Monkey Sees

Last April Philip Coggan, a gifted photographer and diarist, wrote this critique to one of my landscapes. (You can view P.C.'s own photos here.) Ipse dixit:

Tell me if I'm right or wrong: I think what you're after here, and in many of your other photos, is the non-emotive, rational world that underlies the highly emotion-laden world we live in at sense-perception level.

The human-as-monkey can't see any-damn-thing without relating it to sex and/or food. We react to the colour erd because it means ripe fruit and/or dangerous beasties and plants (and maybe sex too – lips and labia). And so on. I think your photos try to break that connection and show the world as if it had no meaning except the mathematical. So here we have circles and lines. And many of your other photos have the same focus.

And yet...well, this does in fact have emotive power. Did you intend that? Like a Jackson Pollock painting. Tho I've never been fond of Jack the Dripper myself. But there's always emotion out there...because after all, we remain monkeys.

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My response:

P.C. – thanks for what's certainly one of the most perceptive comments I ever got. You've articulated something that's central to the way I see. It would be dangerous for me to say Yea or Nay to your query, since ambiguity and polysemy are the generative organs of art, and it wouldn't do to clog them up with commitment. But I will say, and hope others see, that there's a confusion in human people between thinking and feeling, which are as hard to unscramble as a scrambled egg, and that I try to bring that confusion into focus.

I've seen mathematicians weep for the beauty of number. Romantics who talk about the cold, unfeeling, bean-counting, unmagical, materialistic world of reason are like children whose deepest emotion is their love for Santa and his toys.

I have a sweet tooth for the truth, and there's nothing sweeter than sweet reason.

Problems of Scale

A critique I posted to one of Karen Habbestad's Colorado landscapes.

Your Colorado landscapes have a problem, or evince a problem, or beg a question, or exemplify a quandary, or like that, which I've been agonizing over myself. In the 70's I used big-negative equipment (Rollei, 4x5) to do landscapes, and even then seldom printed bigger than 8x10. The impact of my photos, assuming they had any (and if they did it was on me alone, absent the Internet), depended on textures and details that would've been lost, or so I thought, in large prints. Then I gave up photography for a long time and came back to it in 1998, working mainly with 35mm and then with DSLR's and digicams. I knew nearly all my viewers would see the pix on the Web at 72dpi, and had only small format to work with anyway. So I consciously revamped my style to make my images flatter (OK, more two-dimensional) and to build them out of large areas of similar color or tone. Think comic books or stained glass. Scenics were replaced by details of landscape for the most part – no horizons, no whole trees.

Because there's no point in giving the viewer details smaller than a pixel. Even in color, where adjacency effects can give the impression of sharpness, surface and detail, a photo like the one I'm commenting on here tends to look mighty approximate when it's the size of a postcard – a postcard viewed at that canonical 72dpi.

Consider what happened to painting in the 19th century. It began with artists like David, whose paintings depended on hard details. He even varnished the damned things to get a glossy, high-contrast finish. Such canvases were quite large – had to be, to show off that detailing. But photography came along, and cheap tintype or Daguerrotype had more detail than any painting ever. Time to shift gears. Enter the Impressionists, who devoted themselves to less detailed, more dynamic, more Web-like imagery. They tended to produce smaller canvases, since the loss of fine detail didn't matter. (Their academic rivals continued to work minute details into ever-larger canvases.)

Such were my principles, or at least my thoughts, in 1998. Over the last little while, for reasons I don't know, I've been backsliding. During the holidays I cranked out lots of detail-riddled landscapes that just don't look good on the Web. (Whether they look good anywhere else is a point I'd rather not pursue.) This distresses me, but I'm having trouble seeing the way I did a few years back. What to do? That is the question. (Or quandary, or problem.)

I see the same problem in this photo, and in other recent scenics you've done in Colorado. If you find a way out of the quandary, let me know!

The Filbert Steps

For years my old friend Pete has been trying to get me to move to California, if possible to San Francisco. (He lives in Philadelphia himself.) The other day he sent me a photo of the Filbert Steps, which to him are fraught with fond memories and nonesuch associations. I had to tell him that to me they looked pretty much like any other flight of wooden stairs. "It may well be my full memory of the place," he admitted, "bay view, weather, and cute, ancient little doll houses, that make this photograph special to me." My reply, lightly Bowdlerized, follows.

Yes. BTW, that raises an extremely important and basic esthetic issue: evocation. Art often works by evoking a response in the beholder. Some would say it always works that way. "Abstract" art and decorative design are efforts to make it work otherwise. The extreme case is the painting or photo of a big-eyed stray kitten with injured paw. Most would dismiss such images as crude attempts to evoke a response. Yet how do they differ, except in degree, from more respectable evocations? "For all the history of grief/ An empty doorway and a maple leaf." Hmmm. As I'm sure you've noticed, I generally try either to avoid obvious evocations or to use them paradoxically – the flyblown corpse of a cute li'l bunny displayed as elegantly as possible, etc. Irony, you dig.