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Unit 203 - Environments
The brief for this unit said that:
"In this unit you must concentrate on researching and visualising
any environment you choose. This could be different environments
within a single ecosystem or selected environments from a range of
ecosystems. Resultant images should represent your interpretations
of the subtle interplay between all elements which contribute to the
environment and the dynamic balance which results, i.e. you should
represent 'the balance of nature'."
And that: "As a result of
theoretical and direct practical study in at least 3 different
environments of your choice you must produce a photographic
representation of those environments. Within the resultant images
you should communicate your interpretations of the interactions
between organisms and non living components of the environment.
The number of images you produce and their content is entirely up to
you, but they must be 'sufficient for the task'.
Apart from the submitted images above, the project
generated a number more some of which you can see
here.
Unit 203 Rationale
For this project, rather than make my starting point any particular
type of environment, I wanted to look at some of the natural
processes which underlie the physical, chemical and biological world
in which all living things must exist, which themselves can be said
to constitute their environment as well as being fundamental to
specific natural ecosystems in the more conventional sense.
In parallel with these scientific concerns I wanted to explore and
push the boundaries of photography, wildlife photography and
representations of the natural world in general. In particular I was
keen to extend what, in the digital age, might constitute a
photographic image, both literally, in a physical sense in terms of
scale but also in terms of content and concept. This concern was
concomitant with a personal shift in emphasis away from the normal
context in which wildlife photography (in the real world) tends to
exist - in books and magazines - to one in which an image would be
looked upon as an object intended for display and prolonged
contemplation, in other words, for want of a better term, as a work
of art.
The apparent paradox of a digital image aspiring to the status of
unique art object is easily resolved since, although theoretically
infinitely reproducible, in practice, in common with prints made
from negatives (Ansel Adams likened the negative to a musical
score), only a limited number of prints would ever be made from any
digital original but more importantly the print is the only form in
which the image can be meaningfully said to exist in its intended
form. Unless viewed on a computer screen with the same size and
resolution as the original digital file (typically for this project
30 x 60 inches at 300dpi) then what you are seeing is either a much
reduced approximation or a very partial series of details. That
said, unlike a negative, digital images will last for ever as long
as the information can be stored in some readable form and in the
future, when everyone has a high definition wall sized integrated
computer and TV monitor in their home, “original” digital art works
will be available at the click of a mouse. But I digress.
The underlying scientific paradigm which informed my initial
researches and visual experimentation (see logbook) was chaos
theory, with the attendant ideas of complexity and emergence. Chaos
is not, as is often supposed, a synonym for randomness, rather it is
about the inherent unpredictability of complex systems due to small
variations in initial starting conditions leading to large
variations the behaviour of a system when a number of variables
interact over a period of time. Given identical starting conditions
then complex systems will behave identically, however the tiniest
variation will eventually lead to an entirely different outcome, the
‘butterfly effect’ as it is known. That said it depends on what
scale one is observing a system as to how apparent such chaotic
behaviour becomes. To take, for example, the behaviour of water
flowing down a stream; on a quantum level it’s behaviour can be
truly random (though still probabilistic); on an atomic level it is
chaotic due to the sometimes random nature of the level below and
the number of interacting variables in the system; on a scale
observable in everyday life the ripples produced as water flows
around a rock begin to follow a pattern, though predicting exactly
what pattern might be produced at any one moment is impossible due
to the random nature of the quantum level and the chaotic nature of
the atomic level. On a geographic scale the behaviour of the water
is highly predictable: “Even the weariest river winds somewhere safe
to sea.”1
Until, as will always happen, some variable outside the system (an
earthquake or ice age, for example) becomes an influencing factor.
270 oak leaves
So what has all this got to do with arranging oak leaves in a grid?
Well, my initial researches and developing aesthetic and technical
ideas (see logbook, itself a complex system with, one hopes,
emergent properties) led eventually to the idea of representing a
natural process, such as the decay of leaves - the time of year was
a factor in this choice of subject too - as a spatial sequence, by
combining a number separate captures. Failing, initially, to find
the kind of sequence I had imagined - from intact leaf to skeleton -
I did, however, notice what actually proved to be a more interesting
variation, namely the colour and transparency of individual leaves.
Focusing on beech leaves to begin with, for no other reason than
being a favourite tree, I incidentally collected a number of oak
leaves and separating these out (sorting became a very important
process in this project) discovered by the simple means of holding
them up to the light that they became transformed from dull brown
leaves into objects of delicate and colourful beauty.
Seeking to capture (in every sense) this effect, I discovered that
by firing a flash from below through the leaf the latent colour and
detail was revealed - brown is after all only dark yellow - it also
gave me a clean white background that abstracted and isolated each
leaf and enabled me seamlessly to combine separate captures
together. The effect was rather like placing slides on a light box
or like a stained glass window, both needing light to bring them to
life. Light then became the key theme both literally and as
metaphor. Leaves are gatherers of light, that is their function, as
they decay, due in part to the process of photodegradation, where
the action of light (UV-B mostly) breaks down the chemicals in the
leaf which gives them colour - tannin, in the case of oak leaves -
they become more and more transparent to light and less able to
absorb it. The degree of transparency and thus the actual colour of
any given leaf is then proportional to and an index of the light
which has acted upon it, almost. In actual fact other forces are at
work, namely the action of water, with leaves nearest to the soil
level not exposed to the light becoming waterlogged and breaking
down due to mechanical and biological action. This is why a sequence
from dark to light is not quite a true reflection of the processes
involved in leaf decay but stands as a metaphor for that process and
a kind of inverse metaphor for photosynthesis, in the way that as
log of wood as it burns gives back the energy it absorbed from the
sun so as leaves “die” they give back the light they absorbed in
life.
I wanted to present the leaves in as neutral a way as I could to let
the leaves “do the talking”, to show their variation in colour and
also their individual variation in forms. I decided a grid structure
would perform this task best, invoking the presentation of
collections of objects, be they butterflies or stamps and also the
reductive forms of minimalist art. I had, therefore, to sacrifice
one variable, namely leaf size, in order to make them conform to a
grid structure. I thus resized all the leaf images to a height of
1200 pixels, this did leave some variation in width. The shape of
the final image was determined by the number of leaf images that I
ended up with, 270, in combination with the height size (based on
printing them life size) that I had chosen. 270 has a large number
of factors, giving many grid options but a 9 x 30 grid allowing an
average spacing of 600 pixels just happened to give an exact double
square, this cascade of numerical serendipity was too good to
ignore. The final form the grid took then was a combination of
chance (the number of leaves collected which produced usable images)
and the proportions of the leaves themselves, height to average
width.
The concept of number was very important for all these images.
Mathematics is the language of physics and increasingly all other
sciences too. A scientific theory may be more or less useful in
describing the world or in predicting future events (an eclipse, for
example) but however like the truth it appears, it can never be
proved to be the truth, only in mathematics, being merely (!) a
series of logical axioms, can statements be said to be provably
true. The language of mathematics can attempt to describe the
underlying order of the universe, even if that order is chaotic -
not an oxymoron - but also is the language of proportion and harmony
and of course, music. I wanted to employ proportion, harmony and the
universal standards of beauty which are said to be derived from
mathematics to both order my image and to highlight the variations
within that order. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty...”2
Having sorted the leaf images (by eye) into a sequence from light to
dark I discovered I had a tonal continuum but with enough similarity
between adjacent images to present them from top corner to bottom
corner to form a series of diagonals across the image. Any
discrepancies due to “awkward squad” leaves or my inadequate sorting
became absorbed in the overall scheme. The light to dark arrangement
was arrived at on aesthetic grounds, as much as anything though, of
course, a left to right, top to bottom reading is culturally
specific.
Though any two or three adjacent leaves are almost identical the
variation from one corner to another is very great, this apparently
seamless continuum was an emergent property of the simple act of
deciding if one leaf was darker or lighter than its neighbour. I
have taken the chaos of a system with complex interacting forces,
gravity - where a leaf fell, the action of light, the growth of the
leaf, wind, disturbance by animals (including humans), Blackpool
College of Art field trips, Unit 203, the size of the box I used for
collecting - and brought my own order to it in order to demonstrate
a natural - chaotic - process.
I also wanted to create an object of beauty and think I have
succeeded. The beauty comes from an individual’s act of perception
of what I have done to order and illuminate (in every sense) an
aspect of the natural world.
Beyond the specific concerns with leaf decomposition,
photodegradation, chaos and complexity I hope that the image may
have another resonance. Death and decay are universal themes, be it
the eventual death of the universe or of an individual, as is the
metaphor of moving from light to dark or from dark to light. The
title “fallen” suggested itself, referring literally to fallen
leaves but also to the idea of “the fallen,” those that have died in
battle or otherwise. The regularity of the grid suggested a war
cemetery, the sequence of decay is about transience and mortality.
Dylan Thomas exhorted “old age” to, “Rage against the dying of the
light.” But perhaps the living should just make the most of their
time in the sun.
105 razor shells
I had by now discovered a way of objectively measuring the tonality
(or indeed any component colour) of an object in an image using
Photoshop histograms. Looking for something which might have similar
transparent properties as the oak leaves I headed for the beach
intending to make a collection of sea weed and came back with 100
(and five) razor shells instead. I chose shells which were intact
and fitted into a fairly narrow size range. These were then
photographed using the same bottom up flash technique as I used for
the oak leaves. Having ordered them from dark to light a simple
linear 1x105 grid suggested itself as the best arrangement. I could
have rounded it down to exactly 100 but I prefer odd numbers and
like the idea of chance factors such as the size of my collecting
bucket having an effect on the final image. I again resized each
image to conform to a specific height so that they would appear
uniform and print at life size. The final image turned out to be 8
inches by approximately 21 feet. The razor shells have much in
common with the oak leaves both being discarded products of a living
organism and subject to forces of decay; in the case of the shells
photodegradation again, as well as the mechanical action of the sea.
63 holly leaves
This time I found the sequence of decay, from freshly fallen leaf to
leaf skeleton, that I had had in mind right at the beginning. Holly
leaves with their tough structure tend to stay preserved for long
periods. The holly leaves exhibited a definite progression of decay
but not a direct progression towards greater transparency as in the
oak leaves. The green leaves by gradual stages go entirely black and
then start to become transparent through the decomposition process
leaving eventually just the skeleton. I had therefore to photograph
the holly leaves in a different way using a combination of bottom
flash and ring flash from the front adjusting the proportions as the
leaves became more fragile. The eventual form of the image grid was
again determined by the number of leaves I had available to form a
satisfyingly representative sequence of the decomposition process,
though I had many leaves from some stages I only had three from all
stages and so that determined the height. The length was arrived at
by selecting leaves which exhibited equally sufficient variation
from each other to form a coherent sequence.
seven oak leaves, one &
two
From the second batch of leaves collected I began to develop
favourites, which conformed to one of several “leaf style” groups.
This batch had also been sorted objectively and so it was relatively
easy to select representative leaves at regular intervals along the
tonal continuum. I chose groups of seven to mirror the seven colours
of the conventional rainbow spectrum. Seven is also prime and forms
an aesthetically pleasing group, probably for that reason. Both
light to dark and dark to light sequences work equally well, the
progression can after all be read in either direction as I think
would happen if the image was lived with for some time.
49 oak leaves
A seven by seven grid forms a shape in natural proportion to the
shape of the individual leaves themselves and this fractal
proportion mirrors the fractal nature that the leaves exhibit.
16 oak leaf circle
This form was, in common with many of the other images arrived at by
a process of trial and error, where the natural properties of the
leaves played as big a part in determining the final image as any
preconceived structure of mine. In this case 16 was the number of
leaves that I could comfortably fit in a circle of 36 inches in
diameter. A circle, of course, has no end or beginning as so neither
does the sequence, I could imagine the image being made so that it
could be rotated in 22.5 degree increments. The form arrived at
mirrors a compass with cardinal, primary intercardinal and secondary
intercardinal points marked by leaves, linking the image to the
fundamental magnetic structure of the earth itself.
1Algernon Charles Swinburne, The
Garden of Proserpine.
2John Keats, Ode on a Grecian
Urn.
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