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Unit 202 - species The basic
idea of this project was to pick a species, research it and produce
a, "photographic representation of that species within which you
communicate what you have determined as the main defining features
and the character of the organism together with images which convey
your emotional response to what you have learned." This is all to be
achieved with an, "increasingly personal and original approach." I
chose Whooper Swans and worked on a continuance of the slow shutter
speed, panning style that I began with unit 103.
Below is the written work submitted with my images for this project.
Unit 202 - Rationale
Introduction
As all these images, with the exception of the first, have a number
of technical, thematic and conceptual similarities I decided to
treat these common and most important elements together in an
overview of the whole project; choices made concerning individual
images will be dealt with separately, where appropriate.
Overview
"We are not interested in the precise reconstruction of movement,
which has already been broken up and analysed. We are involved only
in the area of movement which produces sensation, the memory of
which still palpitates in our awareness."
So wrote Anton Giulio Bragaglia in, "Futurist Photodynamism", in
1913. Reacting against the sequential analysis of movement pioneered
by Eadweard Muybridge, Étienne-Jules Marey and others, which was to
lead ultimately to the perfection of the illusion of movement with
cinematography, Bragaglia wanted to, "record the continuity of an
action in space". He argued that:
“...it is only through our researches that it is possible to obtain
a vision that is proportionate, in terms of the strength of the
images, to the very tempo of their existence, and to the speed with
which they have lived in a space and in us.”
In other words Bragaglia used slow shutter speeds to record the
movement of things, usually people, usually against a dark
background, in a single blurred image.
I wasn’t aware of the work of Bragaglia (and his numerous brothers)
when I first began myself to experiment with slow shutter speeds to
capture the trace of the movement of swans. Discovering this body of
work via researches into Futurist painters such as Balla and
Boccioni I realised that Bragaglia had arrived at much purer form of
representing movement than the artificially staccato, Muybridge and
Marey influenced, work of many Futurist painters and that I had
discovered a language and rationale, which could inform my own
practice.
The photographic medium, in common with other indexical means of
representing reality, such as a seismograph, a sundial, a footprint,
always had (until the Photoshop era when the boundary between
photography and illustration has become increasingly blurred) a
direct, one to one relationship with some external reality. The
degree to which light sensitive material - be it silver or CCD - is
effected is an index of the light reflected from the subject,
mediated by the lens, etc, for the duration of the exposure, no
more, no less: in this sense and this sense only, all photographs,
no matter how long the exposure, are equally valid and indeed, true.
From the earliest days of photography when, due to the lack of
sensitivity of materials, slow shutter speeds were the norm, the
trace left by a moving subject, be it people on the street, water in
a harbour or a restless portrait sitter, was a common feature.
Though it could sometimes be used for pictorial effect,
photographers made every effort to eliminate this noise - to use a
term from information theory - the use of head restraints, for
example, was common practice in portrait studios. However, as soon
as the viewers of photography learnt that ghost images and smooth
water were a natural artefact of the photographic process it opened
the door for the likes of Bragaglia to use these “non-realist”
aspects of photography for their own ends.
The frozen moment in time is, of course, as “non-realist” as a
blurry light trail image, in some ways more so, the eye will hang on
to a bright light after it has gone but given that the much of the
world does not move about, the frozen moment does seem to be a
closer match to our experience of the world and such images, to use
another term from information theory, become, therefore,
transparent; i.e. accepted as natural, unmediated truth.
Blurring that transparency, both literally and metaphorically, draws
attention back to the photographic process and by doing so produces
an image which re-engages the viewer in collaborative dialogue with
the image, subject and photographer.
Most people can recognise a swan, if not necessarily the particular
species, indeed it is this very recognisability which allows the
merest suggestion to be easily read as “swan” by the viewer. Picasso
had to use very recognisable objects with easily identifiable visual
cues, guitars, jugs, faces, in order to deconstruct them and still
allow the viewer to reconstruct them. Conversely Dali had to employ
a highly illusionist style to make the viewer believe in his melting
watches and burning giraffes.
There is a kind of aesthetic bonus to be gained by making the viewer
work that bit harder to read an image, contribute a larger portion
of what E.H. Gombrich calls, “the beholder’s share”1. By analogy a
joke which involves a great mental leap or unexpected twist to “get”
produces a greater reaction than one which has a very predictable
punch line; you get a bigger laugh. It is the aesthetic equivalent
of a big laugh that I am after. The bonus is greatest when the act
of recognition happens despite the novelty of the means of
representation. In extreme cases the means of representation may be
so “out of left field” that viewers have to be re-educated to read
them. If the image has a truthful relationship with some aspect of
reality the act of recognition may then happen in reverse, i.e.
instead of recognising reality in the image, recognising the image
in reality.
To take an example from art, audiences used to the conventions of
academic art were at first dismissive of the impressionists, the use
of complementary colour in shadows, for example, but having tested
reality against the impressionist palette the truth of what they
were doing was recognised.
Viewers test images against their version of reality and may at
first dismiss them but subsequently may find themselves testing
reality against images and finding that it passes. Images,
representations, signs, art, are the means and the only means by
which we construct reality; so they’re quite important!
So I took a lot of slow shutter speed panning shots of swans...
Rather than concentrate on the detailed external appearance of
whooper swans, their feathers, bill patterns and so on, I wanted to
show not only the behaviour characteristic of the species, in its
natural elements of air and water and the interface between the two,
but my emotional response to that behaviour and the physical essence
of the bird's presence in space and time.
Using a slow shutter speed panning technique, not only is an index
of the movement which occurred during the exposure created but an
index of my activity as a photographer, or perhaps simply as an
observer, is created too. This not only serves as a record of the
event in time - the subject and my photographing it - but it strives
to be a kind of photographic equivalent for the process of
perception itself.
Photography of this kind may show you the world as you never,
literally, experience it but then so does an X-ray or an electron
microscope and both are equally valid ways of seeing. As human
beings we only see a part of the electromagnetic spectrum with
limited acuity anyway. Rather than evolve better eyes we have
evolved lenses and sensors with which to better see the world.
Whooper swans’ adaptation to and mastery of their environment is the
key theme of all these images but I was attempting to go beyond just
a description of morphology and behaviour. In some senses these
images are not about swans at all, swans are just the medium with
which to talk, at the risk of sounding pretentious (why stop now),
about the quiddity of experience. The featheryness of feathers, the
dazzle of a backlit wing beat, the splash and speed of swan flight,
swan fight, swan bright. That’s the context, the meaning and the
message are a search for the sublime in nature: the creation of a
visual poem. And all this at a glorified duck pond in Lancashire!
There is an overall colour theme here too, greys and blues, whites
and greens, with signature dabs of yellow. The colour temperature is
largely cool. The colour scheme is winter. I also explored,
exploited and had to put up with the range of qualities of light
that are characteristic of this time of year.
I wanted to create something beautiful. I think beauty is a pretty
good thing. Is life worth living or is life a bitch and then you
die? Is your bottle half full or half empty? I know that on my
meandering path between these opposing propositions the idea that
existence can be beautiful gives me hope. Art holds a mirror to
nature but is it a distorting mirror, are you looking, “as through a
glass, darkly,”2 or as with any looking glass, at your own
reflection?
Of course, standing crouched in the hide at Martin Mere, panning
furiously after a swan landing in a flurry of feathers and spray I’m
not thinking of the “tempo of existence,” indexical signs or the
“beholder’s share,” not at least on any conscious level. I may be
thinking about f-stops and shutter speeds, about where the next swan
might arrive from, how much storage space I have on my microdrive,
how cold my feet are but mostly I’m just reacting to what is
happening in front of me. I both create and later judge my images
intuitively, emotionally, instinctively: if an image works it tells
me immediately.
So is it all just luck, so much serendipity? Samuel Goldwyn said,
“The harder I work the luckier I get”. That is part of it, certainly
but it’s also about setting the initial conditions to allow chance
to play its part and more importantly recognising a “happy accident”
when it happens and then following wherever that might lead. It’s
also, on another level, knowing exactly what I am doing.
Jackson Pollock said, “When I am painting I have a general notion as
to what I am about. I can control the flow of paint: there is no
accident."
(my emphasis.)
Working this way one is just attempting to snatch at bits of
fleeting reality; some bits will be worth hanging on to; others
immediately discarded;
some may be dusted down, brushed up and improved upon; none will be
quite what one was grasping at. Some bits will be not what one was
grasping at at all and those are often the most precious as they may
turn out to take me to places I could never have imagined.
1E.H. Gombrich Art and Illusion. (1960)
2First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians (13:11)
Summary
I have tried my best to articulate what these images are about and
the choices I have made to create them in general terms. I have
deliberately refrained from assigning particular themes and concepts
to individual images as to define a visual image linguistically too
precisely is to limit it: ultimately one cannot put into words all
that an image is about, if one could there would be little point in
making it. However, if and when I am keywording them for Alamy these
are some of the terms I would use:
Species - Whooper Swan, Cygnus cygnus
Location - WWT Martin Mere, Lancashire
Key techniques - slow shutter speed, panning, reaction/reportage
Key themes - adaptation, aerodynamics, behaviour, environment,
flight, movement, seasonality
Key concepts - action, beauty, delicacy, delight, dignity, drama,
dynamism, elegance, energy, excitement, exhilaration, freedom,
grace, immediacy, impressionistic, majesty, monumentality, mastery,
passion, physicality, poetry, power, romance, sensuality, speed,
strength, sublimity, transience, wetness, winter, wonder
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