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.

Space Is (As) Time Arrested

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Right, so I attribute that phrase, or well the phrase “space as time arrested” to Henri Bergson in my mind.  And I’m pretty sure that’s an authentic memory of some sort, but it may well have gotten mixed up somewhere along the way as I can never find that exact quote in any of my Bergson stuff, as hard as I’ve looked and read and re-read.  So, maybe it was someone else, or maybe it’s a conglomeration of phrases, a different translation or something.  Anyhoo….

To bring that back around to my rambles of last week – about recording versus documenting and then ending with a few words about duration (and that which we endure, and how), I want to get back to that thinking.  So, that opening phrase – “space as time arrested” is such a great one to get mixed up in for a while.  You know, what does a photograph do?  Yeah, it arrests time – or at least it can or might, I suppose.  And, how do we understand space (especially as, perhaps, distinct from place)?  To me, space is gravity or something – or space is what holds us down and fixes us into (a) place, and we have to push our way through it/against it – I have this visual of slogging through (outer) space with a giant frickin’ spacesuit all heavy and burdened, but yet you’re weightless and float, but still you have to slog.  So anyway, it seems like that’s also about duration – how long it takes us to wade through all the shit – or, more poetically we could say, the stuff of life.  But what we have to endure – that’s a lot of shit. 

Alright, so back to the phrase – “space as time arrested”.  And that “as” becomes important.  Because, if space is where all the particles come together and matter is what we are at all times (always already) up against, then time needs to be defined.  What kind of time are we talking about?  Bergson lovingly picks this apart in Matter and Memory when he suggests that, 

“The essence of time is that it goes by; time already gone by is the past, and we call the present the instant in which it goes by. …But the real, concrete, live present – that of which I speak when I speak of my present perception – that present necessarily occupies a duration.  Where then is this duration placed?  Is it on the hither or on the further side of the mathematical point which I determine ideally when I think of the present instant?  Quite evidently, it is both on this side and on that; and what I call ‘my present’ has one foot in my past and another in my future.” 

(Bergson, p. 176, 177)   

Yep.  So, how to extend the instant, sort of.  Maybe that’s what happens when we think of “space as time arrested” – it’s like a stop-motion animation of the mind, and I say stop-motion because, for me, even though the suggestion is to “arrest” time which I guess means to stop, we recognize this impossibility – even in the photographic image, because all that does is give us a two-dimensional re-presentation of a moment that’s reactivated when it’s perceived and immediately compresses past/present/future together – and that’s active, and incredibly rapid.

Now, I’m going off the cuff here – if I really wanted to be solid about this, I’d immediately refer more carefully to my Bergson and dig through my Ponty and figure out what they say about matter/space/time – cuz they say a lot (as do Heidegger, Deleuze and others of course, of course) but that’s not (entirely) what I’m using them for.  What I can retain is all that’s really useful – no way in hell am I ever going to truly understand or be able to “do” philosophy – I just need it to help push me along, and give some direction to my meandering – and to burn a few phrases in my head here and there that I can “see” – and lead me to some pictures. 

And of course this is why I’m combining the still and moving image as captured via the time-based mediums of photography and video – if you want to get at the relationship between perception/memory/time, in a visual manner, of course you’d go to the source.   Why are time-based media the source, you ask?  Refer back to my earlier post discussing Crary’s Techniques of the Observer.  And, god-sakes, they’re called time-based media for a reason, eh?  Conversely, if you’ve become so enthralled with the materials you use and their very nature – both in terms of the apparatus and resulting imagery, of course you’d be led directly to considerations of time/memory/perception, and you’d wind up spending loads of time tracing their lineage and sorting out how they work on the viewer in the way that they do – what exactly is a photograph in-and-of-itself and how does that mode of seeing translate to film/video and our relationship to our selves and the world – regardless of subject matter.  Another helpful Bergson quote for good measure, 

“We are dimly aware of successions in nature much more rapid than those of our internal states.  How are we to conceive them, and what is this duration of which the capacity goes beyond all our imagination? …To perceive consists in condensing enormous periods of an infinitely diluted existence into a few more differentiated moments of an intense life, and in thus summing up a very long history.  To perceive means to immobilize.”

(Bergson, p. 274, 275)

And every time I start to really think about this – my mind immediately wants to visualize a cluster of birds in the sky, or a bunch of dust particles in mid-air against a black background (just the way I saw the toilet paper lint pop into the dim light of the black bathroom stall one day), or a stream of leaves in mid-air – you get the point, all this fast shutter speed stuff.  The arresting time.  And sometimes I get stuff like this and I’ve made my way into this territory, but I always seem to let it go for some reason.  I think it’s in part because I need to fabricate the perfect scene to get what I want – and these kinds of scenes (either found or made) are pretty damn elusive and frankly I’ve just not been able to get what I want yet.

So, I’m going to start working toward making this/these scenes happen – and then I’ll record them, and my response to them (which could in fact be/look somewhat different from the action itself).  I have so much unused work that’s resulted from these failed experiments and my random forays into seemingly unrelated territories.  I think it’s time to fuse the old and the new.  Let’s decimate the archive.

Next week, maybe a look in the drawers.

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).