New Book Published: The Art and Life of Sam Ilachinski

After nearly as long a gestation-period as my first book required (that one, published in 2001, was on a decidedly technical subject - cellular automata - and took about a decade to complete), I am delighted to announce the publication of a new book - this one very much about fine art - about my dad's life. 

"I like to paint," is how my dad - Sam ("Slava") Ilachinski - almost always answered the question, "What do you do?", along with the minor variation, "I liked to paint," if asked about what he remembered about his childhood. These simple phrases serve as perfect epitaphs to this preternaturally gifted artist, who spent virtually all of his 75 years creating magnificent works of art. 

Born in 1925 in Taganrog, Russia (birthplace of Anton Chekov), my dad's family lived in Germany before emigrating to the United States. Making homes first in Jamaica, NY, and later in Sea Cliff, Long Island, Slava became a renowned and much sought-after art restorer, and an even more gifted artist. Many expert observers have likened his more abstract work (that he focused more and more on in the waning years of his life) as an additional layer to Kandinsky's already transcendent vision of color and energy. 

Sadly, almost incomprehensibly, my dad passed away on March 30, 2002, after a very long and painful bout with several forms of cancer. Seldom has a soul so bravely fought the miseries of this disease, or faced each new setback with as profound a grace and humor. Despite his enormous physical difficulties, Slava never strayed too far from his beloved studio, even as the already brief stretches of time his poor withered legs were able to support him kept right on diminishing. 

Everyone who has known this brilliant and humble man knows that they are forever blessed with the memory of a soul who, via his art, brought all of us a step closer to God. His eye for beauty, his deep resonance with nature's sacred patterns, and his gentle humility will be missed more than words alone can possibly convey. 

Many artists have come and gone, of course, and many creative people remain in our midst, but never again will the world's beauty be quite so radiant, and the portal to the spiritual realm quite so wide and inviting, as when this quiet, visionary genius was immersed and reveling in the creative process in his studio. 

My mom and I offer this book on the art and life of Sam Ilachinski both as a loving tribute to a beautiful soul, and as a portal for others to discover - and marvel at - the precious gifts he left behind.

The Art and Life of Sam Ilachinski by Katherine and Andy Ilachinski | Make Your Own Book

Postscript. In a bit of Jungian synchronicity (insofar as it was completely unplanned, at least consciously, by me), after nearly a decade of effort - writing, archiving, digitizing (old slides and film), restoring old pictures, and so on - the final words of the text and images for display were inserted midday on father's day, this past Sunday. My muse could not possibly have chosen any better day to mark the formal completion of this labor-of-love project.

"Synesthetic Landscapes" Portfolio Book Published

"…lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and… stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to ‘walk about’ into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?" - Wassily Kandinsky

Those of you following my blog must know that - over the last few years (dating back to Dec 2009) - I've been consumed with capturing what I call "synesthetic landscapes." Synesthesia derives from the Greek syn = union + aisthaesis = sensation, and means "joined sensation." Such as when something that is ordinarily "seen" is tasted as well; though this hardly does justice to the psychological, creative - even mystical - experience of synesthesia (which I possessed until about the age of 10, during which I "saw" numbers as colors, the most common form of synesthesia). 

My experiments to recreate some semblance of these memories of the experience have technically consisted of using one "reality" - consisting of shallow depth-of-field, extreme macro (1x - 5x) photographs of mundane everyday objects, from curved reflecting metal surfaces to translucent colored glass bottles and glasses - to evoke an experience of another, less "obvious" landscape of the mind's eye. The result is synesthetic in the sense that, just as synesthetes use two or more senses other than the one nominally used to designate a given experience of an object to add to their experience of its ostensible "reality," my experimental images are designed to collectively evoke glimpses of surrealities by adding other - visually nonliteral - representational dimensions to our direct experience of reality.

The result is also an experiential synergy between two ostensibly different (but fundamentally intertwined) realities: one literal, and external - i.e., reflections and/or refractions from common everyday "things" - the other implied, and internal - i.e., ineffable landscapes of the imagination. (I should add, and emphasize, that while all the images in this series look like they are severely "Photoshopped," this is emphatically not so; digital manipulations are all deliberately confined to global curves, local tonal adjustment, and occasional noise removal. What you "see" is what is / was "really there," although what your experience of "it" will be ... will be whatever your "eye" and/or "I" will make it ;-)

Synesthetic Landscapes by Andy Ilachinski | Make Your Own Book

And so, for those of you interested in exploring my ongoing experiments with "synesthetic landscapes," I announce the publication of two portfolio editions: one small (consisting of about 40 images), the other large (consisting of 105 images, which includes all of those that appear in the "small" version). Both versions physically measure 7-by-7 inches (although a larger 12-by-12 inch version of the small portfolio edition is also available), come with soft- and hard-cover options, include an introductory essay on synesthesia and photography and an end-notes section that describes the process I used to capture these images (though this process continues to evolve, of course), and include a low-cost eBook edition (that is available as a direct download for Apple's iBooks).

"Color is the key.

The eye is the hammer. 

The soul is the piano with its many chords. 

The artist is the hand that, 

by touching this or that key, 

sets the soul vibrating automatically."

- Wassily Kandinsky

Photographs Not Taken

Astute readers may have noticed that not too many new blog entries have appeared here in the last few weeks. The reason, as always, is due to the constraints imposed on my life outside of photography (the side that pays most of my family's bills, by far;-) The two sides rarely interact, though on occasion - and usually unexpectedly - partly intersect. Such as happened yesterday, when - while being introduced to speak at a scientific meeting (on a distinctly non-photography related subject) - the person doing the introduction turned to me and asked whether my slides will include samples of my photography? My mind was so far from photography at that moment (indeed, I was deeply immersed in my usual minute-before-giving-a-talk inner meditation ritual), that I hardly reacted at all and certainly had no idea what to say. I managed to stammer something banal like, "No, no, that's just something I do on the side." Which is, of course, both literally true (if one measures such things in terms of "time spent"), and emphatically false (if the metric is "soulful nourishment gained").

However, neither metrics nor the "scientific talk" I gave yesterday is the focus of this short (and new!) blog entry. My wish is merely to point out a wonderful little book - called Photographs Not Taken - whose subject and insights are very apropos, given the recent constraints on my ability to do photography. The book is a collection of short essays - by a wide range of photographers - about moments in space and time that never became photographs! Oh, how well I (as all photographers can, at one time or another) resonate with those moments. Maybe we've forgotten our camera, or our tripod, or filter; maybe our camera froze at an inopportune moment; maybe the subject of our gaze shifted its position, or flew away, as we were preparing to take the picture; maybe a gust of wind blew that perfectly composed image into the mists of time, or that sudden burst of sun from behind a cloud ruined the perfect exposure. Or maybe, as has been the case for me for more than a few weeks now, everything is in its proper place and perfect working order except me. Lately, my mind has been so filled - and exhausted - from day-job angst, equations, computer code, briefing slides, and more angst, that about the only images I've managed to capture have been quick-grab iPhone images of some older prints of mine I have hanging in my office to send to a friend.

So, Photographs Not Taken well summarizes my body of work over the last several weeks ;-) But it also reminds me of other genuine "Photographs Not Taken" moments I experienced in the past, when, even though I was in the right state of mind and soul, and had perfectly well functioning camera and gear by my side, the photograph I wanted to take - the photograph I needed to take - I did not take, and is now gone forever. The photograph I am thinking of - more precisely the series of photographs I could easily have taken and never did - happened between 25 and 30 years ago, when my dad (an art restorer / artist) was still in his prime and worked at home in his upstairs studio. Except for this one precious photograph, I do not have any other visual record of my dad working as an art restorer in his studio! I have written before about this being the single greatest regret in my life as a photographer (thus far); namely, that I had never trained my eye and camera on my dad while he worked in his studio. A regret that stings only deeper each year that passes since he passed away 10 years ago.

Readers interested enough to look up the essays in Photographs Not Taken will be treated to many stories similar to mine, that range from whimsical, to personal, to tragic. Of course, the book contains no photographs (at least of the conventional variety ;-) and even the typesetting is kept to a bare minimum, the focus being squarely on the stories themselves. Collectively, these wonderful stories teach us what we must do to become better photographers. They remind us that we are - in each and every moment of our lives - immersed in an infinite field of ever-changing extraordinary and timeless images; and the fact that we have or have not a camera, or want or do not want or cannot use it, hardly even matters. Just look, revel in what you feel, and remember.

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?

Symbolic Omniscience

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

- GYORGY KEPES

Education of Vision

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

- STANISLAW LEM

Solaris

Poetics of Space

"House, patch of meadow, oh evening light

Suddenly you acquire an almost human face

You are very near us,

embracing and embraced."

- RAINER MARIA RILKE

"Our house is our corner of the universe... it is our universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word. If we look at it intimately, the humblest dwelling has beauty... The house, like fire and water...[recalls]... flashes of daydreams that illuminate the synthesis of immemorial and recollected... Through dreams, the various dwelling-places in our lives co-penetrate and retain the treasure of former days... We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection... The house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace... The places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as daydreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time."

- GASTON BACHELARD

The Poetics of Space

Transcendent Order

"When we say that order is transcendent, we mean to say that somehow, the order makes contact with some other reality, or some other 'something,' which lies outside of and beyond our normal experience. We need a word for this something. It is hard  to find a suitable word, since, by definition, the something is beyond normal experience - and presumably, therefore, outside the range of things which have ordinary names... I use the word 'ground'  to refer to this something.

The ground is imagined to be a pure reality. It is a state of reality, or substance, which is in the universe, but not accessible to normal perception and normal awareness. It is, however, not assumed to be distant. It is generally assumed to be here where we are, and even more real, more authentic, than the reality we normally experience. It is thus supposed to be a state of matter, or state of things, or state of existence, which is more fundamental - and of which one might say that 'the universe is really made of this stuff.' All this is 'the ground.' It is the ground beneath our feet, the ultimate ground of substance on which all things stand.

Color not only establishes wholeness as a single quality, a oneness beyond structure.It begins to establish a connection with this ground. The inner light we experience in the cases of great color seems to penetrate beyond normal experience, reaching through to this ground, showing us this ground, making us feel the ground... the experience of inner light reveals an ultimate world of existence as it really is, perhaps, and shows us a glimpse of a reality which is more profound, more beautiful, than the one we experience every day...[it is the] first direct experience of the I."

- Christopher Alexander

The Nature of Order, Book 4:

Luminous Ground