The 'something' framed in the viewfinder is in essence a pattern, a coherence of line and light, of shape and texture, perhaps of sign and symbol. The meaning of the pattern may be clear to the photographer, or may only emerge as the image is processed, or (in the case of abstractions and enigmas) may remain for the viewer to parse and define. The framing itself is the active aesthetic choice of composition, the moment of time and space in which the photographer says "ah, there it is!"
and one Another way to see the 'something' that may be framed in the viewfinder is as an instance of form, an entity that has and forcefully expresses its own identity, and that may reference other forms, similar or related or antinomial. It's here that the perplexity of the apothegm form finds form enters the exploration: is form an actual thing (a rock, a cube, a folded cloth, an empty container), or is it a description of a concept (a shape in the abstract, a Platonic ideal like a sphere or triangle, the contents of a container [the prospective muffin in a muffin pan]. Or does form come into being when there are enough instances of something to name them collectively? Rocks are a form because people have long experience of them and understand how to add new arrivals to the form, but an entirely novel object can't be comfortably contained within established categories until there are enough instances to exemplify its properties, and thus define it as a form.
And so we come to the situation where we've seen and grouped or classified enough instances that a form emerges. One rock that seems to be a face is a curiosity; 50 rocky faces, friends, is a Movement. You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant. And more instances announce themselves as members of the form, and pretty soon everybody is seeing faces in rocks, or on pieces of toast, or in passing clouds. ... So Form can be an imaginary something as well as a concrete physical object that manifests characteristics and properties. Form seems emergent from seeing, interpreting, categorizing multiple instances of a something. And so we return to WYGIWYS. I saw pattern emerge from Nova Scotia phone books, but the form those patterns found was mapping of spatial distribution that revealed underlying processes. Likewise, one ancestor picture is a curiosity, an unsolved puzzle of unplumbed dimensions; a curated collection may reveal all sorts of things that emerge as forms in their own right, that tell stories or hint at obscured narratives (Forebears and the Joe Wilner collection are exemplars).
Forms may become Objects of Contemplation, such that exploring a collection of instances, for example of ensos, is an opportunity to consider ineffabilities, to seek epiphany, to be drawn toward deepened understanding of SOMEthing. And so it is with Beacon Hill doorways or knotholes in railroad ties or creatures in rock or ice. SOMEthing may emerge, some insight into form or essence or process. The specifics aren't predictable, still less foreordained, and different observers may read different versions from the displayed evidence. In the case of tessellations, pretty clearly there is no "rightness" of interpretation, since any reading is an exercise of imagination or projection. === Robert Thorson's Stone By Stone: The Magnificent History of New England's Stone Walls offers an eloquent summary of the elements of New England's complex geology, and especially of the vital role in landscape-making of the glacial epochs that spangle the Pleistocene, the last of which produced the Laurentide ice sheet and buried New England in ice more than a mile thick. The melting and retreat of the Laurentide ice sheet began some 20,000 years ago, and shifted vast amounts of rock. ...lodgement till—a dense, compacted, fine-grain stratum up to two hundred feet thick that was deposited on the land as the glacier slid by... Agricultural soils developed on lodgement till were highly fertile because they were composed of microscopic pieces of glacially pulverized minerals that provided an enormous surface area for biological reactions in the soil... As they moved southward, the stones battered each other and pressed against the bed rock until they were ruptured, crushed, ground, rubbed, and reduced to a wet stony mud, a mixture that was one part water, one part pulverized rock, and one part residual stone. This stone "pudding" became stiffer as the glacier slowed down... The final result was a dense, almost cementlike substratum of the lodgement till... Above the lodgement till in most places is a thinner, looser layer of stones and sand called ablation till... Stones from the ablation-till layer formed the bulk of most stone walls... In contrast, stones from the lodgement till are often smaller, chunkier, and more rounded because they were beaten up during transport at the base of the ice. (44-48, passim) === Caspar Henderson The Book of Imagined Beings: In some rocky landscapes I sometimes feel as if the stones are so alive and so vibrant that it is as if they are speaking, and it is we who cannot understand or who are too distracted to hear. All time since the creation of those rocks is there in their irrefutable presence, if only we can pay attention properly. Our own passing experiences—and even our most cherished hopes and dreams and memories—are momentary and insubstantial by comparison. Stone is not silent but moving to a different rhythm to ours. (pg 349) === This morning's online version of the New Yorker brought a short story by Louise Erdrich, The Stone, and the text of an interview of Erdrich by Deborah Treisman, from which this segment is harvested:
Sometimes I notice an odd, local type of stone and pick up a shard or a pebble... I've learned to put most of these stones back after looking. But stones ground me, quite literally, when I am in a new place. And they are mysterious and yet friendly inhabitants of my house. Every time I've moved, I've left behind a small pile of foreign stones in the garden. Have these stones used me to get from one place to the next? So I have a lot of stones around, I must admit, but this story isn’t based on a particular one among them. In the Ojibwe language, nouns are animate or inanimate; the word for stone, asin, is animate. One might think that stones have no actual power—after all, we throw them, build with them, pile them, crush them, slice them. But who is to say that the stones aren't using us to assert themselves? To transform themselves? One day, the things we made out of stones may be all that's left of our species. Of our complex history of chipping away at and arranging stones, what will be recorded or known?
The story itself is quite marvelous, and includes this resonant passage:
A stone is, in its own way, a living thing, not a biological being but one with a history far beyond our capacity to understand or even imagine. Basalt is a volcanic rock composed of augite and sometimes plagioclase and magnetite, which says nothing. The wave-worn piece of basalt that the woman [protagonist of the story] had slept with for more than a decade was thrown from a rift in the earth 1.1 billion years ago, which still says nothing. Before she broke it and dumped it at the bottom of a drawer, the stone had been broken time and again. It had been rolled smooth by water and the action of sand. Because of its strange shape, it had been picked up by several human beings in the course of the past ten thousand years. It had been buried with one until a tree had devoured the bones and pulled the stone back out of the ground. It had been kept by a woman who revered it as a household spirit and filled its eyes with sweetgrass. It had been shoved off a dock, lifted back up with a shovel, deposited in a heap. It had surfaced in a girl's left hand. A stone is a thought that the earth develops over inhuman time. It is a living thing to some cultures and a dead thing to others. This one had been called nimishoomis, or "my grandfather," and other names, too. The woman had not named the stone. She had thought that naming the stone would be an insult to its ineffable gravity.
My dealings with ineffable gravity are hereby declared entirely legitimate.
===
from Andy Ilachinski’s blog, 31 Aug 2014:
Our store of photographs – and/or, just as validly, any other impermanent artifacts that our essential being has “created” along its journey (including, in my case, equations, computer code, technical reports and papers, and even books) – accrued over a lifetime of “seeing,” are intertwined, nonlinearly nested visual palimpsests of an ever-evolving / never-complete document of our being; of who we really are. As such, they serve as potent probes, in hindsight – and only after careful reflection – of who we were, at some past time; and offer valuable clues and insights into how (sometimes even why) our essential being has evolved into its current state. More rarely, and with deeper contemplation, these emergent palimpsests can help us better understand and appreciate the forms and rhythms of the journey itself.
===
The experiencing of a photograph is a personal thing and therefore its course is unprescribable. That feature of a photograph which acts as a magnet for you is the starting point. Hence start with the magnet and follow its lines of force as you feel them to the end of the journey of the photograph… (Aperture 5:4 [1957] pg.162)
(Minor White, I think)
===
Lyle Rexer:
(Adams, Weston, White, Sommer, Bullock, Sheeler) …all shared the notion that form is a universal constant of the world and our experience, the expression of a fundamental principle of order uniting all levels of phenomena. Form is inherent in the nature of things but obscured by circumstance. It is identified by the intuition of the photographer and fixed objectively in the composition and attributes of the photograph. The expressive photograph, then, is one that mediates a recognition of connectedness between the viewer and the greater order of the world through the artist’s artistic sensibility. The meaning of the photograph is open-ended in that it suggests connections that can be both psychological and natural, if not spiritual, as in Wynn Bullock’s famous Tide Pool (1957), an image that sets up a chain of associations from the microscopic to the heavenly. Specific place and time, the anchors of photographic reference, are only points of departure. (pg. 26)
===
Blake Stimson’s The Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation (MIT Press, 2006), which discusses three photographic Projects: Steichen’s The Family of Man, Frank’s The Americans, and the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Among the rumination-worthy bits I found this passage on aesthetic experience:
…The moment of feeling the pleasure of beauty or the fear of sublimity… [quoting Adorno] “the moment in which recipients forget themselves and disappear into the work; it is the moment of being shaken. The recipients lose their footing [and] the possibility of truth, embodied in the aesthetic image, becomes tangible.” (pp 25, 26)
===
Rudolf Arnheim’s Visual Thinking (1969):
A concept, statistically defined, represents what a number of separate entities have in common. Quite often, however, a concept is instead a kind of highspot within a sweep of continuous transformations. In the Japanese kabuki theatre, an actor’s play suddenly petrifies into an immobile, monumental pose, the mi-e, which marks the climax of an important scene and epitomizes its character. (pg 182)
Mi-e generally follow a pattern, serving to focus our attention on a particular character or characters at an important moment during the play. Mi-e crystallize the action into a formal picture. More than mere focal points, mi-e are used to express to the audience a climax of great emotional tension. To perform a mi-e the actor must physically and emotionally wind himself up to the desired emotion, be it anger, fear, indignation, or surprise. Most mi-e are accompanied only by the beating of the wooden clappers (tsuke) … struck in a pattern called ba-tan, the two beats of which serve as a framework for the climax of the mi-e, in which the actor, while holding the pose rotates his head toward his adversary and crosses one eye, the other looking straight ahead.
…
The first beat, the ba, is hit as the actor strikes the pose. Then, as he rotates his head and glares, the mie is completed by the second, tan beat. The tsuke beater, or tsuke uchi as he is called, has the great responsibility of not only timing his beats to the actor’s movements but also feeling the emotional climax of the mi-e with the actor. (from Ronald Cavaye Kabuki: A Pocket Guide)
“How very like the moment of photography!” I thought. And sure enough some of my creatures are caught in mi-e, communicating directly to the viewer.
More commonly, the creatures appear self-absorbed, going about their business, brooding or just being grumpy or dozy or fey, not interacting with the watchers, or simply being unaware of their audience. I’ve assembled a gallery of some that seem to me “immobile, monumental” and performing for the viewers
Form Finds Form is a phrase I’m continuing to unpack and trying to more completely grok. My mother was wont to say it, and via Ann Berthoff it has crept into the field of Rhetoric and Composition. It seems to resonate with many things I’ve done over the years (photographic projects, surname mapping, improv music…), even though I can’t fully explain just what it Means. In this instance, my almost accidental discovery of the Form mi-e educed the subset of images, each an exemplar of that Form. But which found which?
===
There is something very satisfying about the thought that
within ten feet of you at any given time
lies enough material to keep you busy a lifetime
learning to understand it.
--Ansel Adams
===
The photograph isn't what was photographed. It's something else. It's a new fact.
--Gary Winogrand
===
You can't photograph all the rocks. And even if you could, what would you have?
My approach has been (1) to look for faces, and (2) to appreciate designs in stretches of rock, mostly surfaces. The first is up-close and generally one at a time, a foot or so away, and so overlooks the patterning of rocks heaved by storm and tide. The second is a bit haphazard, but generally at a distance of five feet or more, and is an exercise in framing, often helped along by some particular feature—an intrusion or a fracture that might make a shadow on a bright day, or almost disappear on a cloudy day.
===
The events along the way are what give the journey its meaning.
The magic is in allowing the distractions and diversions to point the direction,
and following the unanticipated detours
as if they were the roads meant to be traveled all along.
--Mark Citret, Along the Way
===
The discourse, then and now, centers on the puzzled linkage of illusion and allusion in both the visual and the verbal.
--Carl Chiarenza Evocations pg 99
===
thinking about abstraction and the abstract... One thread is 'non-representational' in which it's the design that's paramount: the overall effect of the lights and darks and colors, in which there's no obvious or evident depiction, though there may be composition or framing.
[0183] is one example, [0184] perhaps another. [0185], [0186], [0187], [0188], [189]. Some series of geological events brought about the /composition/ we see. [0190] makes a nice example. In some of tghese I fancy there might be faces, though they are clearer in (many/some) of the others, presumably due to my having "seen" them and so pressed the shutter button to capture them. Surely my sense for faces is pretty well developed, but sometimes it's the design/pattern that draws my attention.
Besides the non-representational sense of 'abstract', the sense that actively EXTRACTS or ABSTRACTS elements from complexity and so focuses the viewer's attention on specific elements of a complex scene or frame—a line or set of lines that somehow capture the essence. A sketcher's capture of a line or figural movement exemplifies that sense of ABSTRACTION, and it's quintessentially representational, pared down to the essence. A skill I simply don't have, the Zen of the Line.
"Something out of Nothing": an apprehension of the sublime within the mundane. After all, what's more mundane than rock? Most people wouldn't think of rock as a "living thing", though it isn't a stretch to see in its patterns the outlines of a subtle Story with great time depth. Geologists read such patterns at landscape scale, and not at palm-of-hand scale. And I don't think many geologists are attracted to the Makapansgat view of bits of rock.
Makapansgat is really worth returning to again and again, reckoning with what our Australopithecine forebear saw and thought and did when he or she picked up and kept the pebble. Our first example of the Representational?
The hominin ancestor who picked up and carried the pebble some 20 miles from its geological origin seems to me to represent an early (I’m tempted to claim the earliest) instance of aesthetic Consciousness in our own evolutionary branch [“possibly the earliest example of symbolic thinking or aesthetic sense in the human heritage”]). My own pursuit of wholly imaginary faces in various materials seems a direct descendant. I’ve been chewing over the deeper significance of this for the last year or so (since I learned of the Makapansgat Pebble). A couple of weeks ago the phrase “morphic resonance” drifted through my mind, and seemed somehow portentious (though I can’t remember when/where I first encountered it). It turned out to be a coinage of Rupert Sheldrake:
Morphic resonance is a process whereby self-organising systems inherit a memory from previous similar systems. In its most general formulation, morphic resonance means that the so-called laws of nature are more like habits. The hypothesis of morphic resonance also leads to a radically new interpretation of memory storage in the brain and of biological inheritance. Memory need not be stored in material traces inside brains, which are more like TV receivers than video recorders, tuning into influences from the past. And biological inheritance need not all be coded in the genes, or in epigenetic modifications of the genes; much of it depends on morphic resonance from previous members of the species. Thus each individual inherits a collective memory from past members of the species, and also contributes to the collective memory, affecting other members of the species in the future.
====
The cubism of Braque and Picasso was "about stirring our brains into action and prompting us to pay some attention to the everyday and the overlooked... breaking matter down into a series of interrelating fragments.
(Gompertz 125, 128)
...
Sontag:
Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything,
are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy. (23)
===
You may call these figures many things.
You might call them the Comedy Company of the Psyche,
but that would be flippant and not do justice to the cruel blows
you have had from some of them.
In my profession we call them archetypes,
which means that they represent and body forth
patterns to which human behavior seems to be disposed;
patterns which repeat themselves endlessly,
but never in precisely the same way
--Robertson Davies
====
My notions of 'simple/simplicity' seem to center on clarity ("to the point"), balance/equilibrium (often emphasized in composition/framing), minimal visual distraction from the central element, the intuitive (appealing to personal and subjective understanding: grokkage), and the direct and the succinct (not requiring elaborate explanation).
The form of Simplicity I'm most interested in courting these days is the "it's just a..." (it's just a rock, just a cloud, just a river, etc.). It does seem that surface simplicity often has hidden depths, into which I'm happy to dive. The kicker for me is the story, the explanation, the reveal that lies behind what looks pretty simple and straightforward but contains magnificent complexities. Human minds love to construct interpretive stories, often anthropomorphizing the phenomena or otherwise rendering them vital (stars interpreted as mythological beings, clouds seen as creatures, faces appearing to appear in rocks, trees, etc.).
The momentary form we capture via film or sensor is often a process apprehended. A cloud is just water vapor pushed by the wind; a rock is just a slowly-disintegrating fragment of terrestrial crust; a river is just a flowing column of water, but in each case the 'momentary form' we can observe encodes processes and dynamics of great subtlety.
Another pathway toward Simplicity is simple/simplifying action: symmetrical mirroring is a simple transformation, which often makes a coherent [ordered? simplified?] something out of a jumble of apparent disorder. Inversion (white to black, black to white) is another seemingly simple transformation that can disclose unanticipated realities. And abridging the visual spectrum (as in infrared photography, or via desaturation to black-and-white) simplifies, as does blurring or defocusing. Some see these as gimmicks, distortions of a supposed objective reality, but they appeal to me as means to extend the range of my eyes and nudge perception into new territories and modalities.
===
I've made a number of blog postings about tessellation (Simplifying, symmetry, the Elder Gods | A Sow's Ear | Inversion, conversion, reversion) and the chief element has been the discovery of hidden creatures, released by symmetrical transformation or unfolding along an edge. The conceit is that the liberated creatures were hiding, but the almost as remarkable fact is that we are so perceptually attuned to symmetry. There may well be survival value in that, and there's surely great social value when it comes to recognizing people and remembering faces.
I'm fascinated by the joy people take in hunting for creatures in my constructions, and pleased too by the great variety in what they discover. They don't all see the same things, and often don't see the features that I privileged as the key to creating a name for each image.
So is this mostly a frivolous pursuit, a game (though without winners and losers)? I see it as one of the (many) arms of my explorations of photography, a sort of antithesis of abstraction (concretion?), in which a narrative order emerges from material that might even verge on the chaotic, before the hinge creaks open to reveal one or more figures. The feedstock is often quasicoherent (or perhaps just 'interesting') patterns in rocks or wood, but the effect of symmetrical construction is, rather paradoxically, to simplify by disclosing a pattern or design that was latent.
My ability to foresee what an unfolding will produce is very limited, and I'm usually surprised and delighted by what appears on my screen when I join symmetrical halves. At the very least I produce a mirrored design, often expressive of a graphic coherence that's worthwhile to spend some time exploring. More than a few have then been named "design for..." on the basis of some discerned allusion or possible application.
But it's the animals and anthropomorphic beings who evoke the greatest glee and provoke onomastic flights of fancy. As my friend Max Nigh was wont to say, "Name It and Nail It", but also "Just because we've named it doesn't mean we know anything about it."
If one of the objectives of photography is to produce (create, liberate, disclose...) graphical objects of interest, things that capture our interest or engage our minds, symmetrical constructions surely meet the criteria. But are they Art, or merely Whimsy? That may come down to how they are encountered and experienced. In my Flickr photostream they may be "oh god there he goes again...", but fancy printing on grand scale and placement on gallery walls might change the perception. Or they might be turned into laser-cut jigsaw puzzles.
A special form of diptych? Possibly folding screens, or fabric, or dye-sublimated tiles.
===
My Blurb books are episodes in a continuing process of sorting through a lifetime of engagement with images, including almost 60 years in which I've thought of myself as A Photographer. The last 10 years of work in digital media have been especially intense and intensive, and seem to be opening out still further into new subject matter and more engagement with the imagination. The photographs in this twelfth book are primarily concerned with visual landscapes in which things seen are phantoms, figments, illusions, apparitions, and perhaps projections onto the cave walls of the mind.
...photography that comprises
an archive of experiments,
intuitions,
metaphoric apprehensions,
eccentric, sometimes mad projects,
apparent distortions,
embraced accidents,
and, always,
contradictory impulses
--Lyle Rexer
===
https://www.flickr.com/photos/blackmerh/44804938235/ might make a WYGIWYS cover, OR a back cover, with text
or
https://www.flickr.com/photos/blackmerh/30892273567/
and this is a stretch:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/blackmerh/32010269287/
and
https://www.flickr.com/photos/blackmerh/48751476978/
and
https://www.flickr.com/photos/blackmerh/48481676516/
but this is probably the best:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/blackmerh/48976151253/
=== Photography is usually thought of as a realistic medium, a means to record or capture what clearly and palpably is. There has always been a strain that wanders beyond the strictly real, sometimes to improve upon the warts-and-all (think retouching), sometimes to seek what may be beyond the veil (think the Victorian vogue for counterfeiting ghosts and fairies), sometimes to falsify (think selective erasure and 'Photoshopping'), and sometimes in search of the imaginary. I have spent a lot of time in the lattermost specialty, reading, evincing, and constructing forms and patterns in what is palpably nothing, in order to bring forth creatures. They exist because I point them out in or unfold them from the parent material of rock and wood and ice. This activity is quintessentially human, and stretches back through evolutionary time to our Australopithecine forebears: the Makapansgat Pebble is the earliest example of the moment, and the archaeological record is littered with "figure stones" (sometimes called eoliths) and other examples of things picked up and kept for their beauty or interest (sometimes called 'curated objects'). The Nasher Sculpture Center's 2018 exhibit "First Sculpture: Handaxe to Figure Stone" (https://www.nashersculpturecenter.org/art/exhibitions/exhibition/id/535?first-sculpture-handaxe-to-figure-stone) claims the Makapansgat Pebble as "evidence of the earliest forms of artistic intention ... [and] suggests early human ability to recognize beauty and meaning in found objects." ==== Photography is usually thought of as a realistic medium, a means to record or capture what clearly and palpably is. There has always been a strain that wanders beyond the strictly real, sometimes to improve upon the warts-and-all (think retouching), sometimes to seek what may be beyond the veil (think the Victorian vogue for counterfeiting ghosts and fairies), sometimes to falsify (think selective erasure and ‘Photoshopping’), and sometimes in search of the imaginary. I have spent a lot of time in the lattermost specialty, reading, evincing, and constructing forms and patterns in what is palpably nothing, in order to bring forth creatures. They exist because I point them out in or unfold them from the parent material of rock and wood and ice. This activity is quintessentially human, and stretches back through evolutionary time to our Australopithecine forebears: the Makapansgat Pebble is the earliest example of the moment, and the archaeological record is littered with eoliths (sometimes called ‘figure stones’) and other examples of things picked up and kept for their beauty or interest (identified as ‘curated objects’). The Nasher Sculpture Center’s 2018 exhibit “First Sculpture: Handaxe to Figure Stone” (https://www.nashersculpturecenter.org/art/exhibitions/exhibition/id/535?first-sculpture-handaxe-to-figure-stone) claims the Makapansgat Pebble as “evidence of the earliest forms of artistic intention ... [and] suggests early human ability to recognize beauty and meaning in found objects.” Raymond Dart writes of the Pebble: “My initial reaction on examining the pebble soon after its discovery [by W.I. Eitzman, in 1925] was that it had little inherent value, except that the stone had been unquestionably selected from a stream-bed [20-odd miles from the site in which it was found] by one of the man-like creatures whose bones we had found entombed there.” Almost 50 years later, Dart examined the pebble again and read the stone differently: “It would be unfortunate if we failed to appreciate the insight into the breadth and robusticity of australopithecine existence and humour that this stone, despite its chequered history of acceptance and rejection, reveals...”