A totally, wonderfully unexpected viewpoint.
Today could have been about the last day of classes or the overwhelming attendance at the LRR publication party, but instead it was a very intense conversation with my roommate about the nature of photography.
It all started when my roommate, an art major, showed me this website about Symmetrical Faces. She had been studying how models are often perceived as beautiful because they tend to have more symmetrical faces. However, when we each did the experiment to our own face, we though just the opposite.
As you can see here, we have an original photograph of my face on the left. Because photo formatting is hard, I'll just say the one that looks like I have my hair in a bun is made of two halves of the left side of face, and the one in which my hair looks down is made of two halves of the right side of my face.
Now because I was fascinated by this and wanted to do it to more people (but also so you couldn't make fun of just me) I did it to my sisters face as well. I couldn't get the sizes to quite work, but the bottom right is the original, the one next to it is the right side (with the bangs over her eyes), and the one above it is he left side (with the pointy hair).
So my roommate Alicia did one of these too, and we agreed that we all looked better unsymmetrical rather than unnaturally symmetrical. But here's where the intense conversation came in. I siad it's weird because these aren't even real photographs. Alicia said "What?!" and I said well no one took these pictures; they are completely artificial so they aren't photographs. Alicia found this extremely fascinating, being an art major. She believes that all photography altered or not, digitally created or produced in a darkroom, is just photography. And apparently all art students at uconn think so too. But I tend to create a distinction between a "photograph" and an "image," an image being a creative composition that did not occur naturally. Apparently, I think of photography as purely documentary because I believe that if you did not capture something with a camera, then it isn't a photograph. Because if you change what you actually saw through your lens and captured, whether by film or memory card, then it's artificial. Alicia said that she believes all "photographs" are "real."
All in all, we both had a very enlightening sort of mutual epiphany that what we think is the obvious truth is not always apparent to everyone else.
Any comments from art majors or not?
Lots of artists do this thing where they attempt to become "authentic" or put simply: "real". But once you click a shutter on a camera, the experience is translated, as if though a shoddy online translater from russian to english, and then back to russian and back to english. The photographic proof of a picture is never the same once translated from light to silver hallide suspended in gelatin, (or digitally interpolated pixels, if we're going to be so modern) and then from those particles back to a positive image and back to light which then is reunited with out eye. The photographer alone has the memory of the original experience, and will feel similar emotions when they look at the photograph, but the viewer, who never experienced this moment in time, and therefore will bias their experience of the image with his or her own past experiences.
ReplyDeleteI first came a cross this "photograph/image" ness when i created an image using a scanner, or even long exposures (if you want to see these, i can give you links). when using these processess, images become altered on their own, colors become skewed. You can be a purist and say, "well that;s what the camera gave me, so that's what i'll use to print/publish/whatever" but then you become a factory, with the mantra "Click, publish, click, publish." Boring, so to speak.
The art world, at this juncture, Is less focused on the authentic, and more on the conceptual, or narrative photography. By playing an "art photographer", using a camera, or otherwise, are we "making" a picture, or "taking" one?
http://www.berk-edu.com/RESEARCH/ken_josephson/index.html