A more subtle message

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Following up on our discussion of horrific iconic images yesterday.  The kind of images that we have been speaking about are evoke a visceral aka gut-wrenching response.  However, there is a more subtle approach to getting the message across and often this is the more powerful.  Consider, as a poignant example, this story from the San Francisco Chronicle about “Lost Childhood,” by Paul Szoldra, and the associate images by Hamid Khatib for Reuters.  It tells the tale of a ten year old Syrian boy who lives in Aleppo, Syrian.  He and his father fix weapons for the Free Syrian Army.  Issa works ten hours a day and not unlike the children in Jacob Riis’ photograph, “The Children Sleeping on Mulberry Street,”  his story is one of lost childhood.

 

 

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This post tests WordPress’ Twitter Embeds feature.

A “Night Gallery” of iconic images

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We have discussed recently the powerful and subsequent numbing effect of terrible imaging.  And this brought us to Susan Sontag’s point that each time a terrible, heart-biting image it raises the ante.  The next one must be more terrible to overcome the desensitization.

CNN World has recently posted a series of the “Twenty-five Most Iconic Images.” And I thought that I would share them with you.  Not all of them are terrible.  Some even make you smile – and then you feel guilty for that.  Those that are horrible truly illustrate Sontag’s point.  They are all part of our collective consciousness.  If you remember them from when they first appear they take you back to the original moment of nightmare.  Many are, well, truly gut wrenching.

The antique rite of looking at snapshots

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I was at a dinner party the other night when I observed an antique rite. People were looking at a package of snapshots.  While it is not as antiquated as, say, practicing the Elysian mysteries, and we can be grateful that no animal sacrifice was involved, it was nevertheless antiquated.  In fact, I cannot tell you when I last looked at a stack of photographic prints fresh from their little, once Kodak envelopes.  And I certainly don’t miss squinting at someone’s slide through a hand slide viewer.

I was relieved, at least, to observe that these were not film prints, but rather digital ones.  Still the reality is that when you say something like “Do you have any pictures of your adorable children,” you no longer expect the person that you are asking to dig through his/her wallet and pull out a dogeared print of buck-toothed little Billy and pigtailed Mary Sue.  Today the pics are shown to you on a smart phone, computer pad, or laptop.

Of course, this is only the latest in a long chain of events that progressed photography from scarcity to plenty.  First you went to the Daguerrean Parlor to have a single (although multiples were a possibility) made and placed in a fancy little case that you either carried close to your heart or displayed with pride on the mantel.  It was at once a much beloved keepsake as it was a symbol of affluence.  Then there were albumin prints, and tin prints. And of course the great democratizing event was George Eastman’s invention of roll film and the box camera.  And now my generation has stacks of envelopes in drawers and boxes as well as albums filled with deteriorating color prints.  My sister and I cleaned out our parents apartment; so I harbor no illusions of what will become of these.

The profoundest point in all of this is that something else is slowly changing.  It used to be that the goal of the art was to produce a print.  Prints have a somewhat limited and nonlinear dynamic range, but wonderful resolution.  Until very recently, every photograph that I did was aimed at the production of a great print (or at least a masterly print) and every one that I viewed to be of value I had printed.  More recently I have been taking so many photographs, and I have to say, experimented with so many images, that I don’t always print them out.  And this is not a value judgment. While I have settled upon a very excellent print service in BayPhoto, and while these prints don’t take up so much room in the archival portfolios that I use, I now don’t print them all.  The fact is that more often then not, when I show them to someone, it will be electronic. This is especially true when I share them on this website or through social media.  So here it is September 19. 2013 and we find ourselves, yet again, plummeting headlong along the path of photographic evolution.  The next innovation, the one we cannot yet anticipate, is just around the corner.

Tribute to the Soul of Annie Brigman

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Figure 1 - Annie Brigman, "Soul of the Blasted Pine, 1908," from the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – Annie Brigman, “Soul of the Blasted Pine, 1908,” from the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

As I was walking along the main path in the Arnold Arboretum, I was struck my a tree that looked very white in the intense light and seemed to be reaching up with two arms beseeching heaven.  My head is always cluttered with mythology, both photographic and spiritual, and what immediately came to my mind was photosecessioniust Annie Brigman’s 1908 image “The Soul of the Blasted Pine.”  Figure 1 is a copy of this and shows the soul of the tree departing its blasted stump as it reaches to the sky.  I was very moved by this picture when I first saw it at the RISD Museum.

I experimented with the scene and the lighting to see if I could in some way capture my sense of Annie Brigman’s image in the tree at the Arboretum. I moved around the tree looking for the best angle to capture a sense of feminine curves and arms reaching upward.  My best efforts are shown in Figure 2.  I am not quite sure that I have succeeded and leave it to the reader to decide.  In that regard showing my oicture here is a kind of self indulgence.  I consider it to be a first attempt and will store away what worked and what didn’t work so that the next attempt can be more successful.

Figure 2 - Tribute to the Soul of Annie Brigman, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Figure 2 – Tribute to the Soul of Annie Brigman, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

The Arnold Arboretum

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Figure 1 - Great Blue Heron, Jamaica Plain, MA, (c) DE Wolf 2013

Figure 1 – Great Blue Heron, Jamaica Plain, MA, (c) DE Wolf 2013

Our vacation wanderings last week took us to the Arnold Arboretum managed by Harvard University in Jamaica Plain, MA.  Established in 1872 by Frederick Law Olmstead, it is the oldest public arboretum in North America and one of the great jewels in Olmstead’s emerald necklace of green space parks surrounding the city of Boston. As you wander around, and wandering purposelessly is the best way to achieve serenity in the park, all the trees seem to fit in together.  But then on reading the labels you realize the great geographical and species diversity that you are observing.

Several years ago, I came to realize how disappointing the Tamron zoom lens that I had was in terms of sharpness, when I went to photograph a great blue heron (Ardea herodias) in the Plum Island bird sanctuary.  Yesterday, I spotted a huge heron by the side of the pond and I realized that it was a great test for my EF 70-100 f/4L USM.  The first trick is not to scare the bird.  So you take pictures as you slowly move forward.  Fortunately, I had my camera mounted on my monopod.  As a result I think the bird found me more amusing than threatening.  I used center spot auto focus.  Hold breath and exhale.  The result is Figure 1.  Despite the monopod, I made sure that the exposure time was faster than 1 over the focal length.  So the image was taken at ISO 400 using 1/500 s at f/7.1.  I am reasonably happy with the sharpness.  I might have preferred a 500 mm lens and I am not totally thrilled with the composition.  The heron probably likes the camouflage of the bushes, for me they conceal him a bit too much in a sea of contrast.  Still…

I am still working on a number of photographs from the day.  But another that I would like to share is a close-up of the flower of a silk tree (Albizia julibrissin) (see Figure 2).  I took this again with the EF 70-100 f/4L USM at 70 mm with ISO 400 using aperture priority, -1 exposure compensation, and center spot auto focus.  Exposure was f/9.0 at 1/500 s. Again, I am reasonably happy with the result.

Figure 2 - Silk Flower, Jamaica Plain, MA, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Figure 2 – Silk Flower, Jamaica Plain, MA, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

The camera’s mind

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Figure 1 - Photographer of Oscar Grossheim, in his Muscatine, Iowa studio around 1910. From the Wikimedia Commons. Original image from the Musser Library and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – Photographer of Oscar Grossheim, in his Muscatine, Iowa studio around 1910. From the Wikimedia Commons. Original image from the Musser Library and in the public domain.

We recently discussed the statement that “I never look good in pictures.”  There is an implicit viewpoint in that statement, namely that somehow the camera is conspiring against you, that the camera has a mind of its own and a rather devilish one at that.

Early cameras were huge cumbersome things.  Consider for instance the monstrous camera in Figure 1 which shows Oscar Grossheim in his Muscatine, Iowa studio around 1910.  In an age of scientific emergence the camera was a marvel indeed, and it is not difficult to imagine that it somehow seemed to have a life of its own, and ominously one that captured souls.

At first the camera was seen as a machine that in an instant produced a perfect portrait of a person or image of a scene.  But soon it was realized that the camera often caught details that the eyes would miss – that it was capable of shifting the mental focus of an image.  This meant that the camera, really the photographer, was capable  of creating an interpretive image.  Arguably the photographer unlike the painter was constrained by the physical world.  There were physical laws that could not be violated.  I would suggest however, that all artistic media possess restraints.  It is just that those of the camera are different than those of oil paints or acrylics, marble or bronze.

Still, sitting for a painter was quite a different story and experience than surrendering your soul to that mechano-optical box that feigned indifference.  And the box was omnipresent well into the twentieth century.  You had to deliberately carry it along when you wanted to capture life’s moments. You had to load it with the magic film.  You had to take it out of its case.  You had to focus it.

In the twenty-first century all of this deliberateness is gone.  We always carry cameras with us as part of our cell phone “communicators.”  They are there to photograph, to transmit, and to share. But we don’t think about it.  We just point and snap even take “selfies” with the Pope. The camera has lost its personal identity.  It has become part of us.

The paradox here is that modern cameras, unlike the cameras of the last century, truly have their own brains and identities.  Typically you’re not responsible for the beautiful image; the camera is. This is truly become what Ray Kurzweil has called “The Age of Spiritual Machines,” where your camera or cell phone might actually think.  But our sense of cameras is different.  They are silent partners now, their presence goes almost unnoticed and as a result we no longer fear them as “soul catchers.”  Perhaps they have already stolen them.

 

 

Down to the sea

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Figure 1 - Nubble Light, York, ME photographed with my IPhone 4S. (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Figure 1 – Nubble Light, York, ME photographed with my IPhone 4S. (c) DE Wolf 2013.

For New Englanders the sea is paramount and there is no balm to the soul more curative then a pilgrimage to the ocean.  Some sail upon it, while others merely gaze.  It is as Herman Melville said in his great magnum opus “Moby Dick“:

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”

Figure 2 - Antique granite block with white flower, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Figure 2 – Antique granite block with white flower, Kittery, ME, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

This past week I took a stay-cation and a day’s trip to the Maine coast, in search of both water and lobster, of course, was a necessity.  Needless-to-say camera was in hand.  Atlantic Ocean achieved! I am still working on my photographs from that trip.  But, I thought that I would share a few of them here.

The first Figure 1 is the quintessential Maine coast postcard.  It is of Nubble Light House in York, ME.  I paused for a while there, setting up my camera on its monopod and carefully framing pictures, before climbing along the rocks for the next location.  After loading my gear back in the car, I decided that I would take a shot with my IPhone; so that I could text it to my desk-bound friends.  The only problem with the IPhone is that it is very wide angle, necessitating more than a bit of zoom in, which is digital, meaning considerable loss of resolution.  When I got home I played with the image that compositionally was most like the IPhone picture and to my surprise the heads of two tourists adorned the lower right and could not be cropped out without a serious loss of balance – so much for careful framing.  Figure 1 is the IPhone image, and you can just make out the pixelation as noise in the sky.

Figure 3 - Mineral Veins in Antique Granite Block, Kittery, ME, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Figure 3 – Mineral Veins in Antique Granite Block, Kittery, ME, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

We had stopped for lunch at the new “When Pigs Fly Pizzeria” off Route 1 in Kittery, ME.  This is a wonderful place to have great food and become separated from your money.  Had the nicest waitress, named Nell. In walking around their gardens after lunch, I found some interesting antique granite blocks there and took several pictures, two of which are are Figures 2 and 3.  Figure 2 is a study of a white flower that I placed on top of one of the blocks and which I hoped would bring out the white highlights of the granite and would create an ambiguity as to what story was being told.  Figure 3 is a study of the patterns of mineral veins along the side of one of the blocks.

These stone pictures were taken under a tree, which provided a lot of shade and softened the contrast.  In raw format it also created a strong blue tone.  As I always find with black and white images of stone, there is an ambiguity as to what toning works best.  Unlike the marble images that I took last May in Dorset Quarry, VT, where I chose cold toning, here I felt that a subtle warm sepia tone worked best for me.

As for the technicalities, both of these images were taken using a monopod with my EF-70-200 f/4L USM Canon lens at ISO 400 with -1 compensation in aperture priority mode.  Figure 2 is 1/500 s at f/7.1 at 70 mm. Figure 3 is 1/320 s at f/10.0 at 91 mm.

Stories in the eyes and faces of refugees from the Syrian Civil War

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Whatever may be said about the numbing effect of terrible images of human suffering, the fact remains that we are drawn to empathize with our fellow human beings.  And in our digital age, the images keep assaulting us.  Most recently it is the dead and dying children gassed in Syria.  But there is another, and often much more effective approach to telling this story in pictures.  You don’t show any of the horror.  You just let your audience see it in the victims eyes and read it in their faces.

In this regard there is a photo blog by Marko Djurica in the Reuters Photoblog entiled “From Aleppo to no-man’s land.”  It tells the story of Syrian families (the word families is important) trying to escape into Serbia.  The United Nations estimates that there are over two million refugees of the civil war in Syria.  Their story is told by Djurica’s image of a little Syrian girl asleep in her father’s arms.