…or maybe it’s the God of Small Things. However, I did notintend to participate in Paula’s Thursday Challenge until I found this little devil, a very minuscule example of Urban Art.
Author: Tobias M. Schiel
Abstract arts lover, Jazz enthusiast, mystery buff, compulsive reader - and how do I get it all into pictures? Photography has been a good way over the last couple of years.1. .
Suburban Dots
The second of my entries for Paleica’s Magic Motto for the month of March: Formen & Figuren: It seems like I got stuck with dots and circles, although there must be other forms, even in geometry. Call it creative stubbornness (I read that term in a mystery novel, and liked it).
Let’s Make Harmony
An entry for the Weekly Photo Challenge. For more experimenting and toying around with small animals in a life size world, see here.
Dot City
Paleica at episoden.film gives photographers a month to come up with responses to her challenges, which is nice to begin with. In January and February I used the time to photograph and select, and came up with a retrospective by the end of the month. Today I see it differently. I photographed Formen & Figuren (shapes and figures), trying things out. I intend to share them over the month so we can see what develops (if anything develops at all).
Traces of the Past
This is an entry for Paula’s Thursday’s Special. All traces were found in southern France (Languedoc). Check out the other contributors’ pictures as well if you like.
Structures & Rhythms
Choice
Last Thursday we invited friends and colleagues for a private viewing. The show included two pieces from the Litfaß series, and one of the visitors remarked that she had mistaken the two photos for collages at first sight.
Collage is a matter of choice: You pick the elements of your picture from a vast pile of available stuff, then arrange it into a composition.
The process of making a photo is very close to that of making a collage. You choose. You eliminate. The choice determines the outcome. We don’t show what is but what we see fit for framing.
I hope nobody minds me choosing another Litfaß picture (from session no. 17) over showing arrays of things to pick from for Paula’s Thursday Special which is – you may have guessed – choice. And this is what I chose from (click to enlarge):
Sea Shells
Late Afternoon by the Sea
Renesse Underground
Same scene, different pictures, and I do not know which one I prefer. So I decided to show them both, trying to prove the point that – as has been noted – that it is the difference that makes the difference: Both appeal to me, but for different reasons.
I looked at the original picture (bottom) and asked myself if it would look more ‘radical’ if I cropped the black parts to the left and right, letting the ocean view running past the margins of the picture. Now that seems to make the picture more difficult. There seems to be some hint that the world continues beyond the frame of the picture, and in some way the picture seems to correspond with its surroundings – the white background of the page – more openly.
In comparison, the original picture might be more conventional. The bright parts can be seen as a picture within the picture, and it is almost neatly framed – almost: The left part of the frame shows a post, its shapes are just visible. And the left side of the frame is also a bit “heavier” than its counterpart. It seems like this picture offers more information it is possibly more restful, suggesting that what we see is a whole complete in itself. It might be more affirmative.
Writing this, I realize there is a bias – but I really wanted to say that these are not just two more or less identical pictures of a piece of ocean, seen through some posts, but that form makes quite a difference, not necessarily between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ one, but in content.
Litfaß 12 . 1
Life imitates art imitates life… If we only see what we know the impact of art seems clear: It hints at seeing differently, or different things. A torn-off advertisement poster may ‘contain’ an abstract composition. This one vaguely reminds me of Joan Miró. | This is my contribution for the Weekly Photo Challenge.
Beachclub Zuiderduin
Near Westkapelle, Walcheren, January 2016.
Strandpaviljoen “Zeecafé”
Near Oostkapelle, The Netherlands, 2016.
Life-Size
A contribution for Paula’s Thursday Special: Life-Size. At first I did not know what this was all about. But then our pets got out of hand – that cat: You don’t pay attention for a moment and the next thing you know, she’s in the milk! Just sharing some photos of the weird menagerie. Life-size, of course.
Walk on Beach
Walking on beaches is a passion I seem to share with Jo. Which is why I would like to share this walk (or maybe even series of walks) on her Monday Walks collection: Walking the beaches of south Holland, you find many things – among them the strandpaviljoens, beach cafés standing on stilts at the seaward base of the dunes, a welcome refuge from rain and cold and in case of an appetite for fish & chips. As a landscape photographer, I have always hated them because they are prone to get in the way. But this winter, I decided to turn the tables: You’ll see a couple of strandpaviljoen pictures this month.
“Organized Noise” – an Afterthought
Paula at Lost in Translation kindly asked me to host a guest challenge which I gladly did because those challenges often entail great discussions. That’s what’s happening… Jo wondered if organizing noise was something like finding beauty in ugliness. I remarked that the phrase might also be understood as “ordering chaos” and then realized that this answer might make sense in more ways than I would have thought.
1. I was reminded of Michel Foucault’s L’ordre du discours, “The Order of Discourse.” Order/ordre seems to signify system here, or disposal, also connoting terms like regulation or even directive.
According to Foucault, there is no knowledge to be had outside of Discourse. Discourse decides what can be said within reason and what cannot, and what form a proposition must have. By exerting this power, Discourse forces knowledge into existing: The ways in which we can think or speak about anything determine what we can know about these things.
2. I was also reminded of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, one of the masterworks of Modernity. Writing this novel, Döblin saw himself confronted with the problem of representing all the things happening simultaneously in a metropolis. As a solution, it seems, he chose the form of collage. And in one of the many essays that may be read as commentaries of his work, Döblin asks: “Was steigt in das Becken des Jetzt?” – “What will climb into the Pool of Now?”
Climbing into the Pool of Now: I love this metaphor! Today I get the impression that it is also a photographer’s (and an artist’s) question: What will be allowed to ‘climb’ into the picture – now?
Answering this question by releasing the shutter, we force pictures into being, pictures of a world that often presents itself to us as an incomprehensible chaos. Pictures then can help us sort it out, no matter if we choose the counter-discourse of art or the discourse of reportage.
Pictures from Litfaß session no. 11
Vibrant
An entry for the Daily Post’s Weekly Photo Challenge.
Thursday’s Special at Paula’s: Organized Noise
The notion of son organisé seems to be central to composer Edgar Varèse’s understandung of music. “Son” can be translated into both ‘sound’ and ‘noise,’ and it is the ‘noise’ part that fascinates me. For music, it means broadening the material that can be used for a composition: Varèse apparently claimed that ‘noise’ is only another word for any sound one subjectively does not like .
In my eyes the concept of organized noise begs the question of its applicability to pictures. Photography is known to record ‘noise’ in capturing the old, the broken, the decrepit – the sights someone might not like subjectively. The medium appears to lend itself to this aesthetic choice, and it has been keenly criticized for it.
But there is also the aspect of organizing noise into music – or visual ‘noise’ into pictures. Some sights overwhelm us with their complexity, some with their ugliness or apparent meaninglessness. Nonetheless, I claim that photography can be a means of reducing this complexity, or making sense of the ‘noise.’
So, how to approach this? Here is a couple of thoughts:
- Take your pick: Not all available ‘sounds’ have to be heard at the same time – not all the available elements have to go into the composition of the picture. Get closer, eliminate some of the ‘noise.’
- Look for a main voice: Find a visual anchor that dominates all the other elements. Or look for a visible hierarchy of 1st, 2nd, 3rd (etc.) voices. What’s dominant? What’s just background noise?
- Find a rhythm: Straight horizontal or vertical frame-to-frame lines can convey such a sense.
For this challenge abstract pictures may work better than those showing recognizable objects. The abstract pictures in this post were made ‘using’ the battered trash container below.
Comments are closed for this post because I would like to invite you to visit Paula’s Lost in Translation and participate in the challenge. Thank you – and have fun!
Litfaß 10 . 2
Litfaß 10 . 1
The pictures in this series sometimes look like pictures of art pieces to me. If they were, I would not see the point in photographing them like that. I do see a point, however, in finding constellations like the ones shown here: posters torn off an advertising column.
One could call them artworks resembling the reproductions of artworks. They actually show destruction, simultaneously constructing something new. The title previously assigned to this series – Deconstructivism – was therefore just as good, but Litfaß should set the record straight; Litfaß-Säule meaning advertising column.
empire of lights 