Essay 3: Silently clamorous with images, hopeful
If this museum were a how—were a process—what would that process be?
Perhaps every institution has a process. Perhaps each is a process. Beguiled by the seeming stasis of structures, we project inflexibility, rigidity, and immobility upon the organization that inhabits the shell—we mistake the nautilus’ habitat as a priori to the soft and fragile sailing creature of the currents.
For better or worse, an online museum is a soft institution. It has no protection, architecturally speaking. Unlike soft things in the animal world, a museum eschews camouflage—instead, it flaunts pattern and color in an entropic-kaleidoscopic visual crescendo, desperate for traffic—silently clamorous with images, hopeful.
Perhaps. But I may be drifting into the “who” of a museum. The how. Let me revisit the how.
I am the how. But I am not that different from other digital photographers. So just like there are infinite Leibniz’s and Newton’s to develop an infiniplex of calculi, you and I and everyone else with an I-phone or a non-I-phone will spawn forevermore slightly differential platforms for sharing images. We have been doing so since Lascaux. We have been sharing selfies for 65,000 years. Perhaps longer.
So if an institution is both inevitable and eventually a cliché, isn’t populating the internet with another website a form of institutional pollution? Isn’t it destined for ruin, with a very low probability of infinitesimally small recognition in the interim? Yes. Probably. Perhaps I, too, comme Camus, am Sisyphusian.
How did this particular museum begin?
Well, it probably had two parents. My first camera ever, perhaps. And my first digital camera.
My first camera was one of those square things with an aluminum face and a view finder. I can’t even remember what brand. But the first camera I identified with was my clamshell Olympus with the smooth oval that split to let the light in and then clicked-closed. And the shallow-depth of the shutter release. There was a screw-on flash assembly. It was the first machine I was given that was…hmm...somehow too good for me? Too expensive for a child? Was there some seed of responsibility that came with this camera? A child doesn’t really know about money. But knows when something is expensive. To me, this was a luxury and a practical tool at the same time. It must have been one of my early experiences with higher-end gear. It wasn’t a Leica and it wasn’t a Hasselblad. It was consumer grade, but high end. And I treasured it. And I took it seriously as a tool. My mom was the family photographer but she also took art shots and had taken a few photography classes at community college. And my dad shot too. They both gave silent approval to the art form.
Of course, I never took a good photograph. I was a child. I was mimetic.
And then, Tokyo.
I’ve told this story before, perhaps elsewhere in my missives about photography. But I will tell it again. I imagine each time I tell it, I emphasize something slightly different—I develop the story for the moment. Like reworking the same image to give it a variety of identities.
I was in a café. You see, I wanted to be a writer. This is perhaps a different way of telling this story—etiologically seeking the origin of my café habit. Perhaps that too came from photos. Perhaps Hemingway in Paris. Perhaps my grandmother in Berlin. I don’t know how or why, but I, like so many people in the world, fell in love with the ritual of the café—with being in situ amongst the chemistry, the aroma, the people and their personas, the poetry, the philosophy, the hoped for romantic connections, the depressions, the expressions—if there is a better place people go when they die, I’d like mine to be an endless street of charming cafés.
In any event, I was in the café and I was approached by two women. It was not romantic. It was business. But there was something neither they nor I could know about their business proposal. There was some alchemy that was about to occur.
They wanted to lend me a digital camera for a week to see what a foreigner saw. It was a marketing project. I don’t even know what kind of company they worked for.
I do know what kind of camera they lent me. It was a vertical body Fuji FinePix designed by Porsche with knurled metal nobs and the appearance of an engine block decoupled from whatever those hoses or large pipes are that come off such things. I know nothing of engines. Nor of cameras, really. That frees me to exhibit them to you phenomenologically. I am not beholden to their realities.
As with my Olympus, I was again in admiration of a machine. Of its design. Of its build quality. Of the promise the maker was making to the user. This promise is rarely satisfactory. But from time to time, you find something.
But more exciting than the metal and its heft was the inverted counterpoint to analog photography; I felt no film guilt. I could take as many photographs as I wanted. And I took. Photo after photo. I was in love with having this machine on me to snap away at any given experimental opportunity I might encounter. Of course, this novelty wore off, but I still remember that exuberant hunger to capture my world in an almost 1-to-1 series of stills.
There was a lot that I didn’t know about digital images. And digital photography was in its infancy. My camera was perhaps capable of 6-megapixel images. And low light photography was so grainy it was a kind of visual oatmeal.
Still, I was sold. I returned their camera and immediately bought the same model in Akihabara. I subsequently traveled through Europe with the camera and lived in Taiwan with it until it eventually failed. I was looking for a new camera in Taipei—a wonderful place for photographers—and at the last minute I decided on the Ricoh R8. I am not sure what I was considering instead, but I was sold on this odd camera that got mixed reviews but consistently appreciative remarks on its image quality if you were willing to accept some tradeoffs.
My particular visual universe
It wasn’t until I bought my next camera that I really arrived in what I knew was my particular visual universe—it wasn’t until I started working with images taken with my Sigma Merrill DP1 that I realized what it was like to be able to really connect with my work—the images of the Merrill DP1, and all the Merrills, for that matter, are technically and phenomenologically different from other images. The Sigma images are almost alive in post-processing. There is an ability to achieve depth that is almost sculptural—the images alternate between hologrammatic and bas-reliefs. The camera, in my humble opinion, is perhaps the ultimate photograph-taking-machine. And I am not endorsed by Sigma. Though I wouldn’t object!
You know why. Everyone knows why. There are a lot of technical papers written about why. I’ll give you the ultra-pared down 3-sentence synopsis here, but feel free to read elsewhere about the technology that underwrites the experience:
1. The Sigma Merrill cameras use the proprietary Foveon sensor.
2. The Foveon sensor is actually a stack of three sensors for Red, Blue and Green light, arranged from greatest to smallest amplitude of wavelength, like three grades of cheesecloth with large, medium and small mesh.
3. All light can be recorded and accounted for since every wavelength can get through to a sensor, whereas Bayer arrays use smaller and smaller squares to approach the totality of light capture…but this is like counting to infinity; even though you might get into the millions…or billion…or trillions, infinity has gazillions. The universe, like the amplifiers in Spinal Tap, goes up to 11. Or 42?
That is my three-sentence explanation of Foveon sensors. Once I started working on images in post that were captured with them, I was hooked.
I used my Bayer array cameras for different reasons and on different projects, and I have a deep appreciation for those projects.
But for pure development, nothing comes close to a Foveon. I could be wrong. I’d be curious to shoot with an ultra-high-end machine someday.
But I found happiness in my Foveon sensor.
Which came first, the image or the word? Seeing or saying? Whilst neuroscience and visual studies scholars have probably explored the order of perception, we will do so naively. We will remember our fractions. Take 1 over 4, for instance. And we will recollect that something strange occurs when we square fractions, and take their square roots. Squaring them makes them smaller. A quarter becomes a sixteenth. And taking their root makes them bigger. A quarter becomes a half. Seeing and saying function like this—at least, they can be mapped onto a similar profile along the existential axis, the line of being—life.
We are sightless for a long time, listening to the twin heartbeats of our mother and our own, tiny mimetic muscle. We may not “hear” as we will, later. But it is impossible to beat from within and not feel the rhythm. We are creatures of pulse before we are receivers of the light.
Images beget theories; theories coalesce into philosophy; philosophy inspires more images; images beget more theories. An identity of the museum amalgamates from the gyres of the algorithm above. Collections of images accrue. An identity of a museum emerges, in the image of the images of so many creators. This process is human. It is reducible. One may peep at its pixels. And yet, it is more than the sum of its pixels. In an image can be audacious, joyful, humble, rapturous, blasphemous, spiritual, material, truthful, deceitful—but to be inspired to take and to make images, and to be sensitive to the voices from within an image—herein lies a gift. To play in the language of any art is to discover a kind of magic. But to play in the language of light? One may make bold images, but one is humble. How lucky we are, the photographers? The creatives? And what happens to our legacies? What happens to our collections? This museum, perhaps. With the dedication of a curatorial cabinet and through a dynamic and dialectic project, a museum with an identity will emerge.
Who will this museum be?
This identity will seek self-understanding. It is both patient and practitioner in the psychology of an identity made up of images, of curating, of viewership. It has its own double helix—along one edge, image after image…the other curvature is a spiral library of ideas—the museum depends on criticism, analysis, forensics, ekphrasis, celebration and cerebration. If the exchange rate is an image for 1,000 words, then this museum seeks to be both the house of curation of images and the ledger of the words that underwrite their images. What we see, then, is that famous tip of the iceberg—this museum seeks to offer you the whole iceberg from image to the deep ideas beneath the surface of the image…the philosophical metadata of the images we create.
What will it not be?
This museum will not be a place of beautiful images—it will not be a cult of ultra-curated landscapes, flawless food plates, flashy fashion, or any other type of imagery that might be suitable for marketing purposes. No placidly pleasant or powerfully picturesque pictures please. Instead, every image should be prismic, refracting the thoughts of the viewer into a spectrum of interpretations and inspirations.
The phenomenology of light
The phenomenology of light: Is photography an art of deposition? Like writing, and yet writing’s inverse at the same time? Photography registers photons. The sensor is the digital page. Writing is the record of movement: photon v. ink, light v. dark. If photography is an art of receivership—the receivership of light—as such, it is an art where the artist stands still and the vectors move toward the artist. It is an art of the shield more than the sword. It is an art of reception. Photography is seemingly simple at first glance, but more complicated, ambiguous, paradoxical, and polyvalent upon closer examination. If one grants that photography is the reception of light on sensors, and writing as the act of depositing ink onto a page then one can consider the two arts as complementary—fort and da, yin and yang, Apollo and Dionysus, male and female, sword and shield, and so on.
The womb? The dark room. The delivery? The image.
But photography feels different to me than calligraphy. One is a project of the yin. The other, the yang. While photography collects light, calligraphy collects darkness. Ink. As black as can be wished for. The phenomenological corelative of opacity—of darkness that is so dark it has a spiritual event horizon. We can’t even see it—perhaps we only see it as a symbol. Calligraphy is an art of contrast.
But so too is photography. Is there an intersection of these two arts?
Calligraphy is yin to me; photography, yang. There is the structural continuity of the pen/sword/brush. I think we know what the Freudians would add to the list. Notwithstanding the well-established fact that calligraphy is the meditative terminal station of martial arts, it is a movement-based mediation. And then there is way you feel when you do it. That last one—the feeling—I won’t try to explain it to you. It is perhaps like the Dao. You need to experience it for yourself.
I feel different when I take photographs compared to when I work with ink.
In some ways, I feel nothing at all when I take photographs. Just like the light. I rarely feel light. Unless it is very hot. But then I slather myself with terrible chemicals to block the light.
Sometimes, when I was using my Ricoh camera, I would binge on a certain stimuli. I called these episodes of capture, Etudes. That’s French, for Studies. These Etudes—I am thinking of one in particular—concertina wire atop a spalling wall in a marine environment with my mother—remind me of any type of binge or spree. You just keep going. It is manic.
Perhaps one might apply Freud here as well—photographing a wall with razor wire is obviously Oedipal and a fear of castration. Perhaps we could apply this to Bartleby’s dead-wall reveries. As I already disclosed, I am a Freudian. I can even offer you a deconstruction of baseball and all net sports along Oedipal lines. To me, there is nothing more obvious than the batter/son correlative and the pitcher/father and the catcher/mother. It is also Odyssean. And heroic. Leaving home. Returning. But not everyone is a fan of Freud, so let’s move on.
Contracts with angles and angels
Let us return to our theme. What is photography?
It is a system of contracts with angles. And perhaps with angels. The former offers us a geometry, a trigonometry, and ultimately a quantum-economics of photography. The latter, a spiritualism of photography.
What do I mean by a system of contracts with angles? Well, what is an angle? Those are the things with degrees. Like slices of a pie. I am not referring to the angles of fields of vision in lenses, but rather in the angles of relationship between artists and their objects.
I will tell you a little secret that has probably been an open secret since Socrates. If you walk one step and then turn one degree (either clockwise or counterclockwise—it doesn’t matter—probably if you are north of the equator, you will turn clockwise) and then if you walk two steps and turn two degrees in the same direction as you did previously (I am not sure what happens if you alternate your turns), you will eventually end up walking in kind of circle.
But alas, even though my algorithm above precludes tangents, narratively, I have gone off on a tangent. What I mean by photography is a system of contracts with angles is that it is sextantal. Can one make an adjective out of the sextant? The sextant, of course, measures azimuth. Nobody really knows what azimuth is. They just pretend they do. To be honest, sail boats really get places by sheer luck and flotation. The wind knows where it’s going. Navigation is just a pretense invented to give captains an excuse for lives of leisure.
Sextants are those old brass things that look like a telescope and a protractor got fused together in a fire and then someone decided not to discard the new creation and hence, we look at stars and make measurements. And the compass, angles upon the curvature of the earth.
Angles.
Angels.
Angles and angels. The sextant looks into the sky…they are our instruments of verticality; they are also our spiritual search engines: stars, saints, constellations, angels, and all things empyrean. Compasses work horizontally. We move forward but take magnetic markers and confirmatorial terrestrial landmarks as our waypoints. It is easier for us to go left, right or down than up. We are not birds.
In a way, a camera is a sextant and a compass that inverts motion: instead of facilitating our movement through space, it brings space into the apparatus. It is a looking device that can be aimed up or down or side to side. Much of my work is lateral. It is this system of angles, the compass angles, that I wish to discuss. A discussion of non-linear, non-Euclidean photography is really a discussion of writing. Language is the older form of the camera, but the a posteriori byproduct of vision. The discussion of linear photography begins with an initial position.
The first position in photography
Let us imagine this first position in photography. But herein we are trapped with another riddle: what came first, the photographer or the object that begged the photograph? Inspiration, or a machine that would manufacture its own desiderata? I am going to assume that things worthy of inspiration came first and machines to isolate them, second. This is the concept of objective salience. Things, not us, look cool. Have prominence. Or monumentality. A kind of positivity, probably. Let’s take a hypothetical landscape to create our workaround. It is a field. On the field, a tall, symmetrical, conical tree grows. A fir. It is the only thing on the field. It bisects the horizon. It is a visual wedge. It has divided us from our environment. It has taken us out of time, or at least has inspired the trace of timelessness which is the photograph.
This is the first field and upon it homo photographicus finds herself or himself, I guess that image number one, or dessin numero un, if you will, might be the perfectly centered portrait of our tree. I imagine it would be perfectly centered. The angle. It would be 180 degrees. Only an artist would frame the tree off to the side. But even such framing—left of center or right—is still well within the worn ruts of objective encounters of the ordinary kind. What bold photographer would willingly take a picture of the tree truncated? And even if one would, the truncation would be vertical. Who would take one of the tree split horizontally, invisibly halved, stitching the known and unknown worlds by omission? And even more unlikely, who might hold the device at an angle not parallel to the ground? Who might defocus the image, or create blur by moving the camera? Who will experiment? Of course, all of this has been done and is quite passe. But I doubt it was in the initial opening gambits of most photographers to intentionally deprioritize the objectively salient elements in their worlds.
But it is the spirit of the experimental, and the description of that spirit in terms of the geometrical, that interests me. At least at first. What are the angles of photography? Later we will see if we can approach the angels of photography. For now, however, we remain all too human in our project of relationality between the artist—the photographer qua artist—and her or his image content.
I believe initial image impulses would be face to face. Vis-à-vis in Latin. En face de, in French. Dui mian in Chinese. This constitutes a direct linear relationship between subject and object intermediated by instrument. And the instrument is one that allows visual throughput. So, in a sense, the instrument is incidental. This is the same stance as two samurai would assume. Or two soccer teams. Or two armies. It is the symmetry of opposition. It is a potentially hostile posture. And this is how we begin our art. It is no wonder that we have an existentially-antihistamine response to being aimed at with a camera. A camera is a weapon-correlative. This leaves little quarter for sympathy for the photographer.
This 180-degree relationship requires trust/surrender/dominance/submission and more. Détente? It is charged. Being face to face is always charged. We might soften the frontality of our artistic approach by photographing from an angle to the left or to the right. If we consider our subject to be amenable to our directions, we may require them to do the moving: mug shots or modeling shoots.
Photographing people has always troubled me. Without permission, I consider it a kind of theft. Even with permission, I wonder about the belief systems of some Native people who consider it a kind of theft of the soul. The only person I can see truly photographing with consent is myself.
This leads me to the ultimate position in photography: -180 degrees, or selfies. We close the loop in this reversal. But then we have the problematics of a correlative of suicide here: we are aiming the instrument at the self. In my strong version of moral criticism against art, I seek an impossible neutrality of being. Strong versions of theories are usually problematic. But interesting.
The aftermath of images
In the arc from the other to the self, we have the full compass of photography. How do we make this turn? Or do we? Panning whilst our object of focus is still might ironically leave us with empty pans…quite the opposite of panning for gold. Tracking along an arc with our object always in focus would be giving our object the royal treatment. Literally. Zooming? Must we stop where the photons scatter and reflect? No! We can use x-rays. We can split atoms. All tool-based inquiry is akin to photography. All mediation of space and matter is sensitive to the angles involved between the objects in motion. Relativity in art is as important as it is in physics, but it is a relativity of morality more than a temporal one. Turning the camera upon oneself is a nod to the non-violence of non-consensual image capture. This is part of the ethos and the etiquette of many photographers.
The selfie is the opposite of the otherie, if there were such a word as otherie. Photographic position number one is a vector with I and YOU at either end. The final photographic position is one in which we have I and I or I and ME. You can construct complementary moral systems out of the two positions. But perhaps we are making too much out of things.
We talked about object-oriented photography and self-oriented imaging. What happens when the instrument is pointed at any other angle? Well…there is angular photography—investigatory adjacencies—but I may have written myself into a wall, here. Not that I can’t dissolve walls with words.
For photography is a kind of image capture that can theoretically leave the world intact and unchanged. But herein we have a Zen koan conflated with a principal from physics about observation and influence: does a photograph change what is photographed? Does it change the photographer? What if the image is never seen? Or the photographer? What is the weight of an image being captured? What light has been Hoovered into an apparatus? To what degree is the world darker?
My argument was that photography, in theory, could be a kind of invisible art—were it not for the visibility of the camera and the aftermath of images, which is a phrase quite similar to a book I am fond of, The Afterlife of Images which I recommend you consider reading, The Afterlife of Images, by Ari Larissa Heinrich, which I encourage you to read.
Images simultaneously change the world and leave the world unchanged, like radiation. You can’t really feel a photograph. But you know that it erodes the analogue narrative of existence which it paradoxically records. In fact, the afterlife of us might be an AI version of imaged and imagined us on satellite servers sailing out of our solar system using complex spatial sextants and compasses to preserve us and escape the collapse of our nearest source of heat and light and seed a new we, the people, all the people, but perhaps a spatially collapsed, hologrammatic we that exists in a strange visual dimension where our rules of gravity and other laws of physics need no longer apply. Perhaps this too is part of a quest for categories of freedom that will conflate reality with the imaginary. Perhaps photographs are a kind of set of first steps for a species we have yet to become.