A dialogue? Maybe: These two pictures feel a bit like one person finishing another person’s sentence to me.
Category: Composition
Light Patterns
London Textures
A Year
Made pictures of monuments. Visited an airfield. Contemplated a modernist chapel. Displayed photos from the Airlift Memorial, Frankfurt. Played with eggs. Tried a breakfast table. Was haunted by bunkers. Visited ironworks. Found a way to photograph Wiesbaden’s Monopteron. Was fascinated by structures of a Colombier, a trickle of water. Intrigued by the cliffs of Fécamp. | Please klick the photos for larger images.
One Corner, Two Angles
The original idea was to try out a different film, the Kodak PLUS-X 125, processed with Rodinal. Judging from the scanned pictures, my first impression is that it has a rougher, perhaps more old-fashioned look than the T-MAX 400 I usually prefer … While experimenting I realized that these two also seem to illustrate the idea of this week’s photo challenge.
One Shot, Two Ways
This Way. That Way.
Grammar Exercise: Future
When I first read about this week’s photo challenge – Future Tense – I immediately thought: I should do something with an egg!
Couldn’t Wait Till Lunch
My interpretation of this week’s photo challenge – lunchtime. Since this was inspired by the light, I could not wait till lunchtime. (I am in a different time zone anyway.) So here is the table, waiting for breakfast, plus some more pictures.
Inspiration
“We want to see portraits of you doing something that inspires you to blog.” That’s what the Special Photo Challenge asked for. So here are some things that inspire me.
The left picture shows many objects – me photographing stuff, actually. It was inspired by Susan Sontag’s essays on photography: The mere act of making a photograph, Sontag says, re-evaluates the stuff we find because taking a picture equals claiming that the subject is deserves to be looked at – even ugly objects become ‘nice’ in photograph. Hence Sontag’s idea that photography aesteticizes the whole world.
Though I find a lot of inspiration in texts, pictures inspire me too: I ‘found’ the right one after visiting an Ellsworth Kelly exhibition entitled “Black and White”. This abstract picture with me in it may well be a reaction to (or inspired by) the pictures I saw. – While all this describes my motivation to photograph, this blog is really inspired by my love of photography, and the desire to share my pictures and see what you think.
Leaf and Landscape?
Just two more pictures inspired by the Weekly Photo Challenge: Silhouette. Some of those close-ups remind me of Rorschach tests: What do you see?
In the Grass
A contribution to The Weekly Photo Challenge
The Broken Flower Pot Abstractions
A Picture with Me in it
On Nature’s Whim
Isn’t it sometimes hard to tell if something was arranged or just happened? Esspecially when looking at photographs, we often are at a loss.
The situation you see here was composed by nature, and I only positioned it in a frame. While many photographers arrange people and things so they look natural in their photos, I love to do it the other way round – I do not arrange but love my subjects to look like they were deliberately positioned.
Contrast: Patterns Permanent and Passing
This is my counterpoint for Judith (A View From The Woods) – and also another contribution to the Weekly Photo Challenge.
Neist Point Rocks and Pools (Isle of Skye)
Stand There!
Photographs serve the illusion of realism, of showing the Eiffel Tower or the bombing of a Vietnamese village as it really was. Perspective strongly supports this illusion. It denotes three-dimensional space on the basis of construction rules that have been derived from optics. A camera basically follows the same optical laws we find at work in the Renaissance theory and practice of perspective. It is a machine for making central perspectives, very much like the devices contrived by Dürer and others to facilitate the drawing of perspectives.
Perspective does not only denote space. It also positions the spectator: Central perspective works best if you stand right in front of the picture’s vantage point. You are thus made part of the geometrical arrangement; your (ideal) position, your eye is inscribed into the picture. For the image to captivate you and work its illusion, you have to cooperate, positioning yourself accordingly. Illusion comes at the price of a loss of freedom for the spectator.
Would absence of perspective, emphasizing the picture‘s flatness, then mean that spectators regain a certain amount of freedom, being allowed to stand wherever they like, without missing anything?
If this were the case, speaking of Informel paintings as ‘democratic’ may not only cover the picture elements (which are all equal) but also the ‘positioning’ of spectators. Confronted with a painting by, say, K. H. Sonderborg, spectators can position themselves freely, they can pick any spot in front of the picture they like. There is a certain openness to this, some kind of laissez-faire a Renaissance painting following the rules of central perspective might lack.
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Sources
Hans Belting, Florenz und Bagdad. Eine westöstliche Geschichte des Blicks. München: Beck, 2008.
Willi Kemp, “Das deutsche Informel”, Le grand geste! Informel und Abstrakter Expressionismus 1946 – 1964. Hg. v. museum kunst palast. Köln: DuMont, 2010.
Putting Things Into Perspective
Until I wrote the lines about landscapes and maps, I never really realized the impact of perspective. A camera was a great machine for making perspectives; some perspectives were not what you wanted, especially when depicting architecture; you could deal with this issue by using the right lenses. That was all I knew and ever thought about.
I remember using perspective quite deliberately in several pictures though (consider the steps above).
Still, I was not fully aware of what perspective or the lack of it means if you consider actual space and the picture plane. Making photographs with little or no perspective (or ‘depth’) is yet another way to abstract from our everyday perception of things, and it might be yet another hint at the artificiality of pictures, their ‘pictureness’.
Landscapes and Maps
Looking at a countryside horizontally, you see what would be represented in your classic landscape picture. If you tilt your view by 90° and look straight down, what you see is something that could be appropriately represented in a map – except for the scale of course. Scale and detail would rather be a matter of distance from the ground then.
There are several examples for this kind of perpendicular view in this blog, and the feature these pictures share is a reduction in or even absence of perspective.
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Further Reading
Gottfried Boehm, “Offene Horizonte”, Wie Bilder Sinn erzeugen. Berlin: Berlin UP, 2007.
empire of lights 