An example of the vacuous type of item is his description of photographers working in black as opposed to other artistic approaches - this sounds deep and profound but he is fundamentally describing a working method, not a philosophy or meaning. Change the analogy and see if it holds - a sculptor working with stone, the basic element of our world evokes the more base or primitive feelings of his audience. Bullsh*t! "By contrast, the photographer inhabits the camera obscura, and he ultimately and always draws in the future viewers with him." Bullsh*t! Both are mediums of expression - the fact that the sculptor needs light to see is no more significant than the fact that I don't need a chisel to make a photograph. While his prose sounds impressive and admittedly somewhat poetic, it is not meaningful. However, I will take the time to read the book before deciding on its' value to me. If it has value to you, use it and care not what I think! I don't mean to discourage you, I mean to prod you into deeper introspection.
However, I would not get my hopes up too greatly for a thread like this - my experience is that people will discuss the precipitation rate of AgN03 in a metol solution for hours or the log of a exposure curve (I have no idea what these things mean, as much as I have tried) but will not read through a thread like this. There is a reason philosophy departments are generally small - not only can't you get a job with such a degree, it is intellectually harder to pursue than a number of other disciplines (I'm looking at you accounting!)
At the Universities I attended, these were fighting words- analytic philosophy is heavily distinguished from continental and it was pretty insulting to either camp to mistake one for the other. Perhaps things have changed in the past decade but I would be careful around certain academics with a comment like that.
Going to have to disagree with you here - photography is light interacting with a sensitive surface and is therefore not a physical sample of the subject matter since the light is reflected by the surface and not generated by the surface (a photograph of a light source being exempted). When the light hits me and reflects towards the camera, it does not carry a piece of me with it and I am not diminished by it - rather, my clothing, skin and the physical characteristics alter the light to produce the image. Put it another way, if theoretically you could take an infinite series of photographs of me instantly, I would not disappear since you are not taking anything away from me.Quote Originally Posted by Maris View Post
Since there seems to be a lot of anxiety about reality I would offer the observation that there IS something particularly realistic about a photograph that separates it from virtually any other kind of representation. A photograph is generated when a physical sample of subject matter travels across space (at 300 000 Km/sec!) and penetrates the sensitive surface, lodges in it, and occasions changes that result in marks. This arrangement of marks, if it coheres as a picture, is a photograph.
Is the nexus of "captured specific time" and "captured specific light" any matter to this philosopher?
The spectacle, the actual photograph, has 'contained' within it this discrete 'nexus' and only THAT specific 'nexus'. Thus, maybe 'light' and 'time' become somehow 'different' when combined in this way because they share nothing with any other combination of these 'reality' components. Only during the actual exposure are these two components captured (but, only as indice, i.e., latent). We, as ignorant humans, turn this unique (truly unique) combination into 'reality' through the recognition of a respectable 'spectacle' in order to 'force' sense out of the mess.
Is this 'nexus' the key that is finally needed to 'open the door' so as to allow our basal understanding through transformation of the indice into index?
| PART ONE THE TEXTURE AND STRUCTURE OF THE PHOTOGRAPH Theoretically, one can assume that a certain number of photographs have no other purpose than to unintentionally capture light. MAX KOZLOFF, Photography and Fascination, 1979. |
The serious point here is that the light collected by a camera really was a physical part of the substance of the subject matter. The classical mind-picture of reflection as light "bouncing" off the external surface of things is not what actually happens.
Another point missed by Van Lier and other philosophers who think about (but do not do) images, imaging, and possible connections to reality is that there is a whole class of image making procedures that are utterly physical in their workflow and their output. These include life casts, death masks, brass rubbings, papier-mache moulds, coal peels, photographs, and even footprints in a sandy beach. All of these things are unaguably embedded in reality and there is no philosophical credibility in vaporising about the opposite. Where things go off the rails, in the particular case of photography, is mistaking it as a species of painting or drawing; just with some mechanical aspects thrown in. The great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out that many of the conundrums of philosophy originate from getting the original assumptions wrong, following up with the wrong words, and ending up with a labyrinthine confusion of impenetratable text. Henri Van Lier would not be the only one to have run this hazard.
David, in a word, "yes:"
PART ONE THE TEXTURE AND STRUCTURE OF THE PHOTOGRAPH Theoretically, one can assume that a certain number of photographs have no other purpose than to unintentionally capture light. MAX KOZLOFF, Photography and Fascination, 1979. [...]
4. Isomorphic Imprints
Photographic photons, focalized by optical lenses according to relentlessly constant deviations, obey continuous equations. This regularity allows the rigorous positioning of their sources, and thus also a prospective spectacle, in accordance with spatial coordinates, as can be seen in geological and astronomical photographs. But simultaneously it subtracts from spectacle its local accentuation which would render it a true place. Besides being monocular (cyclopean), the photograph is also isomorphic. As it is rigorously spatial, it is always a non-place.
5. The Synchronous Imprint
Also, a photographic imprint can be dated close to a billionth of a second. Regardless of the time of exposure and the moment of impact of each specific photon, their appearance is ultimately datable by the arrival of the last of the photons. In case of a moving source and therefore also a possible spectacle, the succession of incoming photons can never give rise to what has always judiciously called movement. Thus, much in the same way the isomorphism of lenses and imprints evacuates the concrete place by replacing it with a purely localizable space, the alignment toward the passage of the last photon expels concrete duration, substituting it with a physical and exclusively datable time (tn).
[...]
8. Surcharged and Subcharged Imprints
In some respects, every photograph is disinformed. If we compare the visual singularities of the spectacle and what remains of it on the photographic imprint, the loss of information will be considerable, while colors (dozens instead of thousands) and lines become a sort of sharpened stains. But, conversely, even a mediocre photograph of the facades I pass every day in my street will reveal, thanks to its immobility and its accessibility to my sight, thousands of things that my perception, unstable and purposeful as it is, had never noticed there before. And this is yet another abstraction in relation to the concrete of everyday existence of these simultaneously filtered and superabundant representations.
Chapter IV - THE NON-SCENE:
ON THE OBSCENE IN STIMULI-SIGNS AND FIGURES
Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic
SUSAN SONTAG, On Photography, 1973.
Before anything, the photograph unsettles the scene. Firstly, the scene is a specific and marked place that is at a good distance from our eye and body, neither too near nor too far so that we can embrace with our sight what is taking place there. Next, it are [sic] the objects, characters and actions that will manifest themselves in this place with the desired clarity. The scene cannot be found in every civilization, it is lacking in that of Africa for instance. However, the scene was so forcefully introduced over here by the Greeks, and then penetrated the entire western history so intensely that it attained a fortunate immortality within a beatific vision, so that, in the eyes of many, photography is seen as undoubtedly invented to stage things and present dramatic or touching scenes even better than in painting.
His concepts of 'index' and 'indice' are not such that one becomes another, but indexes are the projections that we make onto the world when we're photographing things, and when we're looking at photographs. I'd say that your thoughts are very parallel with his.
If for the sake of argument I was a cabinet maker and had spent many years working with wood, creating beautiful furniture as works of art. Can you also apply this navel gazing Philosophy, devoid of practical experience and make it meaningful?
Scales are stupid, they can't differentiate between force and mass. A perfect reflector will not gain mass from a flash, but the photons will exert pressure on it. The weight change indicated by the scale will depend on the direction the light hits! If you have a less than perfect reflector, some energy from the light flash will be converted to heat, which will actually increase the mass of that object until the excess heat gets radiated away. Same thing applies when a phosphorescent body takes on energy from the photons.Experiment 2: Again you are standing on those scales but this time in a dark room. Someone a couple of metres away fires a Metz 45 flashgun at you. The scales indicate an increase in your weight and then a decrease back to your original weight. If you are a phosphorescent being (unlikely) the full return to original weight might take some hours!
This was trivially explained decades before photons or quantum physics were postulated. Any material absorbing/reflecting/transmitting electromagnetic waves differently dependent on wavelength will change white light to colored light.Experiment 3: Gold is yellow.
These experiments indicate that the light that illuminates things actually becomes part of those things.
This almost reads like a middle age hymnus! I think it's quite a stretch to claim all these things for light, in particular visible light (which the author probably means given he writes about photography). Despite Maris's claims that light somehow penetrates and becomes part of Gold, it is a very limited means of exploring nature, it will reveal the surface of an object but rarely its interior. While it will reveal the structure of an object billions of light years in diameter, it will fail to do so with objects smaller than its wavelength. And it is beyond me how light would have any of the naturality of water, air or rock.In the photograph, by contrast, light is eminently present and explicit; as such, it marks its own naturality. Moreover, it unveils nature in its most basic aspects. In fact, light not only has the more or less localized naturality of water, air or rock. It takes on the structures of the universe in what is most wide and thin, in its transmissions from afar and in its minimal energies. This means that light contains and shows the two cosmic constants, i.e. c and h, coming across the photographer in a pronounced way.[/indent]
If for the sake of argument, I was a cabinet maker and had spent many years working with wood, creating beautiful furniture as works of art. Can you also apply this navel gazing Philosophy, devoid of practical experience and artistic merit and make it meaningful?
...it is beyond me how light would have any of the naturality of water, air or rock.
Most animals would completely ignore photos regardless of what they show. We have gained some insight into how our brain sees but that understanding is still too shallow that we could teach a machine vision system to detect non-trivial objects in changing scene lighting. I don't think one can derive the importance and significance of photography without considering the specific importance of the visual sense to us humans. Deriving it from superficial knowledge of modern physics is bound to create a mess, regardless of how much philosophical lingo is used to hide this.
The fact that the language used by those philosophers is the natural language does necessary mean it is accessible to the profanes like me. It requires a lot of effort to understand the concepts involved here however you teased my curiosity enough to read the books of R. Barthes and Van Lier!
It is difficult because it is a precise way of thinking and thus, very demanding since you have to understand what someone is saying and not what you think they are conveying. It requires very disciplined thinking which can only be gained with time and practice - this is in no way to say that others are undisciplined but rather to say that philosophers take it to a new level. I write government regulations and guidelines for a living and a misplaced comma or a plural where there should be a singular can cost hundreds of thousands, even millions. I need the discipline of my philosophy background to do my job - a wedding photographer missing a shot might upset the couple, but they are still married. I miss a reference and somebody could lose their house.
Please understand that I am not trying to stifle anyone from contributing - the point of my last thread is that we have 1.3 million threads here on APUG and maybe a half dozen are on the philosophy of photography (I mean that in a formal sense, not the generic "we have a philosophy of care in the hospital" meaning of the word). Nobody ever suggests when people are discussing agitation cycles, pre-rinse procedures, stop bath preferences or exposure logs that this is somehow not real photography and that they should stop these discussions and just take pictures. For some individuals, understanding how a developer works on a chemical level helps them take pictures since they know what is going to happen before they hit the shutter - for me, understanding why I am taking the shot is what helps me fire the shutter.
If we have contributed to someone being more curious or thinking more deeply about something, then it is worth it. I probably won't get around to reading the book till next week but it is nice to be able to have a discussion.
Please understand that I am not trying to stifle anyone from contributing - the point of my last thread is that we have 1.3 million threads here on APUG and maybe a half dozen are on the philosophy of photography (I mean that in a formal sense, not the generic "we have a philosophy of care in the hospital" meaning of the word). Nobody ever suggests when people are discussing agitation cycles, pre-rinse procedures, stop bath preferences or exposure logs that this is somehow not real photography and that they should stop these discussions and just take pictures. For some individuals, understanding how a developer works on a chemical level helps them take pictures since they know what is going to happen before they hit the shutter - for me, understanding why I am taking the shot is what helps me fire the shutter.
If we have contributed to someone being more curious or thinking more deeply about something, then it is worth it. I probably won't get around to reading the book till next week but it is nice to be able to have a discussion.
Sorry, I'm lost here. What does he mean by that? That light is transformed by our natural habitat? Or that light is as much part of our habitat as rocks, water and air are?He says here the "local naturality," which I think he means to say the (holistically) elemental quality that light has of our inhabited natural environment, like soil, water, air, etc.
Sorry, but the excerpt from your OP don't say much about these issues. The author seems to be fascinated by modern physics to the point where he assigns ethereal properties to electromagnetic waves. He hangs on to some catch phrases from physics 101 (or the science section of daily newspapers) to derive a very odd theory of what goes on in photography.Yeah, for real. I think he does a good job of introducing his ideas on this in the excerpts I included in the OP, and gives extensive treatment to this exact issue throughout the text.
If it is because as an artist, you have something to say and this is you way of saying it - congratulations, you now need to understand why photography provides you with your artistic voice and you are a philosopher.
light is as much part of our habitat as rocks, water and air are?
The author seems to be fascinated by modern physics to the point where he assigns ethereal properties to electromagnetic waves. He hangs on to some catch phrases from physics 101 (or the science section of daily newspapers) to derive a very odd theory of what goes on in photography.
Yes, electromagnetic waves connect the cosmos as we know it, but so does gravity which is not recorded by cameras. We have reasonably good eyes well suited for life in the Savannah during daylight, and a brain that can make incredible images out of what we see, but that does not mean "man captures light in a most balanced and integrating manner."
Cameras are certainly no black boxes to those who make or service them, and the fact that case and shutter let only those few photons in that are meant to be recorded does not make a camera "secret and genital". A video camera is quite illuminated inside while it records, BTW.
And that's one of the weird things in many of these "philosophy of photography" tractates. Authors go through great length to derive a very solid train of thoughts, including lingo that is nearly impenetrable to humans not trained in that subject, and then base their whole train on thoughts on a very fuzzy image of modern physics, brain science and aesthetics.
Is there a philosophical question to be asked, as self-taught photographers and perhaps thinkers; where should we look for wisdom?
You'll notice the language the OP uses referring to the text (not to make a psychological assessment) - his attachment to it and his need, in making the thread, to find validation for his attachment to it. What I've taken from this thread is how dangerous it is to aesthetisize ideas and especially, rewarding others for doing so.
Some intelligent people have responded to this thread with dismissive comments, as Kevin did initially, perhaps with brief clarity of judgement.
These "magical effects" are made "magical" by our brains, not by specific magical properties of light. Attributing these effect to some ethereal qualities of electromagnetic waves sounds quite esoteric. Once you accept something as "magic" or "ethereal", you stop asking, you stop trying to understand and that is (in my opinion) the opposite of what philosophy aims for.Well, light is ethereal, isn't it? Only because we have deduced its behaviors to elegant theories and equations doesn't deprive it of its 'magical' effect on our minds and bodies.
Yes, I do assume that Van Trier has no formal education in physics and his CV does nothing to claim otherwise. That's ok, lots of people don't have one and get along with their lives quite nicely. But if one bases one's philosophy on things one doesn't really know beyond trivial facts, that's just another Alan Sokal event waiting to happen.Also, don't assume that this guy ( <- his CV, use google translate if you can't read french) doesn't have a reasonable grasp on physical theory. He's attempting to relate the empirical elements of environmental examination with subjective elements of our lived existence, and hypothesizing about how these things come together in photos.
One interesting difference between light and gravity is that you can't shield or reflect gravity. Light tells you about the surface, gravity about volume. Gravity lets you see behind and inside things, and it is necessarily omni directional and isotropic, at least much more than electromagnetic waves.It's not about connection, but the transmission of information. The thing about light that makes it special is that it is a rich spectrum of EM radiation which moves from one place to another, and can be influenced by (and thus can carry information about) the things it interacts with--gravity, or any other natural perceptible phenomenon (like sound, or smell) cannot carry information in this way, we cannot 'see' with it alternatively. The integrated manner in which our physiology has been selected to interpret the information that light carries, balanced well around the spectral intensity of our star. I don't see what's confusing about this.
Yes, agreed, one interesting property of cameras is that they can create detailed images regardless of what the photographer knows about their internal workings. Note that a tape recorder can also create accurate sound recordings of whatever the microphone was pointed at. Also note that a whole class of microscopes creates images by throwing and recording electrons (their wave property doesn't make them electromagnetic waves). If you look at Mandelbrot sets (and their popular pictorial representations) you have an even stronger form of creative primacy: the computer not just records but also manages the subject matter.Cameras are, in fact, designed to be black boxes which we employ without being able to fully know and fully control (to the extent possible with manugraphic modes of object and image making).It is secret in its exclusion, it is genital in its technological creative primacy;
The philosophical concept sounds interesting and a lot better founded than the author's theories of the ethereal qualities of light. Which is not a surprise because philosophy is the author's stronghold, not theoretical physics. I sure hope the book puts more emphasis on this than on pop science electromagnetic theory.and here in the excerpt from the OP he's speaking more specifically about the (often solely inhabited) darkroom. I think your biggest problem with the book is that you're not actually reading it, content to (as a few others are, it seems) dismiss his ideas out of hand and without adequate inspection.
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?