Photography

1. Photography • Preliminaries: • Physiology: Our visual system is among the most complex parts of our make-up, but it is so to allow it to function without conscious intervention. It seems to us to be automatic. • We do not generally think that we need to learn to see. But we do.

2. Your eyes & the brain

3. Integration of elements • You open your eyes and you see. • But what has to happen is the consequence of an elaborate sequence of events. * = automatic • 1. The light entering the lens of your eye stimulates nerve endings in the retina. * • 2. The lens and cornea adjust the image to focus. • 3. The image is sustained by saccadic eye movements (these keep the neurons firing).* • 4. The nerve impulses from the left and right visual field in each eye are transmitted along the optic nerve, past the optical chiasm. This routes the signals from the left visual field to the RIGHT hemisphere, and the signals from the right visual field to the LEFT hemisphere.* • 5. The Corpus Callosum (the interconnective pathways between the hemispheres and the reticular formation—a primitive and still poorly understood basal brain structure) connects the visually active portions of each hemisphere together.* • YOU SEE!

4. Sublime Stupidity about vision • The fact that all of this just happens leads us to a more or less permanent condition of stupidity about vision—and that leads to really sublime mistakes about thinking. We do NOT pay attention to seeing, but rather, pay attention to what is in the visual field. • What do you actually see? What do things actually look like?

5. Lifting the edge of the curtain • Optical illusions: • Plato’s stick in the water. Is what you see a reliable indicator of what is true or real? • The stick in water APPEARS to bend. • Plato: Appearance vs. Reality • BUT: It leads to Image Anxiety

6. Plato’s Phaedo • The argument: If our eyes can deceive us, then vision is not trustworthy: • Phaedo: 99d-100b: • Well, after this, said Socrates, when I was worn out with my physical investigations, it occurred to me that I must guard against the same sort of risk which people run when they watch and study an eclipse of the sun; they really do sometimes injure their eyes, unless they study its reflection in water or some other medium. I conceived of something like this happening to myself, and I was afraid that by observing objects with my eyes and trying to comprehend them with each of my other senses might blind my soul altogether. [e] So I decided that I must have recourse to theories, and use them in trying to discover the truth about things. Perhaps my illustration is not quite apt, because I do not at all admit (100) that an inquiry by means of theory employs 'images' any more than one which confines itself to facts. But however that may be, I started off in this way, and in every case I first lay down the theory which I judge to be soundest, and then whatever seems to agree with it—with regard either to causes or to anything else—I assume to be true, and whatever does not I assume not to be true. But I should like to express my meaning more clearly, because at present I don't think that you understand. • No, indeed I don't, said Cebes, not a bit.

7. Wrong Conclusion • First point: we ‘see’ what we expect to see. • it takes conscious effort to see what is actually before our eyes. • Second point: Our visual habits (typically reinforced) need to be interrupted and stopped, so as to allow us to examine the elements of what is present to us.

8. Finally, photographs • The first habit is the assumption that a photograph is an image of something else. • So? • A photograph is just an exact transformation of a 3 dimensional image source to a 2 dimensional picture plane. There’s no mystery here. IT STOPS TIME, and records everything that is within the mechanically defined picture frame.

9. May I take your picture? • What do we do? • 1. Scurry to the bathroom to look in the mirror. • 2. Fix your hair and make sure your blouse is buttoned, your fly is closed, you do not have remnants of your breakfast on your chest. • 3. Fret about whether the picture will be “good”. There’s “image anxiety” here, but it pertains to the fact that we like to think that we look a certain way, but the pictures actually taken show us something else.

10. The Main Rule of Thumb • The photograph is NOT an “image of” something else: it is a visual PRINT. It is exactly what it is: a two dimensional image. LOOK AT THE IMAGE. • Don’t mess yourself up by trying to decide what it is a “picture of”: Just LOOK AT IT. What is there? • The power of the technology is that it provides A VISIBLE SIGNATURE OF TIME IN SPACE. • It is of interest only as it REVEALS SOMETHING. • The photographic images does something that YOUR EYES CANNOT DO: it stops the visual flow at an exact instant, and fixes it in an image.

11. 4 more sublime stupidities • 1. Good photographs depend on “The photographer’s eye.” • Bullshit. It depends on the photographer’s intelligence—and her quickness. • 2. Good photographs capture “the Decisive Moment” • Spastic mystification. One never knows until you look at the picture. Even then, what made the ‘moment’ decisive may have nothing to do with what you may have thought you were capturing. • 3. The “Good Photograph” depends on its aesthetic composition and craft. • Frog crap. It depends on exactly what is revealed in the image, as taken. There are no reliable rules. Photographs get embedded in our experience as a selection among (now) millions of images, most of which don’t reveal anything. Robert Frank: 83 images in The Americans, selected from perhaps as many as 80,000 picture—or roughly 1 in a thousand. • 4. “A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words” • Category confusion: One picture may be worth a thousand other pictures, but if you could get it into words, you won’t need the picture at all.

12. 4 Principles that don’t fail • 1. PAY ATTENTION TO EXACTLY WHAT IS IN THE IMAGE. You are dealing with a PICTURE, not the world. • 2. DO NOT LET YOUR ATTENTION COLLAPSE WHEN YOU HAVE IDENTIFIED THE IMAGE SOURCE. • 3. ALWAYS ASK WHAT THE IMAGE REVEALS. DON’T GET HUNG UP ON WHAT IT “REPRESENTS” or what you think it “means”. • 4. GIVE UP THE IDEA THAT THE VALUABLE UNIT OF STRUCTURE IS THE SINGLE IMAGE: IT IS ALWAYS, AND INVARIABLY, A SEQUENCE.

13. SEEING SEQUENCE • The single image is the special case, but even there, there is sequence of attention: you move from what is there to reflection on what you expected, what is ‘ordinary,’ what is different. • One image creates two things: the image as recorded, and the possibility of another image related to it. • Two primary forms of sequence: • A: HISTORICAL. You take a picture, on the hint of what has been revealed in an earlier picture by another photographer. • B: PRACTICAL. You take one picture that pursues a line of revelationthat follows from a picture you have made.

14. Louis Daguerre (1787-1851)daguerrotype (1837-39)Joseph Niepce (1765-1833) heliograph (1825)William Fox Talbot (1800-1877) calotype (1839) Boulevard du Temple, Paris 1838 from The Pencil of Nature 1844

15. Eugene Atget (1857-1927) Daguerre: exposure time 10 minutes; Traffic and people (except as noted) do Not appear. Atget: look, look, look. Realizing the potential of a scene.

16. Atget

18. Juxtaposition • Juxtaposing two images deliberately expands the scope of a visible idea. The “idea” is NOT a CONCEPT, not a word. It is a link of revelations. • Atget to the Mayor of Paris, after the old city had been demolished for urban renewal: “Mr. Mayor, I have in my possession the entire city of Old Paris.” The mayor thought Atget a madman.

19. Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986)

20. Self Conscious Photographic work • What has been enabled by what photographs have allowed me to contemplate? • PICTORIALISM Allegorical setups: using the tool to juxtapose elements • Sentimental productions and poses: tear-jerkers But also: • Opening the world to be seen.

21. Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879)Henry Peach Robinson (1830-1901 Fading Away 1858 H.P. Robinson “Wist not that your father and I sought thee sorrowing” J. M. Cameron

22. Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936)

23. Timothy O’Sullivan (1840-1882)

24. Mathew Brady (1822-1896) The Dead at Antietem

25. Mathew Brady: calvary at Rappahannock river

26. Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904)

27. Man in Motion

28. Alfred Steiglitz (1864-1946) The Terminal The Steerage

29. Paul Strand (1890-1976)

30. The Photographic Essay and Book • By the 1920s, the potential of sequenced photographs had not only given rise to motion pictures, but especially through the quite different work of Steiglitz (491 studio and Camera Work), and Jacob Riis (1849-1914; How the Other Half Lives (1890), the power of sequential images was settled beyond question. • The question that persists is what do photographic sequences reveal?

31. Jacob Riis

32. Major Sequences • Walker Evans (1903-1975) American Photographs • Robert Frank (1924-) The Americans • Nathan Lyons (1930-) Notations in Passing • Lee Friedlander (1934-) Factory Valleys • Paul Berger (1944-) Mathematics Photographs, Seattle Subtext