Reading Response 3

EKPHRASIS

Ekphrasis is the verbal representation of a visual representation, such as the description of a photograph.

Ekphrastic indifference is the realization that ekphrasis is impossible. An example is when I have to describe a work of art for an art paper. This is always difficult because I know that the words I choose will never be enough for the reader to picture exactly the image I am looking at.

Advantages and disadvantages for group work:

Indifference allows for more creative freedom for the individual in a group. Since ekphrasis is impossible, there is no point in trying to create a perfect connection between image and text. However, indifference could compromise the connectivity of a group project. Too much creative freedom could lead to text and images that do not go together at all.

Ekphrastic hope is when the perceived impossibility of ekphrasis is overcome by imagination. It is when we find the words “to make us see” an object or work of art. When I am describing a work of art, ekphrastic hope comes when I realize that descriptive words alone will not be enough. When combined with description, words that describe feelings and make comparisons better convey the image. Every visual image evokes a feeling or mood and text can bring out this same feeling or mood.

Advantages and disadvantages for group work:

Ekphrastic hope can make a group project more resolved and connected because each person is working towards a single goal and they believe it is possible (unlike with indifference). Each person in the group has less creative freedom and the final group project may not reflect their individual vision.

Ekphrastic fear is when we resist the possibility that the difference between verbal and visual representation can break. It is when we question whether we actually want to be able to see something purely through language. An example is when I read a book and then a movie based on the book is made. Sometimes I will not want to see the movie, because it might be a better visual representation than the one I imagined while reading the book. I am afraid that when I read the book again, the movie images will replace the images created by my imagination.

Advantages and disadvantages for group work:

Ekphrastic fear can lend creative freedom to each form of representation while maintaining a cohesive goal for a group project. It could be a problem in group work if only one person has fear and the rest do not. This could lead to big differences in the vision for the final project.

THE PLOT THICKENS

Through framing and juxtaposition, a photograph combines previously disparate elements into a cohesive whole. Why do we continue to make narratives out of this newly defined space?

We are constantly surrounded by narratives – movies, books, history, our own life stories and those of others. Everyday we tell stories, “Guess, what I did today.” “How was the party?” “You’ll never believe what happened to me today…” We are not satisfied with simply seeing an image and not having a story to go with it. A photograph is a representation of the narrative world, so it must have some narrative meaning, right? This is not always true, but it can be difficult to accept that a picture may be just a picture of a chair or a beautiful sunset. Photographs can evoke memories or feelings just like music or movies. Even if a picture has no inherent or created narrative, we can give it one of our own.

Discuss and define the differences between the “matter of fact world” of the photograph and the narrative world we live in.

The matter-of-fact world is based on what we can observe, like the image in a photograph. The narrative world is the story behind the photograph, derived from our world. When you first look at a photograph, you see the matter of fact world – the person, the landscape or the chair. The narrative takes over when you start to answer why this photograph was taken or what is happening or who is this person. Our world is narrative, because every person, place or object has a history or a memory associated with it. A photograph can have a narrative of its own, but it is not always evident because it is just an image. One image cannot tell a story, just like the landscape cannot tell its story. This is why the image is the matter of fact representation of our narrative world.

Be ready to agree or disagree with Valery’s comment, “ …that bromide (chemistry make up of a print) proves stronger than ink”. How does he argue this changes the nature of words…?

I agree that often a photograph can be much more powerful than words. This is evident in photographs of war or tragedy. Seeing the image of suffering or danger evokes a deeper response in the viewer than words describing the experience. To see something is to make it real because a photograph is evidence. However, Valery also says that photographs can lie. A photograph is taken from a point of view and it cannot wholly capture an experience. A picture has the limits of a frame, the choices of the photographer and the action of the subjects. Photographs can be more deceitful than words because they are not obviously taken from one person’s point of view. Stories or news articles are signed by authors or delivered by newscasters. The photographer is less visible than the author because it is signed in tiny print in the corner by someone usually unknown to most people or by the company that distributed the photo. Photographs are seen as evidence of words, an affirmation that something is true, but they can be just as easily if not more easily manipulated.

Discuss what Winogrand meant by “to photograph something to see what it would look like photographed”

In the real world, things are always moving and you cannot really see everything in front of you at once. However when you take a photograph, you are stopping time forever in an image. You can see what you would have missed if the world was still moving. The framing of the image also leaves out part of the world. The elements within the frame of the camera can change the context of the world it captures by leaving out information. Sometimes it is not what the photographer chooses to photograph that makes an image captivating, but what he or she chooses to leave out. So, to take a picture is to find a new way to see something and then, to look at the photograph is to see a piece of the world in a new way.

College high school information books as Photobooks.

So I could not figure out the best way to describe these books. If you can remember your senior high school days and remember how colleges would inundate your mailbox with why you should pick their school, then you know the books I am talking about. Well my sister is a junior in high school and our mailbox is filled with colleges asking her to apply to their school. Well I realized that the information books they send in the mail are photobooks - they tend to have contemporary styles. I have a couple of them that I plan on using to get inspiration for my spreads and thought I should share this with the class.

The Book Surgeon

Remarkable interview and images that should conjure up inventive ideas! (thanks Ruth!)

The Book Surgeon

PLEASE POST YOUR RESPONSES TO CLASS READING (CD WRIGHT)

Please put your thoughts and responses to Wright essay here to refer to in class on Tuesday. (in comments section)

Article Response

This discussion of the interaction between Wright’s poetry and Luster’s photography made me think a lot about the role of the camera in receiving/creating a reality simultaneously. The camera was described as an “O,” an opening, as opposed to its traditional theoretical association with a probing and forceful/manipulative phallus-like object. I believe I have read more about this in film classes – horror film and sex in American cinema, as it seems especially pertinent to these subjects. This was quite an interesting re-viewing to me, as I have tended to think about the camera as a more probing device, while that doesn’t seem to make full sense considering the receptive/creative side of both the camera and the eye.

To me, this points to a much greater interactivity between the often binarized penetrative/receptive roles of camera and subject in film and photography, and where the “origins” lie – in the photographer’s eye, the subject’s reality, or both. The concept of the subject as “subjected” was brought up, as well as the eagerness of the subject to be photographed, which introduces an interesting, possibly ambivalent relationship of the photographer and the photographed. The article also discussed Wright’s focus on bodily secretions, reproductive organs, disorienting perspectives, and childbirth, with the body being a source of power and energy, like the creative capacity –and the photographer, the writer, and the subject.

There was a lot of discussion of “openings” in relation to the ekphrastic process, as a production of the creative mind lends itself to being viewed by other creative persons who it then inspires to create. Wright was quoted as saying, “My eye is what I work off… I look for the line of the eye.” This is really exciting to hear a poet say, though it makes a lot of sense as she is a writer who has worked in close contact with photographers. It also brings up the visual nature of text, especially poetry, in which the visual form is so important. Some very literal examples are shaped poetry and organic poetry, which often tries to recreate the “breath” of natural and immediate experience through line spacings. The “line” of the eye can also be recreated in the sounds and rhythm of poetry, which similarly lead us through poems, like the framing and composition of a photograph leads us from edge to edge or otherwise in a specific direction through the photograph.

It was interesting to read about how Wright’s poetry focuses, like photography, on “angles of view, light sources (one or many?), light-dark contrasts (sharp or diffuse?), shadow and hue.” The role of photographic language seems very important in her writing, without directly speaking of the technical processes of photographing. I also found very fascinating the line, “To make familiar in her poems the work of a camera is also to make odd the work of an eye.” Writing about the subjective viewing of a chopped reality is very different from writing about the whole spread of reality that we generally accept in our everyday viewing. The article discusses the postsurgical eye and relearning reality. It also introduces Muybridge and the interaction between stillness and movement, as he sequenced still photographs chronologically to create a film-like effect before the moving picture was a cultural phenomenon.

The “stillness” of the photograph, showing us a moment in reality – even if it conveys motion through a long exposure or otherwise – versus the narrative nature of writing and poetry, is a fascinating tension in the ekphrastic process. It is also interesting to consider the cultural relationship between the photograph and evidence, valid experience, as one theorist mentioned in the article proposes as a reason for photography’s superiority to narrative/poetry. However, being aware of the manipulability of the world photographed, through distortions such as introducing props and altering lenses, makes the ekphrastic process more interesting to me. Photography can be just as malleable as fictional writing, but it also can be very literal, so the possibilities for representation of other mediums (and textual representations of photographs) seem completely unlimited to me.

The Book as Sculpture

Sent to me by the lovely Nora Burghardt:


http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2011/03/03/134229879/destroy-your-books?ps=cprs


Also, with that first image, you can click through with the arrows and there are actually 15 examples - I didn't notice that at first, just letting you all know.