Each day’s reading and photography is pretty much guaranteed to present me with unexpected conjunctions and insights. This morning I read this in Ralph Eugene Meatyard (Steidl 2005), from a talk he gave to the Louisville Photographic Society in 1959:

I have, at the present time, twelve methods, series, subjects that I am working on… They are: general photographs (that is, on any subject not otherwise covered), rock photographs; wall photographs; pictures of cemetery sculptures and sympathies; ice photographs; glass photographs; light photographs; painting in ice; uncanny photographs; emotionalist photographs; no-focus photographs; and the latest, photographs made through the influence of Zen. (pg 34)

I think of Meatyard and Clarence John Laughlin and Frederick Sommer as inhabiting many of the same quarters of the photographic landscape, where the ineffable reigns supreme and everything is more (and even spookier) than it seems to be at first glance. And I’m delighted to find that I have been, though unbeknownst, treading in his footsteps with about half of those “methods, series, subjects.”

I’ve been exploring the possibilities afforded by a new lens, an 11mm ultrawide Irix. Three rock photographs from this morning’s visit to Marshall Point:

(glacial scarring on display)

(note the enormous feline presence in the NW quarter)

(glacial scarring and a wonderful splash of intrusive lighter rock)

…and, nearby, a marvelous troll maiden, with seaweed tresses:

I’ve been reading 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)

I have occasionally felt that frisson, recently in coming upon a wall of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s images at Pier 24 in San Francisco, and also with a few of Paul Caponigro’s prints. One simply falls into the images and is vastated, never quite the same afterwards.

Critical mass seems to be approaching for a Blurb book of ice photographs, but the conceptual work remains to be done on text and sequence. Here’s a bunch of candidates for inclusion:

Ice Marvels

I continue to explore the mysteries of connotation that accompany the images in my Flickr photostream, wondering what inspires or provokes their composition and capture. Often it’s only during the processing phase that I recognize what a photograph contains, or means, or alludes to. This one is an example of an unsolved problem:

This is simply a salt deposit left on a rock by the receding tide, a phenomenon that seems to happen when the air temperature is well below freezing. The next tide will obliterate the pattern, so its life is only a few hours. The complexity seems to demand an interpretation, an effort to parse the pattern for some sort of figurative meaning. Thusfar I haven’t discerned any faces or other recognizable forms beyond the sinusoidal curve that’s uppermost. There’s something evocative of Japanese painting in the deposit below the thicker curve, but overall I have no better option than to label the image as ‘abstract’. So what drew me to it? Why did I capture it? There’s something elegant in the curves and textures, but beyond that I can’t reconstruct my specific motivation or thought process. It just seemed to ask to be harvested and saved from oblivion.

Does it help at all to mirror the image?

Ah. Now I see something analogous to the figure seen on so many New England gravestones, the symmetrical wings around the death’s head:



But this symmetrical extension doesn’t solve any of the original problems of interpretation, or get me any further along in the quest to comprehend the genesis of the image. The original photograph is a satisfying composition, slightly ambiguous in scale, a small detail in the grand complexity of a particular landscape in space and time, and perhaps makes sense only in the context of a gatheration of photographs of salt deposits on rocks.

I’ve been wrangling the notion of capture of ephemerality as one of the essences of photography, trying to get beyond the obviousness of the observation to the vital idea beneath the cliche, which involves more than just the apprehension of a moment in the river of Time. It’s in the viewer’s mind (or Mind’s Eye, or is it Eye’s Mind?) that the ephemeral attains its significance, a sort of WYGIWYS (What You Get Is What You See).

This morning it occurred to me that the viewer may be transfixed (in the sense of ‘pierced by’ and ‘brought up short’) by an image, caught by a personal punctum, as Barthes names the hook that does the transfixing. Sometimes this transfixion is in fact a transfiction (“an aestheticized imagination of translatorial action”), an obvious product of the viewer’s imagination, an instance of pareidolia or apophenia in which the viewer sees or perhaps constructs meaningful patterns that are notional and may not be seen by others. This happens to me frequently, even incessantly.

Here’s an example, ephemeral because it’s a photograph of rapidly-melting ice:

I read the two circles above the center of the image as eyes, fill in whiskers and a grinning mouth below the eyes, see the curve above the eyes as defining a head and body, note the ribbon floating off to the northeast from the eye on the right, see the whispy, murky, indistinct background, and label the image as ectoplasmic seal with monocle. The seal probably existed for only a few minutes (the eye on the left is a lacuna of meltwater in the ice), and I don’t think I saw it until I was processing the RAW file on the computer. Something surely drew me to the framed scene and provoked the release of the shutter to capture the composition, but I can’t reconstruct it now. All part of the grand mystery of the ephemeral.

There’s a Flickr Album of almost 600 images of ice from the last month or so, many of which have—or may have—resident creatures.

I’ve been combing through my memories and photographic archives in search of traces of entanglement with rocks. The first photographic engagement that I can find came about as a result of an invitation to accompany a photography student named I think Shulman on an expedition to cliffs at Marblehead in the Spring of 1965. He was doing 8×10 color, as I remember.

I think these are the very rocks:

I can’t remember if I had already encountered Aaron Siskind’s 1944 Gloucester rock photographs, or his 1950 Martha’s Vineyard series, but Len Gittleman might have shown them to us. I was certainly entirely susceptible to Siskind’s mode of seeing by Spring 1965, but I’m not sure if these are unwitting homage to Siskind or directly derivative from work of his that I’d seen. But there I was looking at form in rock, wrestling with light and shadow, putting a 2×3 frame around what seemed to be significant bits of lithoscape:

Fifty years later I scanned those negatives and did some experimental tessellations of two of them:

I love the 3-D illusion that emerges, which suggests some lesson in figure-and-ground perception, and I love the notion that there are always more possibilities in an image than one first realizes.

I went still further with the second image, tessellating and then split-toning to create an image that seems not to be rock at all:

In the same cache of negatives I found these two: Shulman himself, and Shulman’s spouse dealing productively with the boredom of waiting for him to finish playing with the huge camera.

I’ve been thinking about the term abstract and its cousin abstraction, and considering how they relate to my engagement with rocks. I don’t have a sophisticated grounding in the use of the terms in writing/talking about art, so I begin with a collection of my own thoughts and work outward. The 5 AM summary today, which will be refined as I read and consider:

abstract (v): pare down to or extract essentials; take away from, purloin, haul away

abstract (n): without obvious representational form; an unparsed collection of design elements

abstract (adj): in which the representation of Reality requires explanation; as opposed to ‘concrete’; loosely, non-representational

Quite a few of my photographs of the last few years have been non-representational captures of forms and patterns, in rock, in wood, in ice and cloud forms. Often I only begin to grasp what they contain when I process the RAW files and have a chance to see what I saw when provoked to click the shutter and capture the momentary conjunction of light and materials. Here’s an example:

Marshall Point 20 ix 2017

The scale might be anywhere from close-up macro to aerial landscape (in fact it’s a stretch of magnificently folded rock about 2 feet from top to bottom, as I recall), and the absence of identifiable features nudges this toward ‘abstract’. Trying to parse the patterns for meaning, I see overlapping faces in profile, but know that I’m imagining that.

So I tessellated the photo and flipped it vertically:

…and the resulting coherent image immediately announced itself to me as The God of Headaches. In my reading, this is himself:
and he perches on the forehead of the sufferer.

This reading is entirely a product of my imagination, and the unpredicted outcome of a simple algorithmic manipulation [copy-mirror-join-rotate] of the seed image: an abstract made concrete, a form found, a Story unleashed, a divinity called into existence by an act of naming. Magic, of a sort, relying on instinctual/hard-wired response to bilateral symmetry, in which the viewer seeks coherent patterns and projects them into conjunctions that appear to be representational: those are ears, those eyes, oh look, there’s a mouth…

The wonder is that different viewers find their own figures within the created images; the glory is that people are easily trapped into the engagement, and clearly love the exercise of hunting for coherence. And, as Yogi Berra said, the more one practices, the more one sees. You can see a lot by looking.