An Emergent Representation

So, this is the part that precedes the passage about the “photo as an emergent, novel representation” that I quoted from Laruelle in the post I made before I made my way to Banff:

The ‘categorical’ content of photography, the a priori photographic content, serves in a certain way as an hypothesis (that must not be imagined, in empiricist manner, to be a simple fiction or supposition) of the experimental work carried out by the photographer who tries to adjust the techno-perceptual complex, with its image content, to that a priori but still undetermined imaging dimension.

- François Laruelle  

I’m tempted to just leave it at that for now, as it pretty much sums up how I’ve been approaching things while here in residence, thus far.  I’ve let myself run pretty wild in terms of what kinds of spaces and materials I’m paying attention to, and how – both visually and conceptually, I suppose.  Still, a common thread runs through (at least for me) – that of the land and/or components somehow reminiscent of earth and atmosphere.

I suspected I would come across new things to look at here, and after a trip to the hardware store I wound up with some decidedly random stuff, including different types of screen and a bit of cheesecloth.  Of course the moiré patterns became immediately evident – more on that later, I think.  I have to say though, I can’t help but wonder if I was subconsciously influenced by the cover image of The Concept ofNon-Photography sitting on my desk, a detail from Moiré 3, by Liz Deschenes.

Any rate, like I said, more on that later.  For now, a single video clip as well as a few first (lightly edited, and non-composited) images are below.

These words and scattered images are dedicated to Lisa Zaher, in honor of her father.

Click on image(s) below for larger view:

Mountainfield Studies

Getting ready to head to the Banff Centre in Alberta later this week, after attending the College Art Association Conference in NYC.  I plan to continue working on the most recent segment of my "field studies" series that I began while in Iceland last June - tentatively titled, Mountainfield Studies, although this may branch off into Snowfield and Icefield studies (it kind of already has) depending on how I respond to the topography of the Canadian Rockies - and whether or not I decide to bust out the rolls of plastic and tinfoil again, or if I end up working with other materials that I come across or seek out.  I won't know until I get there, I suppose, but I've definitely got ice and mist on the brain, having just finish a little sci-fi novella by H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness.  Still sorting through some other readings on mountains as well, and heading back into François Laruelle's writing to revisit some thinking around the photograph(ic) as elemental impulse.

I plan to post a bit from Banff, and will write more about my thought process as well, most likely. For now, I've posted a group of working studies - a bit of a (potential) new direction that uses composite imagery rather than sequential (or partial) multiples.

But in closing, why not have a few words from Laruelle?  The following passages are excerpted from The Concept of Non-Photography:

What really happens in the framing of a shot? 

There is an a priori photographic intuition that gives not such and such a determinate image, but the very dimension or the sphere as such of the image in its excess or its transcendence in principle over its technical ingredients. The photographer 'images' from the outset beyond perception, albeit with the index and the support of perception - [s]he intuits from the very beginning an ultra-perceptual image, irreducible to perception's powers of analysis and resolution, and of synthesis. 

...a photographic apparatus does not transform one into the other the real and the image, but produces images from other images. 

For the photographer, there are only ever photographic images, an unlimited flux of photos certain of which are virtual, framed without being shot, and others that are technologically effectuated or produced and that now have explicitly as their support the representations of perception, etc.

This is why we shall maintain that the photo is an emergent, novel representation, a discovery, and it precedes photography, that it is given before the operation that manifests it in relation to experience. 

- François Laruelle 

Click on images below for larger view... 

In Defense of Leaving the Single Image Behind

Wow.  Let me just start somewhere, eh?  In defense of what’s above, but also in defense of letting oneself embrace the rambling mind.  Tangential threads – welcome!  I don’t know if it’s the nature of secluded time during an artist’s residency (certainly in part) or if it’s more to do with this newfound freedom I’ve embraced, of yes, leaving the single image, for one.

Now, this is not a new thought for me.  I’ve known for some time that I was no longer interested in the photographic “moment” per se.  And that gets back to my fixation on the instant, or instance (is instance plural of instant? – an instance, as encompassing a duration, but yet an instant occupies a duration as well, but do we think of it as inherently being more brief, I wonder – and then what about “moment” – for whatever reason that conjures within me a more lingering, poetic passage of time, one “brief moment” could seem to endure for a painfully long time, whereas we think of things being “over in an instant”).  At any rate, you can see where the (my) problem lies.

So I choose to work with multiple frames – generally those that were captured (in time and in space) very close together.  I’m certain this also has to do with a general shift in subject matter over the years and also a different set of preoccupations.  I work fast/slow – both methodically and stupidly.  It’s always in response to the world, but either that which has been sitting there for quite a while, with minimal transformation other than seasonal/environmental (landscape type spaces) or that which is in my immediate surround, also mainly sitting there pretty quietly, aside from my random interventions – but mainly it’s just me looking at a space, a corner, a slice, responding to something that was prompted simply by virtue of perception. (I rambled off the next paragraph and in the midst had to take a break to photograph the bedspread in the sunlight, because I noticed something when I walked back to the desk from fixing my tea – how many bedspreads in sunlight can I photograph?  Apparently, quite a few.  They’re all different, of course – maybe a separate post on that later). 

Right so, back to the single image chit-chat.  I realize this is not a new notion – photographers have certainly worked with multiples of similarity before and there are many examples out there (Meatyard comes to mind quickly, with some of his repetitive landscape abstractions), and there are even more examples with contemporary work (yes, Uta Barth, I know – but many others as well) and I suspect that more and more of this will become common.  We are now very accustomed to a photographic type or way of seeing, and many of us realize this does not necessarily attach itself solely to one view of a subject from a fixed vantage point for a predetermined fraction (or sometimes longer) of a second.  

What we get from that type of representation (which can certainly be remarkable) is a stable relic of sorts – or maybe even a suggestion that eternity has been fixed in an instant (to paraphrase Cartier-Bresson).  But what has been fixed, really?  (And this is sort of hard to get at in relation to a Cartier-Bresson quote, because I can understand his perspective as a street photographer, thinking about the flux of humanity, rapidly passing in front of his lens and indeed, isolating a solitary fragment from the flow – fixing, perhaps, a bit of the optical unconscious.)  But how then could we attach this idea to images of landscape, or those that sit still – even a formal portrait, perhaps?  When time presents itself as its own entity (part of the subject matter, or even as subject itself) the single photograph confounds our expectations, operating differently in response to subject matter that does not move than to that which can (possibly) be captured or halted.  The descriptive qualities of the photographic image are mesmerizing, to be sure, and to be able to fix our gaze for “an eternity” is one thing – but to suggest that somehow an instant has been captured is problematic.  There is duration.  And there is no saying where that duration starts, or where it ends.  Hence, the filmic representation can only do so much as well – always decontextualizing the world, that’s all any re-presentation can do.  

So there’s no solution to this through use of the multiple either (thankfully).  It’s simply another way of drawing out this kind of photographic seeing in relation to, I suppose, metaphysical questions of being and knowing.  I choose to emphasize the fragmentary nature of photographic depiction by replicating and reiterating, thereby emphasizing the gaps within perception in general.  I’m still in love with the notion of the transcendental photographer as suggested by Laruelle (in an earlier post) and also with Hollis Frampton’s notion of an “infinite cinema” – the camera always having been running and will continue to run forever, we plunk out little bits at a time – and also with Crary’s emphasis upon the inability to represent the temporal experience within the camera obscura – all of this is jumbled around with my thinking about the multiple, but more specifically about what we expect from or desire from the camera, and the camera image.

No (One) Was With Her When She Died - Part II

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Click on image for enlarged view

Let me just get into this phrase a bit, and why I fixate on it, and why I’m wanting to use it to guide this latest group of imagery.  A few things, I’ll try to break it down and go through them briefly.  First, it’s the phrase itself – the poignancy of course but also its precise matter of factness coupled with an uneasy ambiguity.  Second is the action and the time inferred in the phrase – the inference of one/with/when.  Third is its relationship to a photographic kind of thinking (I guess, if there is such a thing – more accurately I could say my own peculiar way of thinking photographically). 

So about the phrase – not only this one but so many others like it.  I’m working with this one now because it’s leading me along these other threads, but the reason I acknowledge others like it, is because we’ve all got our own set burned into our brains – images too.  And really, I guess a phrase is also an image, right?  But I want to continue trying to think beyond, but also in between melancholia.  So maybe only beyond far enough to come back from the another direction, because I’m not interested in stopping when the maximum level of sentimentality is reached, I want to know how it/we got there in the first place.  So at any rate, yeah, we’ve all got these things burned into our minds that rise up unbeknownst to any kind of voluntary cognition, and they comingle with one another (these phrase-images) and if you don’t grasp a corner somehow, you’re fucked.  They’re gone.  That kind of failure interests me.  The tension around those missed moments (they’re not moments really, need to think of a better term, maybe). 

So that sort of takes me to the second bit.  The time and action in the aforementioned phrase.  The wording suggests that no “one was with her”.  This is different than “nobody was with her”.  It makes me think of the one that cannot be counted (I’ve still got some major re-reading of Badiou on the horizon, but I’m led to think in this manner when I consider this phrase fully).  So the one as absent, and so “not one” – the void (please don’t kill me philosopher friends).  In essence then, there was no ONE with her when she died.  The one could not be counted.  So, we’re not simply talking about being alone or without a companion of any sort, but truly in the midst of nothingness.  Holy christ, that makes the phrase even more crushing to me.  Which of course, I love (now, this relates back to the paragraph above – why?  Why is the intensity of loss and longing such a rich and powerful experience?).  But another aspect I fixate on is the “when” in the phrase and also the “was”.  There is a suggestion of time present and time passed.  And of course all of this bundled together within a phrase about mortality.

And that’s what brings me around to the photographic.  I guess anyway, somehow.  It’s something to do with the very nature of photography and image “capture”.  This leads me back to Laruelle’s introduction to The Philosophy of Non-Photography (that I wrote about a few weeks ago) where he speaks of the idea of the photographs we take without a camera (and/or prior to the camera)– simply by virtue of being in the world and burning these images into our brains.  This is what we do with the aid of the camera as well.  The camera image is (sometimes) fixed; the mind/body image is not and/or at least not in the same form – can’t really be conjured up in the same way every time as in a photographic re-presentation.  But, now, I know I can’t explain this last bit well because it’s not a fully formed “idea” of any kind, it’s just a notion, something to do with how each moment (oh, how I’m beginning to despise that word), or how each instant, or each image passes by and in a sense, dies instantly.  Whether it has been recorded with our brain via perception or with a camera via film or a light sensor, that particular image has died (removed from it’s specific position in time and space).  So for whatever reason, this is yet another way I’m dealing with the phrase – as an image, and as loss or failure.

Clearly I’m all over the place, and tangents are likely to occur in the coming weeks.  Should be good fun.

The images attached to this post are a few work proofs from this week (be sure to click on them for an enlarged/detail view).  While working, I moved a box and found a dessicated lizard underneath.  She makes an appearance in some of the photographs.  Seemed apt.

And What If Not Silver

No, not in terms of currency.  Not exactly at any rate.  But for the photograph.  And I suppose it’s not so much about the silver, but about what stopped the silver from continuing to go dark – but I’m not fixated (no pun intended) on the technological evolution of the medium (support?) of photography/the photograph, but instead strangely fascinated by the very nature of what this particular kind of representation is and does, and why.  So, these silver salts get exposed to light and they form an image, a re-presentation of whatever was in front of the lens (modified though by various mechanical manipulations and operator decisions, and then further by the viewer who perceives/receives the image in a particular context, etc.).  At any rate, I’ll delve further into this in future posts.

But, I’ve been thinking around this stuff via a few books recently – among them is Francois Laruelle’s The Concept of Non-Photography, a complex read to be sure, but uses photography and the photograph as an interesting metaphor in (I think) discussing a shift from transcendental perspectives of thought that are tied to dichotomies and moving toward an understanding of “being” via science and ideas of radical immanence – and ultimately picking apart why photography is suited for negotiating this shift.  I tend to relate closely to passages that dwell on notions of an unmediated immediacy that might be experienced in various places within and throughout the act of making/taking a photograph and of being witness to the resulting representation (or not, as in the case of photographs not “taken”).  And speaking of photographs not taken, that brings me back to the title of the post.  This is what I love about Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer.  He argues against the linear evolution of perspectival tradition (at least as attached to technological progress) and locates the emergence of photography within cultural shifts in perception and in relation to the embodied observer that moves through space and experiences time (which was rapidly changing in the early 1800’s – not coincidentally). 

Anyway, Laruelle has this great opening bit equating “a legend of the birth of philosophy in the spirit of photography” and describes a “transcendental photographer…with no camera, and perhaps for that very reason destined ceaselessly to take new shots of that first flash – consigned to extinction – constrained thus to comment interminably on that first shot by taking yet more, to engage himself in an unlimited-becoming-photographic – so as to verify that the flash, the World, the flash of the World – that is to say, philosophy – really  has taken place, and was not just a trick of the senses” (Laruelle, p. 2).  And I just love this visual, or this suggestion of relating our experiential understanding of the world through images in a photographic manner – with OR without a camera, that this kind of photographic thinking has been ever-present, both before and after silver, and certainly WELL before the camera as a hand-held or even box-like apparatus.  The phenomena of the camera obscura has been observed for thousands of years, but Jonathan Crary warns against “conflating the meanings and effects of the camera obscura with techniques of linear perspective” and of understanding the world in terms of a two-dimensional representation.  “The camera obscura defines the position of an interiorized observer to an exterior world.  Many contemporary accounts…single out as its most impressive feature its representation of movement.  Thus, the phenomenological differences between the experience of a perspectival construction and the projection of the camera obscura are not even comparable…the movement and temporality so evident in the camera obscura were always prior to the act of representation; movement and time could be seen and experienced, but never represented” (Crary, p. 34).

Exactly.  Never represented.  So, I’d like to get back to recording slices and glimpses with my cameras – since in fact I can document ephemeral flickers (to an extent) using equipment and materials at hand, while remaining mindful of the photographic-ness of the world sans camera (and I don’t mean photogenic, although aesthetic concerns do drive my decisions – but that is true whether I am looking through the lens of the camera or with my own eyes).  Still sorting out what this all means (for me) of course.  I understand (as in the image that accompanies this post) that this will take more than a few pictures of some condensation on a window and its shadow, or that same dew made mobile in the form of a moving image, but it’s my starting point, for now.

This was rambly.  Such is the nature of thought and unedited journal writing.

Next week, some thoughts on the index from an essay by Tom Gunning included in an anthology edited by Karen Beckman and Jean Ma called StillMoving:  Between Cinema and Photography (and another image or two).