Musings
Imperfection is the gap between the dream and reality. Everything is perfect when left alone. The universe ticks the only way it knows how – the perfect way.
Here comes Man – creator of his dream. He dreams of a world arranged in a different way; a better way, he thinks. He fashions his dreams in his own image, and thus a new world is created. Each time he dreams – a new world is created, another perfect world.
In Plato’s world dreams have substance; ideas are the living spirit of Nature, while the reality is but the dream’s shadow on the cave’s wall.
There’s a particular breed of people who would fashion the likeness of this dream on paper. These are photographers. And if you, my reader, have advanced as far as this line without getting bored and annoyed – you are a photographer. This corner is for you, the corner where the interplay of light and shadows is the reality summoned by your dream and given paper life we call Photograph.
Questions? Comments? Ideas? Share them! Email alex@platophoto.com.
Bread People
First published by Art is Spectrum magazine, November 2010.
When I was a child the world consisted of secrets. The objects were mere containers of these secrets. Take, for example, a loaf of bread: there were tiny bread people living in it! Did you know that? I envied them: they knew the secret of bread.
“People must work for their daily bread,” said father.
I thought the bread people were lucky. They already had their daily bread and they didn’t need to work. But then, long ago, father was always right, so I must have missed something. Perhaps, the bread people did not eat bread? Maybe their “daily bread” was something else? How tragic!
Thus I unlocked my first secret.
Then I grew up, father became mostly wrong, and the world had transformed into a collection of objects. The objects were familiar; they contained no secrets – they became containers of utilities.
The world without secrets has nothing to say. It can only be described and used.
I started taking pictures of this world. I started taking pictures of objects. As time went by, I created a perfect image in my head, the image of a perfect photograph. I’d figured what a perfect photograph – the perfect paper world – looked like. And I was getting closer and closer to this perfect photograph.
Improvement meant describing the objects with ever increasing accuracy.
I took thousands of pictures, only to make the distressing discovery that they were all the same – all modeled after my vision of the perfect photograph. They described objects: buildings, trees, sunsets, and teacups in various arrangements, and even people were described as objects. It could be Chicago or Tokyo – the picture was the same, it could have been Vladivostok! At one time I could not find essential difference between the portrait of a ballerina and the portrait of a zebra I took at the zoo on the same day. They were the same photograph. (Different wife – same marriage, one might be tempted to resort to the bitter metaphor.)
The compositions followed all the lovely rules: the golden rules, the silver rules, the magnesium alloy rules, and when I broke the rules – it was more of a show-off than necessity, and also in order to break the boredom.
Breaking the boredom did not break the bounds.
Apart from the compositional strategy, all the photographs had one thing in common: they evoked no emotional response. The preconceived notion of perfection had drained them of all blood and life.
The idea of the ideal, the perfect photograph, was so ingrained that there was no possibility of taking a single new picture. I had already described everything there was to describe, and plethora of new objects would not have produced a new image.
The job was done; I could now sell my camera.
Then I remembered the bread people. I forgot to take a picture of them!
I was standing in front of the Atlas sculpture in New York. I came to New York for a photography workshop with Lois Greenfield, which was to take place the following day. But now I had a free evening and was taking perfect pictures of perfect buildings, all perfectly soulless.
I looked up at the sculpture of Atlas and decided to unlock its secret. Atlas carries the world on his shoulders, but that’s no secret, it’s pretty obvious, and is a well documented fact. I looked up and up and up until I saw the secret: Atlas was surrounded by the bread people of various denominations: Rockefeller’s and St. Pat’s, living in the trees and in the flags, and all of them were peeking from the windows, from the rooftops, from behind the steeples and from between the rocks. Atlas was holding the world and looking at me, while the world was looking at him. He wanted to unload his burden on me, but I was not ready yet. Instead, I screwed on a fisheye to expand my horizon to the entire upper hemisphere and took this shot:
Popular Photography 15th Annual Contest Grand Prize winner. Popular Photography, January 2009.
Within minutes I was on top of the Rock, trying to catch the bread people in the act. They were everywhere! They were smiling and winking at me, glad and even grateful that I remembered them. They said they missed me. And did I miss them!
At this point, a reasonable person who believes that the world is one big object subdivided into the smaller parts would have gone to a psychiatrist. But I wasn’t a reasonable person, and the world wasn’t an object, I’d simply forgotten this phenomenon, but now I remembered it. The world was a point of view, an attitude; it was full of passion and it was colonized by the bread people. You don’t believe me? This is what I shot from the top of the Rock, and since cameras never lie – see for yourself:
Nightfall in New York.
Represented by Agora Gallery.
Can you see them? Can you see that this enormous anthill is a repository of secrets, and the bread people are their guardians?
Photography is about what does not meet the eye. It is about the bread people. Reality and unreality are freely interchangeable. This quality is called “art.”
My colleagues, when asked for feedback, did not comment on the horizon, or the rule of the thirds, or the monitor color calibration and paper profiling. One of them declared this image “claustrophobic and catastrophic.” I could’ve kissed him. I have managed to convey my attitude towards New York to one person, in a single image.
If someone asks me, “what does New York look like?” – I’ll send them a bag of postcards. But if someone asks me, “what does New York feel like? What’s it like being there?” – I’ll whip out this single photograph: “This is what it’s like!”
The next day was a big day for me. I went to meet Lois Greenfield. She was my idol; still is. She could break bounds of gravity, and she has a book to that effect. It’s called Breaking Bounds, naturally. I savored this book when no one was looking. I wanted it to be my secret. And now I wanted to know her secret. I wanted to break the bounds; gravity was but one of them.
In the world with bread people objects are devoid of any importance; their presence is purely utilitarian, a visual aid and an accent – not more. Only the bread people can tell stories about these objects. The ability to tell a story in a single image became paramount. To acquire this ability one has to replace the descriptive part with its emotional equivalent. But is there such equivalence altogether? How does one approach the task of telling not what one sees, but how one feels about what he sees? Breaking the bounds lies in this trick.
An object matters not a whit – my attitude towards it is everything. Let science describe objects – art is to evoke an emotional response. Objects are all the same – emotional response is not repeatable. By taking pictures of objects one is doomed to produce the same generic photograph: an object here and an object there, and their relations are but nuances, mostly lost on the innocent observer. By taking pictures of one’s attitude towards the phenomenon we so inadequately describe as “life,” one becomes incapable of repetition, since the very attitude is ever-changing and fluid. The objects are fixed and rigid, the attitude incessantly mutates for she is a living organism.
Moreover, by demonstrating his attitude, an artist creates a placeholder for the viewer’s own life’s experience – to be filled with the viewer’s own attitude and understanding of the human condition. Thus, a work of art invariably involves a co-creative process between the artist and the connoisseur. If so – then a work of art is never singular; it is always plural and it comprises of as many different images as there are viewers. Each will find his own bread people.
I deem a work of art that which has a place for me: to enter with my own bag of experiences and to complete the artist’s vision, as well as his story, which instantly turns out to be my story. (A whole new chapter is required to expand on this thought.)
Meanwhile, I entered Lois’s studio and shook the hand of the master. This act had imposed on me a whole new standard. There was no going back to the old visions of perfection. Ahead lay the great unknown, the mystery of breaking bounds. The old ways had to be destroyed. The old themes had to face Stalingrad and be defeated.
I had to obliterate the rigid, the austere, the deadly Savonarola who knew everything about perfection and nothing about being human; I had to release myself from him and beg Botticelli to retrieve his paintings from the Bonfire of Vanities.
One of the first shy shots was of Natasha Czarniewy. It was no longer a portrait of a ballerina in action or an attractive zebra in the zoo – it was the Arrival of Venus:
Arrival of Venus.
Credits: Natasha Czarniewy, Amy Marshall Dance Company, Lois Greenfield Workshop
I could sense the presence of Botticelli. Yet, my Venus did not emerge from the sea foam in a seashell, timid and romantic; my Venus is confident and self-assured, she arrives to make substantial modifications to my understanding of Renaissance and the passion contained therein.
The Renaissance aftertaste seemed appropriate, but I had to find a theme of my own. Stealing the ancient beat-up projects or reinterpreting them to death was not appealing. Besides, a photograph is not an event – it is a process. Dance is the art of motion – and so is photography. Could I reveal this process in a single shot?
For the first time I had to photograph not what was so abundantly provided by God, nature and the human manufacture: I had to create my own reality – to be photographed. I had to choreograph the piece. The most talented dancers took to it like fish to water; their lives’ experiences contained the proposed story, they could easily relate to it, and suddenly this became a co-creative process involving many participants.
The Interloper.Credits: Patricia Foster, Gregory Sinacori, Eileen Jaworowicz. Parsons Dance, Amy Marshall Dance Company, Lois Greenfield Workshop
The adoring bride, the doubtful and uncommitted groom, and the dark woman from his past – the Interloper. All objects are removed, with the exception of the schematic cloud as the foundation, perhaps hinting at the transience of all moments: the unbearable lightness of being. Maybe. And while the photograph bears a number of technical defects, I treasure it, since many bounds were broken in this image alone.
In 48 hours I had traversed the road from the modern art to Renaissance and back again. The bread people had a feast. Art was their daily bread. I had finally understood why Michelangelo walked around the slab of Ferrara marble for the entire year, dreaming of David without touching the stone. He was consulting with the marble people; he could see them and converse with them, and until they okayed the project – there was no David. But this understanding came later. For the moment I was busy digesting the variety of forms and subjects unified by the observation that all the themes involved non-existing entities, mere concepts: the burden and the endurance of Atlas, the innocent beauty of Venus, the haunting shadows of the past, and their collective abode – the New Anthill. Not one photograph was descriptive of an object, instead – it touched the membrane separating the tangible from the intangible, the reality and the unreality, the common sense and the personal aspiration. The world of phantoms appeared to be infinitely richer in every detail and every shade. The utilitarian universe existed merely as the support infrastructure for the ephemeral, and so it remains to this day.
Perfect Lines
Chicago Loop – I want to capture the essence of it. This is my goal. What are the definitive features? Chicago loop is all straight lines: the strong verticals of the buildings, and the strong horizontals of the El. The rest is almost superfluous – the ornaments, the fill-in features that serve only to accent the subject – the vertical and horizontal lines that intersect and split every view into accurate rectangles.
And so I pay attention to the rectangles while taking this quick shot:
Here I have plenty of the vertical lines with the horizontal El splitting the image. There’s “above” and “below” separation, together with the cutting train. There are two figures below, striding in the opposite directions; there’s the Millennium Park sculpture “above” that offers the juxtaposition of new and old. Much is going on between these vertical and horizontal lines. Perhaps – too much; the strong lines are lost in the general mess, and so the entire deal falls short of my intent. Also, the perspective of the sculpture “hovering” over El is annoying altogether! I move in, closer to the El, until the sculpture is fully below the railway line.
Here’s another take:
I seem to have eliminated a lot of the messy action, and as the result the rectangular lines became stronger. The Millennium sculpture now appears to be framed by the natural rectangle of the street, the ground, and the El.
The train appears more significant, no longer a mere supporting actor, but one of the stars – which falls right in line with the sense of Chicago Loop.
The good ideas deserve support. Since the focus of attention – the street rectangle framing the sculpture – is shaped as a square, I decide to crop the photo as a square, thus emphasizing this idea, while eliminating some more of the clutter:
A little post-processing was required to make sure there’s some sky in the photo. And this got me thinking: is such realism suitable for my goal? I wanted the lines, but now I’m thinking about whether the sky is well defined. I don’t care how the sky is defined. I don’t care about the color rendition and how accurate it is. This is not a portrait of a bride in a botanical garden. This is about the strong lines, the stone, the steel, the noise of the train.
And so I take a deep breath and take the photo to its conclusion by removing all but the outlines. Scary thought? Indeed! But courage is the essential ingredient when one says such words as “perfection” and “reality.”
At this point, there will always be someone exclaiming: “This is no longer a photograph! This is now some sort of a bizarre inverted sketch. Go paint! I want my photo. Plain vanilla. No walnuts, no cherries, and absolutely no black sky! Just a classic old-fashioned photo.”
Well, okay then. It’s your expectations and your photo. You will do with it as you please:
Questions? Comments? Ideas? Share them! Email alex@platophoto.com.