"Photography as wherein the visual world was rediscovered as a font of spiritual illumination for those willing to look a process."
"Stieglitz's idea of "equivalents" from the master himself was crucial to the direction of White's mature post-war work. The "equivalents" of White were often photographs of barns, doorways, water, the sky, or simple paint peeling on a wall: things usually considered mundane, but often made special by the quality of the light in which they were photographed. One of his more popular photographs is titled Frost on Window, a close-up of frost crystals on glass. However, in regard to an equivalent, the specific objects themselves are of secondary importance either to the photographer or the viewer. Instead, such a photograph captures a sentiment or emotionally symbolic idea using formal and structural elements that carry a feeling or sense of "recognition": a mirroring of something inside the viewer. In an essay titled "Equivalence: The Perennial Trend", White described a photographer who took such pictures as one who "...recognized an object or series of forms that, when photographed, would yield an image with specific suggestive powers that can direct the viewer into a specific and known feeling, state, or place within himself." (Gantz) Because of the way in which he wanted his photographs to be experienced, White was very particular with regard to the both technical aspects of his art and the quality of the images he produced (Lemangy, 192). To transmit his messages—to ‘direct the viewer’—White employs a variety of methods; he creates symbols to represent emotions, he accompanies his images with text or places them in sequence.
What are my equivalents?Are people (i.e. portraiture) my Equivalent?
SALVADOR DALÍ
“Photography, Pure Creation of the Mind” (1927)
Painting is not photography, the painters say.
But photography is not photography either.
RENÉ CREVEL
Clear objectivity of the little camera. Objective crystal. Glass of real poetry. The hand
ceases to intervene. Subtle physico-chemical harmonies. Plate sensitive to the softest
adjustments.
The perfect, exact mechanism demonstrates, by its economical struc ture, the joy of its
poetic functioning.
A nimble ease, an imperceptible tilt, a wise translation in the spatial sense, so that -under
the pressure of tepid fingertips and the nickel-plated spring- the spiritual bird of the thirty-six
greys and forty new means of inspiration can emerge from the pure, crystalline objectivity of the
glass.
When hands cease to intervene, the mind starts to know the absence of murky digital
flowerings; inspiration is extricated from the technical process, which is entrusted solely to the
unconscious calculations of the machine.
The new method of spiritual creation which is photography, puts all the stages of the
production of the poetic act in their right place.
Let's trust in the new imaginative means, born from simple objective transpositions. Only
the things we are capable of dreaming lack originality. The miracle is produced with the same
precision needed for banking and commercial operations. Spiritualism is another thing
altogether...
Let's be satisfied with the immediate miracle of opening our eyes and being skilful in the
apprenticeship of looking properly. Shutting your eyes is an anti-poetic way of perceiving
resonances. Henri Rousseau knew how to look better than the Impressionists. Remember that
they looked only with their eyes almost shut, and merely grasped the music of objectivity, which
was the only kind that could filter through their half- closed eyelids.
Vermeer of Delft was another thing altogether. His eyes are, in the history of looking, the
case of maximum probity. With all the temptations, however, of light. Van der Meer, a new St.
Antony, conserves the object in tact with a totally photographic inspiration, the product of his
humble and passionate sense of touch.
Knowing how to look is a completely new system of spiritual surveying. Knowing how
to look is a way of inventing. And no invention has been as pure as that created by the
anaesthetic stare of the extremely clear eye, free from eyelashes and the Zeiss: distilled and
attentive, immune to the rosy flowering of conjunctivitis.
The camera has immediate practical possibilities, for new themes where painting
necessarily remains only in the experience and understanding. Photography glides with continual
imagination over new events, which in the pictorial realm have only possibilities for being signs.
The photographic crystal can caress the cold delicacy of white lavatories; follow the sleepy
slowness of aquaria, analyze the most subtle articulations of electrical equipment with the unreal
precision of its own magic. In painting, on the other hand, if you want to paint a medusa, it is
absolutely necessary to depict a guitar or a harlequin playing the clarinet.
The new organic possibilities of photography!
Dalí, “Photography, Pure Creation of the Mind”
2
Let us recall that photo by Man Ray—the portrait of the late Juan Gris put in rhythm with
a banjo—and think about this new organic method, a pure result of the limpid mechanical
process, undiscoverable through paths which are not those of the clearest photographic creation.
Photographic imagination! More agile and faster in discoveries than the murky
subconscious processes!
A simple change of scale causes unusual similarities, and existing-although undreamt ofanalogies.
A clear portrait of an orchid poetically merges with the photographed inside of a tiger's
mouth, where the sun plays in a thousand shadows with the physiological architecture of the
larynx.
Photography, grasping the most subtle and uncontrollable poetry!
In the big, limpid eye of a cow we can see deformed, in the spherical sense, a miniature,
very white post-machinist landscape, precise enough to define a sky where diminutive, luminous
little clouds sail by.
New objects, photographed amidst the agile typography of advertisements!
All recently manufactured machines, as fresh as roses, offer their unknown metallic
temperatures to the ethereal spring air of photography. Photography, pure creation of the mind!
EXPERIMENT C-1
This one is sort of a test on what color might do when it interacts with the textures.
I'm reminded of Chelsea Perry's work every time I run across some little symbol of historical events...
"Fritz Lang quickly established himself at the forefront of German cinema. He had been an enthusiastic art student, but during World War I he became interested in the theatre and cinema, and began to write film scenarios in order to gain an entree into the cinematic world. He began by writing scripts for the great serial specialist of the time, Joe May, and by 1919 had progressed to direction with Der Halbblut (The Half-Caste), a film made in only five days. From there he moved on to bigger things such as the two-part Die Spinnen (1919-20,The Spiders), but after preparing the script of a big two-part spectacle Das Indische Grabmal (1921, The Hindu Tomb), which he also intended to direct, he found himself baulked by Joe May and determined to work for himself from then on. The first major film he made after this decision was Der Mude Tod(1921, Destiny), recounted three historical horror stories. It turned into a big international success, and Lang's future career seemed assured.
However, Lang was not one to sit back and take the easy option. Instead, he launched into three of the largest and most expensive productions to be made in Germany, or indeed anywhere else in the world at that time. First came the two-part story of an insane master-criminal Dr Mabuse der Spieler(1922, Dr Mabuse, the Gambler), then the even bigger Die Nibelungen (1924). The latter, also in two parts, required enormous sets and vast crowd scenes in order to evoke the stories of Siegfried and Kriemhild, characters from the set of German legends previously quarried by the composer Richard Wagner in his Ring-cycle music.
Scarcely had Lang finished with this vast project than he embarked on Metropolis, a vision of the future written, as had been the three previous films, by himself and his wife Thea von Harbou.
From the outset Metropolis was conceived as both a colossal spectacle and as a film-with-a-message. The message, if any, has always been a subject for controversy - not surprisingly, for Lang's political attitudes during the Twenties were sufficiently far to the left for him to be rootedly anti-Nazi and later to get him into trouble with the Hollywood witch-hunters. In contrast, Thea von Harbou's politics were sufficiently to the right for her to stay on happily in Germany after Hitler's rise to powere, and become one of the most successful screenwriters of the Third Reich. Thus, as a product of both minds Metropolis takes on no less than the whole problem of Capital versus Labour, postulates a gigantic slave community dominated by a small elite in the year 2000, imagines a slave revolt, and invents a solution to reconcile the warring elements.
Of course the 'solution' is, as Lang ruefully admitted, monumentally naive and banal: simply that love conquers all, and that 'the intermediary between the hand and the brain is the heart' ('That's a fairytale - definately' added Lang). But even if, on a political level, the idea is simplistic and sentimental, it has to be admitted that it effectively identifies the keystone in Metropolis' gigantic construction, for the structure is more emotional and visual than reasoning. The story as a whole is seen as a battle between light and dark, good and evil, rather than something so prosaic as management and labour. Indeed, in the view of the film's creators it was about magic and the dark ages as against the illumination of modern science. Taking this approach, it is possible to argue that all the good in the story comes from science, and all the bad from magic, especially in the person of the old magician Rotwang. But as the magical element was minimized in the shooting, Rotwang comes over instead as just another mad scientist and the distinction becomes hopelessly blurred. What does remain as impressive as ever is the mastery with which Lang stages his dramas. Evidently he had learnt, like most other directors in Germany at the time, an enormous amount from Max Reinhardt's stage spectacles: his management of the huge crowds of robot-like slaves - and of the rebellion when, spurred on by the false Maria, they go on a rampage of destruction - is as stunning as anything in that line before or since. True, the characters are dwarfed by their environment and reduced to stereotypes, but with so much else going on to interest and amaze, who is going to stop and argue? Certainly not the film's first audiences: even in America Metropolis was taken as a model of how to do things, and Lang was deluged with offers to come and make films of equal quality in Hollywood. But he refused. Why should he go when he had resources just as vast at his disposal in Germany, and far more freedom than he could ever hope for in America? Or so he thought in 1In Metropolis, a giant city of the twenty-first century, everything is done by enormous machines run by an army of ant-like slave workers. They live in labyrinthine underground slums, while the minority ruling class lives above ground in the 'eternal gardens'. They are not conscious of being tyrants, but one day Freder, son of the city's Master John Fredersen, notices a beautiful young woman - Maria - with a clutch of hungry children at the gates of the garden. Moved by her beauty, he sets out in pursuit of her, and discovers the squalor of Metropolis' hidden power centre.
In the subterranean tenements he finds Maria; she has been urging the restless workers to have patience and wait for salvation from 'the forgotten Christ'. Their meeting is discovered by Freder's father, who then instructs his principal scientist Rotwang to make a robot in the image of Maria in order for her to gain the worker's confidence in the rulers, and so put a stop to all revolutionary tendencies.
Rotwang kidnaps Maria and creates an android with the idea of furthering his own designs - which are ultimately to displace Fredersen as Master and take power himself. The ensuing revolt, urged on by the false Maria who has gone berserk, is all too effective: the pumps stop turning and all the underground areas occupied by the workers are flooded. Freder and the real Maria - who has managed to escape - lead the worker children out of danger. The workers, realizing how they have been misled, burn the robot.
Seeing the collapse of all his plans, Rotwang goes mad. John Fredersen sees the error of his ways, and with the joining of Maria and Freder's hands in front of the cathedral, Capital and Labour are united - by love."
FRITZ LANG
On dark glass, (cristal oscuro)
"shatter the glass and each broken shard will be transparent or reflective depending on its position. The human face acts like a dark glass that is alternately transparent, reflective, and fractured. at time we privy to the illuminations of interior states of emotions or feelings, at others we see only what we consciously or unconsciously project, and at still other times we are witness to arrangements of expressions suggestive of multiple meanings, interpretations, and subjectivities. But what lies behind the face-within the person being observed or depicted and beyond any grasp of objectivity, requires a different metaphor, one that alludes to the ineffable nature of whatever it is that makes us human, (or even for that matter trans-human or post-human). In oreder then to differentiate between the container and the contained let us consider the human machine, or more particularly its face, as something of a malleable shell that encompasses and reveals the unnameable ghost)s) residing within each of us. "
References Leo Marx's The Machine in the garden-
The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America is a work of literary criticism written by Leo Marx in 1964. Marx identifies a major theme in literature of the nineteenth century--the dialectical tension between the pastoral ideal in America and the rapid and sweeping transformations wrought by machine technology. This tension is expressed "everywhere" in literature by the recurring image of the machine in the garden--that is, the sudden and shocking intrusion of technology into a pastoral scene. "Within the lifetime of a single generation," Marx writes, "a rustic and in large part wild landscape was transformed into the site of the world's most productive industrial machine. It would be difficult to imagine more profound contradictions of value or meaning than those made manifest by this circumstance. Its influence upon our literature is suggested by the recurrent image of the machine's sudden entrance into the landscape" (343).
But Marx isn't interested so much in historical changes to the physical landscape. Instead, he looks at the interior landscape--"the landscape of the psyche"--and it is literature that he believes offers us the most direct access to the psyche. While popular culture of the traded on "puerile" and sentimental pastoralism--that is, the simple and unreflective urge to find a "middle ground" between the overcivilization of the city and the "violent uncertainties of nature" (28)--serious literature took a hard look at the contradictions in American culture--and particularly the conflict between the old bucolic image of America and its new image as an industrial power (26). It is the "role" of literature, argues Marx, to role to show us the "contradiction" of our commitment to both rural happiness and "productivity, wealth, and power" (226).
One example of this image occurs in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In Twain's 1885 masterpiece, the garden is the raft, and the machine is the steamboat that smashes it apart--and along with it, the (impossible) dream of a free and independent existence for Huck and Jim. As the raft drifts ever southward, deeper and deeper into slave territory, it is increasingly clear that this existence is unsustainable. The raft, like Thoreau's cabin, represents an escape from society, freedom from restriction, and a sense of plenty all associated with the pastoral idea. It "embraces all of the extravagant possibilities of sufficiency, spontaneity, and joy that had been projected upon the American landscape since the age of discovery" (330). The steamboat represents the intrusion of social realities into this dream--and not just the reality of slavery. It is a representation of how machine technology conflicts the pastoral ideal, and in the case of Huck and Jim, onto the southward-floating raft (330).
Marx concludes that literary artists--and Twain, Melville, and Hawthorne in particular-- raised important issues and exposed important contradictions in American culture, showing how "the aspirations once represented by the symbol of an ideal landscape have not, and probably cannot, be embodied" and that "our inherited symbols of order and beauty have been divested of meaning." However, Marx does not believe that these artists offer any solutions to the problems they raise. They have "clarified our situation" but have not created the "new symbols of possibility" we need (365). Literature can expose problems, but it is politics that we should look to for solutions.
"For the 20th century the photographic became the crucial domain of conflict between the real and the reproduced. It put on a series of masks ranging from the supposedly pure social presence of the documentary, to the pure abstract materialism of formal experiment... but both extremes of the photographic stage their signification through an implicit notion of the absolute: thus photography becomes the ghost in the machine of rational and universalist knowledge, the very flicker of the God-Form" - John Welchman, "Face(t)s: Notes on facility"
"Diderot described expression as 'the image of a sentiment' " <-title of my series sentiments on the void, lack of expression void. EPIC.
Physiognomy- the belief that a persons character, subjectivity, or even soul could be read in the features of the face. In short the outward signs of a person's face signified the inner character of that person.
Minor-White "If any subjectivity or 'state of feeling' were mirrored in the face it was that of the photographer, or the viewer." -If I give my subject the control, do they not control a small aspect of the photo? Or is the simple prompt from me enough to say, 'why yes, you are the the maker of the image, and the audience retains the soul right of interpreter'?
On Modern photographers-
"instead of trying to reveal the inner personality, character, and subjectivity of the sitter, modernists photographers turned the camera onto themselves as it were, and sought to express their own artistic agendas through the vacant faces of others. But no matter how blankly, clinically, and soullessly the modernist portrait is rendered, we are still tempted to read physiognomy.... Even the most affectless and mute faces portrayed by Sander, Avedon, Chuck Close, or Thomas Ruff contain at least the suggestion of some subjectivity behind them and at the very least present arenas on which we may project our own versions of what went before and came after the instant of the photograph... what concerns us is that it does signify an other, another's face: an announcement of communication, the begging of countless dramatics, a locus of potential passions, an allegory of the human soul, and a potential embodiment of personal ethics."
