The photographer’s job is to capture. They get a pass on intrusion despite a face of expressive flesh. So too does the scientist who uses their more elusive hands to dabble in a dangerous experiment.
The maker needs no excuse to have skin in the game, as they should feel free to explore via an aura of invisibility to discover and connect the seemingly unconnected.
Creativity is an imaginative process that makes one bolder. Both the artist and scientist live to be more than proactive, to think and feel something beyond the sheath of obviousness.
Should palette beget the pedestal, fame and earned respect follow from doing what matters.
German photographer Andreas Gursky’s photograph “99 Cent II Diptych” (see above) was once the world’s most expensive photo.
In it, the Dusseldorf School photographer stitched together a two-part photograph (also called a ‘diptych’) of a vast but empty grocery store in Los Angeles.
Taking another contemporary digitally manipulated view of everyday objects, Gursky’s “Rhein II” sold for $4.3m at Christie’s New York in 2011 — the image became world’s most expensive photo to sell at an auction.
“I wasn’t interested in an unusual, possibly picturesque view of the Rhine… This view cannot be obtained in situ; a fictitious construction was required to provide an accurate image of a modern river,” recounts Andreas Gursky on the work.
However, I still dig the artifice projected in his 2017 high-speed train ride in Tokyo, where he merged multiple photos to give the picture a blurring, hyperreal effect.
Gursky’s “Bahrain I” which reconstructs myriad images of the Bahrain International Circuit racetrack is also one to marvel at — especially for the way its paint-like race-tracks enhance reality.
The severity of an illusion lies within its shadow of a doubt. Objects as artifice are as credible as our eyes make them out to be.
The gut loves to sensationalize fear. The beating heart frustrates under the tick-tock of boredom. The mind interprets thoughts that drive reality.
What makes the external world feel real?
From the outer world to the inner state, sculpting perception is irrational but intentional as we all seek to decode reality into meaning.
What is the external world but just a bunch of code that exists in our heads, sorting out the facticity of objects?
Our impulse intends to give experience the benefit of “truth, both in matter and in mode.” We use our pragmatist razor to cut comprehensions down ruthlessly.
Words signify a consciousness, of which a newborn or pet can only hear. The baby goes on to break a word up into its individual sounds, eventually coalescing into a communicative language of memes while your dog relies on its own form of internal narrative.
There is some form of mental awareness in all creatures. A body without a brain contains zero working neurons and a dead narrative.
Words are tokens, pictures drawn with letters
Words are a different animal than pictures, perhaps the most effective at harvesting attention; humans use words to propagandize, market, deceive and spread evil. Said Nikola Tesla on the potency of language: “If hate could be turned into electricity, it would light up the whole world.”
Words are sensory stimulants, made of information to which you supply order. They carve out emotions for which both the bad and good stuff sticks. The more you use a word, the more you’ll be charged for it. “Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words,” wrote William Faulkner in his 1927 novel, Mosquitos.
We invent words, best exemplified in lists, because we don’t want to die. Words cue action, form, and follow-through. Yet they also slip the leash — it is their existence that also poses the most threat to our everyday consciousness.
To make meaning and deeper complexity, we need better mental processors.
Sometimes it’s the written word. Other times, it’s a still photo. If the camera is too revealing, we can communicate via video or sound. Said filmmaker Robert Bresson’s in his 1975 book Notes on the Cinematograph: “A locomotive’s whistle imprints in us a whole railroad station.”
Communication is a game of elements. Film is the art of combining images and sounds; it excludes what overexplains or impresses.
“One should not use the camera as if it were a broom.”
A good filmmaker lets the mind dance with imagination. A movie is both a creative and viewing experience. It can be dull and instantly lively, like the pendulum of our everyday lives.
“My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.”
Robert Frank, one of the most prominent photographers of the 20th century, passed away at the age of 94.
He documented American society while on his cross country road trips in the 1950s, eventually publishing a 1958 black and white photobook The Americans.
“With that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film.”
“The Americans” challenged the presiding midcentury formula for photojournalism, defined by sharp, well-lighted, classically composed pictures, whether of the battlefront, the homespun American heartland or movie stars at leisure. Mr. Frank’s photographs — of lone individuals, teenage couples, groups at funerals and odd spoors of cultural life — were cinematic, immediate, off-kilter and grainy, like early television transmissions of the period. They would secure his place in photography’s pantheon. The cultural critic Janet Malcolm called him the “Manet of the new photography.”
We take pictures intending to show someone else — whether it’s our Instagram followers or our family and friends.
But the illusion of infinite shelf space keeps so many pictures on the phone, gone and long forgotten.
Photos should not be stashed away in the closet or hoarded on the hard drive for safekeeping. Even the snap-happy tourist collects a souvenir of the present that few eyeballs witness.
Photography binds us
We communicate in images. And each viewer brings to the picture their interpretation of the truth.
But the facticity of each photo lies within the intensity of the pixels themselves, en route to perception. What we see is what we get, yet we can never look close enough.
Just imagine what it’s like when we train the eye to see.
Everything is contrived, from the glowing burger buns, fresh lettuce and tomatoes, to the juicy fresh meat. Video takes food advertising even further, making it come alive from its static state.
Tabletop advertising or food marketing is no different from any other product marketing: the illusion never matches the reality of creating it. In reality, the food has been dressed up and augmented to look fresh and mouth-watering like those lobsters in Red Lobster commercials.
Fashion advertising is similar. The model is always more enticing wearing makeup and sporting a six-pack. When models make commercials, they never smile. Badassery sells.
Not surprisingly, food porn and selfies are huge on Instagram too, the people’s marketing platform. A little bit of shoot preparation and filters make both food and faces look better than they actually are.
Today, anyone can use technology to create a Hollywood look. Everyone’s deceiving and buying lies at the same time. We all desire better versions of ourselves, including what appears on our plates.
Vladimir Lagrange took artistic photos of ordinary Russians for the “Soviet Union” Magazine. He also captured a bunch of personal photos that never saw the day of light because of Moscow’s censorship.
In reading up on Vladimir and looking at some of his pictures, it reminded me of this Bertolt Brecht line from War Primer (1955):
“The camera is just as capable of lying as the typewriter.”
The rise of mobile photography unleashes the citizen reporter, making it even harder to assess truth from propaganda. The world speaks in images to which people latch on to their own cocoon. Beware the blind spots.
The quietest people have the loudest minds. That’s why introverts are more active than extroverts on social media. It’s easier to speak through screens than it is face-to-face.
But showing up offline is the only way to get anywhere. No one’s going to marry or hire you because you speak well on screen but not in person.
Fortunately, the Internet is the perfect training ground for building creative confidence.
It’s a place where you can show your work and strengthen the presentation muscle for your real life.
It may be ok to hide behind a screen in some cultures and still get where you want to go. But for the most part, success still takes being present. It also begs you to embrace yourself.
So get out. Show up. Strive to be an interesting person online and off otherwise, you might not get the recognition you deserve.
These algae prints were misattributed for more than a century before art historian Larry Schaaf discovered that they were the work of British botanist Anna Atkins.
As a pioneer of cyanotype photograms, a process in which sunlight (not a camera) imprints over objects on a piece of coated paper, Atkins produced the blueprints for a book entitled Manual of British Algæ in 1841. She just never got any credit.
Thanks to Larry Schaaf’s book of Atkins’s work, promptly titled Sun Gardens: Victorian Photograms, her work continues to see the light of day.
