide the basic units of grammar for literary artists to communicate essential truths that have nothing to do with letters and words, so too do light and form provide the visual grammar by which photographers reveal fundamental truths of nature (and our relationship with it) that have nothing to do with light and form. Art transforms the abject banality of sterile rules, internalized through years of rote memorization and practice, into an intimate expression of the ineffable.

So it should come as no great surprise (though, undoubtedly it will) that the blind - yes, the blind (!) - have much to teach those of us who are sighted about what real "sight" means. The image at the top of this blog entry is of the cover of an extraordinary book called Seeing Beyond Sight, lovingly put together by visual artist, Tony Deifell, and published by Chronicle Books in 2007. The book collects the works of visually impaired children during a five-year program of teaching photography to students at Governor Morehead School for the Blind in Raleigh, North Carolina, from 1992 to 1997. The book has a dedicated website; and an interview with the author has recently been posted on YouTube.

Mr. Deifell quickly addresses the most obvious question: "How can you teach photography to the blind?" On a practical level, even though most of the students involved could not see light, all of them were able to feel the heat due to light. Moreover, blindness does not preclude anyone from achieving a technical understanding of how a camera works, nor of learning the rudiments of good imaging technique. The more difficult question to answer - and what the book so beautifully explains by showing - is "How can the blind take pictures?" In a conventional sense, of course, they cannot; but only if by "taking pictures" we mean using the camera to record what they see visually. However, photography, in its purest form, is so much more than that.

Alfred Steiglitz, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Minor White - among many other great "photographic seers" - teach us that the finest photography occurs when we are able to (recognize and) capture that special sliver of time during which the boundary between inner and outer experiences vanishes. Steiglitz called such photographs equivalents; Cartier-Bresson referred to the sliver of time as the decisive moment; and Minor White talked often of the profound role that spirit plays in photography:

"Be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence." - Minor White (1908 - 1976)

But whatever one chooses to call it, the underlying process - for the photographer - is always the same: the camera is merely a mechanical device (and certainly not the only such mechanical device, nor even necessarily the best one to use for this purpose!) that serves to focus our attention (to pressing the shutter) at precisely the right moment when our inner and external experiences align.

"I was thinking that it would be sort of hard for a blind person to take pictures, but it's not very hard. You've just got to listen." (John V., student, quoted on page 48 of Seeing Beyond Sight).

When the "feel is right" - when everything is in its place, when all the compositional elements have snapped into their positions, the shadows and forms are just where they all must be, and when, for the blind, the warmth of the sunlight on the wall is just so, the wind has quieted down, and is no longer heard, the reverberations of distant footsteps are no longer felt, and the texture of the floor is just the right mix of smooth and rugged against the palm of the hand, then we hit the shutter.

In truth, the sighted photographer responds no more to purely visual stimuli than does the blind photographer. All photographers, whether they do so consciously or not (and whether they are aware of it or not) depend on all of their senses to reach that wonderful instant when the shutter goes "click." One can argue that blind photographers, precisely because they do not respond directly to visual stimuli, are actually closer to the core truths and realities that lie beyond the light than photographers who must work their way through to truth (by brute force, so to speak).

Anyone can take a picture of a tree; because that is what is in front of the camera. It takes an artist to use the image of the tree to show you something else about the tree, or something else entirely that has nothing do with the tree per se. Since the visually impaired photographer has difficulty seeing the tree as a tree - indeed, the blind photographer does not see a tree at all - other associations and meanings must necessarily arise that, ultimately, result in some inner train of thought / intuition that concludes with the photographer making the camera go click.

Just as I consider color a "distraction" to the purity of forms and tonalities I try to reveal with my black and white photographs, I can see how light itself can be a distraction if what I am really after is illumination of what light reveals to me (but which I cannot take a picture of directly). It is a great irony - paradox even (!) - of photography that it so deeply but mechanically depends on something (i.e., light) that is, in fact, rarely the focus of its intended message. Even if the light itself is the message (as exemplified by, say, Galen Rowell's lifelong artistic pursuits), the photograph can only capture the effect that light has on whatever environment the photographer has selected to take a picture in, not the light in situ.

There is a touching - or, better, an illuminating - story about a blind student named Leuwynda, who captured a series of wonderful "abstract" photos of cracks in the sidewalk; which she clearly "saw" with her walking cane but which most people are oblivious to. She used her photographs as documentary "proof" of the danger that blind students face in what most would consider uneventfully "short walks" to class, and sent her images along with a letter containing a plea for help to the superintendent. Mr. Deifell muses, on behalf of the rest of us "sighted" photographers, about how many "cracks" there are in the world that we are essentially all blind to?

"If the lights are off, I can see what I'm doing." (Dain, student, quoted on page 138 of Seeing Beyond Sight).

Another student, Josh, produced some soulful photographs of dark, blurry stairs that he used to communicate - via metaphor - a dream he had about being lost and wandering aimlessly in a snowstorm. Other students started using their growing collections of photographs as a means to develop otherwise under-developed communication skills. Merlett, for example, was both blind and learning disabled, and found reading and writing akin to torture. Photography provided a new - and joyous - language in which she could express herself and, as it turned out, tell all the stories she had always wanted to tell others but could not do so in a conventional way.

The book contains a short introduction by the author (and teacher), followed by a selection of student photographs organized into five sections: (1) distortion, (2) refraction, (3) reflection, (4) transparence, and (5) illuminance. It concludes with an afterward, a short FAQ, and a summary of where the students who participated in the project are today.

"How do you not cut people's heads off in a photo? Just ask the person where they are." (Frances, student, quoted on page 112 of Seeing Beyond Sight).

For me, the book (and the project on which it is based) is a revelation. Were it not for the context in which the images in this book were captured, and the accompanying stories of how individual images came to be, one would be tempted to "dismiss" many of the photographs as "amateurish" and merit-less as fine-art. And that would be sadly unfortunate; for these images go to the heart of human experience and artistic expression. They show us what lies beyond the light that illuminates what we take pictures of, and what all photographers - with and without the gift of sight - are trying to reveal with their photography.

Anybody with a decent camera can take a picture of a crack in the sidewalk - and have the image met with blank stares and mutterings of "Yeah, it's a crack in the sidewalk., so what?" It takes a blind photographer to so effortlessly use a physical symbol - i.e., a photograph of some "thing" - to represent the deeper, inner experience of how "difficult it is to walk to class" on a campus built by people who can see. By not being able to see things, the blind photographer naturally focuses on using the things that the camera is able to capture to show what else things are. And that is what the very best photography has always been about.

While I have focused mainly on the philosophical end of the spectrum in this short commentary, I would be remiss in not mentioning that I was just as struck about how powerful a general learning tool - about self, about world, about learning (!) - the project was for the students involved. In some ways, though not quite as "obviously" dramatic - the results of the project remind me of Oliver Sacks' Awakenings (though here the "awakenings" are more spiritual than physical).

The blind obviously have much to teach us sighted photographers how to really see. They teach us to pay attention to all of the little "invisible cracks" in the world, and to not rely exclusively on our eyes in doing so. There is no better place to begin the first lesson on this journey of illumination - which takes the form of a gentle admonition to just "close your eyes" - than to savor the examples in this magnificent book, Seeing Beyond Sight. Highly recommended.

Postscript #1: There is recent evidence that suggests that "blindsight" - i.e., the ability "see" even if completely blind to visual stimuli - is real (and is due to previously unknown ancient evolutionary sensory pathways). See Blind Man Navigates Maze.

Postscript #2: A few days after posting my blog entry, I ran across another review of Seeing Beyond Sight very much in the spirit of mine; which is to say, philosophically infused and considerably more about "seeing" than seeing.

Postscript #3: There is a similar, but unrelated, book about photography by visually impaired photographers, called Shooting Blind, published by Aperture. An associated website also contains some extraordinarily haunting photographs.

The Four-Dimensional Photographer

Stephen Shore, the well known photographer (and teacher; who, among other things, was the first living photographer to have a one-man show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY) has recently updated his classic meditation on the Nature of Photographs. Recommended to all aspiring (and working) photographers, the beauty of this book is the density of its distilled wisdom.

You will not find anything here on f-stops, film speeds and lenses, nothing on the darkroom (analog or digital), nothing on the raging "debate" whether to pick up an 8 megapixel DSLR or a 10, and no instructions - at least explicit ones - on how to take "better" pictures. What you will find is the crystalline essence of Shore's lifetime's worth of thinking about the nature of the photograph. His short, Zen-like prose-poem musings pierce the proverbial bullseye like an archer's arrow; and leave the reader both enchanted and haunted by their eloquence and wisdom.

Shore reminds us that amidst the infinity of potential images, both real and imagined, the photographer has four - and only four - formal tools for defining a picture's content and organization: vantage point, frame, focus and time. Stop and think about that for a moment. With all the wonderful technology underneath our thumb as we prepare to press the shutter, with all the different ways in which we can image ourselves "taking" a shot, and all the different images that can conceivably exist, the photographer really only has these four fundamental "creative dimensions" with which to work, and no more! Where do I position myself; what do I put in the picture and what do I leave out; where should I focus my attention; and how much of a slice of time do I want to include?

Every picture that has ever been taken, and every photograph yet to be captured - from Adams' shots of Yosemite, to Cartier-Bresson's visual etudes on the "Decisive Moment," to visual realities created by some future technologies - is "reality" as aesthetically transformed by the four-dimensional human creative filter!

Yet somehow, miraculously even, this suffices to provide (however brief) glimpses of an infinite dimensional world of meaning and beauty. That is the magic of photography!

More Fog

Here is a shot I have some fond memories of, from about a year ago; taken (as are almost all of my shots) in a local park (Lake Accotink), this time while on a "fog break" from work.

What I remember vividly about this shot is that it was a complete fluke...I was focusing all of my attention on some driftwood much closer to my feet (and not visible in the photo here), and actually made quite a few (in hindsight, unsuccessful) exposures, when I heard a flock of geese overhead. Without taking my eye off my camera's eyepiece, I swiveled the camera on its tripod (and went as wide as I could on my lens) to see if I could get a glimpse of the flock...and got off a single shot. While I was delighted in seeing the geese, I did not expect anything to come of my rapid swivel- tilt- press-shutter action, and I immediately went back to shooting the driftwood.

Well, its not quite a Cartier-Bresson, but it turned out to be the only keeper of the day that day! ;-) I was lucky enough to have it published in the British Black & White Photography magazine (issue #45, April 2005).

Ten "Epiphanous" Photographs: #5

The fifth of ten "epiphanous photographs" - a hand-picked series of photographs as defined in an earlier Blog entry - is...

Epiphanous Photograph #5: André Kertész's Mondrian’s Glasses and Pipe, Paris, 1926


André Kertész (1894 - 1985) captured his first photograph while working as a clerk at the Budapest stock exchange in 1912. A member of the Austro-Hungarian Army during WWI, Kertész photographed his experiences of the war until he was wounded in battle in 1915. Unfortunately, many of the images he captured during this time were lost during the Hungarian Revolution of 1918.

Thereafter, this preturnatually gifted poetic soul traveled to Paris (in 1925), where he worked as a freelance photographer and published three books of his images; and on to New York (in 1936), where one of the 20th Century's most gifted photographers was effectively cold-shouldered by the photographic "establishment" and relegated to taking pictures of architecture and home interiors for House and Garden. In what must be one of the most egregious oversights in photographic history, not a single one of his images was selected for Steichen's famous The Family of Man exhibition in 1956! It was only after Kertész retired from commercial work (in 1962) that he was again able to devote his considerable powers of observation and feeling to the same "simple" everyday subjects of his "amateurish" youth. Kertész left behind a legacy of beautiful, meloncholic tonal poems for all future generations of aspiring photographers to marvel at; and to marvel at the breadth and depth of his feeling for the human condition.

I have selected Kertész's Mondrian’s Glasses and Pipe as my epiphanous image #5 for two reasons: (1) it is a wonderful example of his visual poetry, with the gentle perfection of the geometry of the composition (that slightly evokes the "Decisive Moment" component of Henri Cartier-Bresson's approach, though with a decidedly less-fast-paced subject!), and (2) it is also an example of how subtly Kertész is able to fuse the everyday with the abstract. On one level, the photograph is about nothing more than glasses (and a pipe); on another level, it is an "abstract" in the spirit of Minor White (in the way it uses the objective image to reflect the inner meloncholy of the photographer).

However, Kertész's fusion of the everyday and abstract features an important additional dimension (as does much of his life's work); a dimension that makes this one photograph so memorable to me (and places it firmly on my list of personally epiphanous photographs): the tonal forms of the photograph are used not just as a symbolic language of the inner emotions of the photographer, but as a language that speaks directly about how the photographer relates to humanity.

Where Minor White deliberately used essentially unrecognizable abstract forms to communicate inner states, Kertész instead used immediately recognizable shapes and symbols to convey the nature - and feeling - of his connection (or, more often than not, dis-connection) to the world around him. The fragile interconnected bond between artist and humanity was the real "subject" of Kertész's poetic gaze; and we can all feel it, as we look upon the shapes and tones of Mondrian's glasses and pipe. His work is less about the traditional subjects of photographs (people, places and things), even as the traditional subjects populate his portfolio, and more - much more - about his feelings about his relationships with the traditional subjects that came within view of this gentle artistic soul.

"The moment always dictates in my work. What I feel, I do. This is the most important thing for me. Everybody can look, but they don't necessarily see. I never calculate or consider; I see a situation and I know that it's right, even if I have to go back to "get the proper lighting." - André Kertész.

Kertész's work in general, and this one picture in particular, made me appreciate the fundamental role the capture of one's raw, emotional attachment to the human condition plays in shaping the communicative power of photography. It also intensified - immeasurably! - my love of fine art photography.

Ten "Epiphanous" Photographs: #3

The third of ten "epiphanous photographs" - a hand-picked series of photographs as defined in an earlier Blog entry - is...

Epiphanous Photograph #3: Henri Cartier-Bresson's Siphnos, Greece, 1961


Though definitive statements of the following form, particularly in an aesthetic medium, are as a rule at best controversial and at worst meaningless, one could nonetheless well argue that Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) was the most prodigiously gifted photojournalist ever to use a camera.

Paraphrasing what the mathematician Mark Kac once said of Richard Feynman (the great 20th Century physicist), one can say of Cartier-Bresson that "there are two kinds of geniuses: the 'ordinary' and the 'magicians'. An ordinary genius is a fellow whom you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they've done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. Even after we understand what they have done it is completely dark. [Henri Cartier-Bresson] is a magician of the highest calibre." (see Wikiquote entry on Feynman for original quote).

Cartier-Bresson is most famous for introducing the idea of the "Decisive Moment" into the photographer's lexicon, which he described in his celebrated book of the same name in 1952 as "...the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression."

One can see the "Decisive Moment" at play in virtually all of Cartier-Bresson's photographs; there is no "one best" representative of it, and which images illustrate the idea better than others depends more on context, mood and the temperament of the observer than innate quality. The first Cartier-Bresson image that I can remember having a profound influence on me was his Siphnos, Greece shot reproduced above.

I was struck (when I first saw it as a young photographer, and even more so now, after trying, mostly unsuccessfully, at capturing that stubbornly elusive "Decisive Moment" for a few decades!) by the perfectly seamless (and, seemingly effortless) blend of geometry, time, and dynamics.

The geometry is exquisite in its "imperfect" precision; the buildings are old and withered, the road is well traveled and decaying, but together there is a deep harmony. The harmony is only enhanced by the deep contrast, with the shadows - falling just so, at this precise moment - adding an almost surreal virtual dimension to the physical architectonic shapes. As if all of that were not enough to yield a magnificent moment, the girl racing up the stairs is positioned in exactly the right spot to give life to the entire picture, and with a body posture whose geometry exactly matches that of the surrounding forms and shadows. Masterful, is not the word! You can feel her energy; you feel her heart racing as she makes her way up the stairs; the coolness on her skin as she is momentarily embraced by the precise shadow. And then, as a final reward, as the eye slowly pans around the scene, small details to savor are revealed: the texture of the road, the detail on the door on the right, the architectural "accent" on the otherwise featureless wall at the upper left. The ineffable transience of space, time, geometry, dynamics, and the natural flow of human life, is captured at the Decisive Moment. And then, Poof!, the girl is gone, the shadows pass, a cloud moves in overhead, and the moment is gone, forever.

I have been chasing decisive moments ever since; and it is the third reason I have always been passionate about fine art photography.

Photography and the Creative Process

Three exceptional new DVDs, released by Arte Video (and a coproduction of Arte France, KS Visions and The National Center for Photography), explore the creative process behind the works of some master photographers. Each DVD consists of about 10 short (10-15 min long) "essays" focusing on one photographer, using images (contact sheets, proofs, prints, or slides) with commentary by the artist himself. Together, these films provide an unparalleled excursion into the creative process of photography.

Contacts Volume 1: The Great Tradition of Photojournalism includes Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Klein, Raymond Depardon, Mario Giacomelli, Josef Koudelka, Robert Doisneau, Edduard Boubat, Elliot Erwitt, Marc Riboud, Leonard Freed, Helmut Newton, and Don McCullin.

Contacts Volume 2: The Renewal of Contemporary Photography includes Sophie Calle, Nan Goldin, Duane Michals, Sarah Moon, Nobuyoshi Araki, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Jeff Wall, Lewis Baltz, and Jean-Marc Bustamante.

Contacts Volume 3: Conceptual Photography includes John Baldessari, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Christian Boltanski, Alain Fleischer, John Hilliard, Roni Horn, Martin Parr, Georges Rousse, Thomas Struth, and Wolgang Tillmans.

Cartier-Bresson's "Decisive Moment"

Henri Cartier-Bresson was arguably one of the most gifted photographers (in photojournalism) that has ever used a camera. One of his earliest books, a mini masterpiece of exposition on the art and craft of photography as well as timeless images, was called the "Decisive Moment" (and is now a catch phrase for which he is justly famous). It is also notoriously difficult to obtain; Amazon, for example, lists a used copy for $1600! Here is a site, however, that has lovingly reproduced the entire opus on-line, one page at a time. It is an incredible gift to the photography community. Read, and enjoy!