Empty Words, Empty Frames

The Copenhagen summit on climate change never happened. That's official. Without the 'traditional' photograph of the World's leaders congregated uncomfortably in front of some pretentious piece of display graphics at the back of the conference hall, I can't be sure that anything at all actually happened.

It seems that a photographer had been booked for midday but the leaders had the temerity to keep on talking way beyond then. By the time the opportunity had been rearranged, several significant figures, including Barack Obama and Russian President Medvedev had gone home. In response to enquiries about this, the Danish Prime Minister Lars Rasmussen declared that he had made "negotiations and efforts to reach agreement the priority" over setting up the 'family' photo shoot. What was the man thinking!

These tedious mementos of high-level political meetings are the equivalent of the mass group wedding photo, only a lot less important. They're fodder for lazy picture editors and compilers of history books. They tell us almost nothing except that the ones in the front row have more clout than those in the rows behind and that the insertion of a woman or a Saudi prince in full regalia can have a tremendously disruptive effect on a composition constructed almost entirely of the blue/grey, anally tailored suits of the World's top dogs.

Drowning in Pixels

"Too many images, too many projects, far too much shit out there. I don't want to add to it."
Tom Rice-Smyth.

In signing off from his blog with its almost daily details of London, Tom Rice-Smyth is doing himself an injustice. His pictures are meticulous and considered, and he filters his influences (particularly William Eggleston) with intelligence and respect. He certainly wasn't adding to the shit out there.

But I think most photographers will know what he means about the sheer amount of stuff and many more will recognise the tone of self-doubt. Tom is one of those photographers who produce a continuous stream of work in response to the world around him. In his own words, he doesn't 'think or shoot in terms of ring-fenced projects'. I presume this means that any projects that he does produce come about retrospectively as acts of editing rather than premeditated picture-making.

To my mind, this approach is entirely valid. Off the top of my head, one giant of photography who mostly worked this way was Gary Winogrand who, after his death in 1984, left thousands of exposed but undeveloped rolls of Tri-X for the world to deal with. Without the story-telling instincts of a Bert Hardy or a Eugene Smith, images made within the confines of a project are often forced and literal.

The problems for the open approach lie in protecting the integrity of the images. First there's the self-doubt of the photographer who will regularly question whether the pile of photographs accumulating on their hard drive adds up to more than just random noise - and that's where the editing comes in. Then there's the way that their output seems to seep into the wider ocean of images that sloshes around the net, becoming somehow diluted in the process.

Concern over the unrestrained access the web gives to anyone with a digital camera is not simply a matter of elitism and vanity. Any artist worth the name is constantly questioning and revising what they do with an almost permanent sense that the work might not quite live up to the intention behind it. It's a hard, self-searching activity where important markers of progress have traditionally come from curators, publishers, collectors and reviewers. While it's true that these people had become gatekeepers of culture, very often with dubious authority, the sytem did at least provide something to kick against or aspire to.

The web gives previously disenfranchised artists (photographers and writers in particular) a chance to stick a digit up to the established channels of exposure and canonisation. Anyone can now become a published writer or photographer no matter what the intrinsic quality of their work. Given that any audience's appreciation of art is entirely subjective, it is difficult to argue that this is not a good thing.

And yet, there's something deflating and depressing about the vast, suffocating volume of undifferentiated photography that is being pumped into the Photo Buckets and Flickr streams, puffing cyberspace into a distended bag of equally valued pixels. When everybody's having their 15 minutes of fame at the same time, they're having no fame at all. For a photographer, the illusion of instant approbation given by effortless worldwide exposure is no way to develop an eye.

From the straight-shooting f64 movement in the 1930s through the independent photography movement that grew out of the art colleges of the 1970s, the validity of the artist who uses the camera in and of itself as his or her medium of expression has needed constant reaffirmation.

Photography is a fluid thing. It is subject to seismic technological shifts in a way that no other medium is. But beyond the revolutionary impacts of developments like the dry plate (which meant that you no longer had to carry a chemistry lab around with you), the box brownie, kodachrome, the Leica and digital imaging, it is about what you can do with your eyes. 

Photo copyright Tom Rice-Smyth

Moving on

TV manufacturers have, for a while now, been advertising their HD televisions with the promise that they will make the "viewing experience more intense". Apparently there's a problem with lesser TVs whereby "at explosive speed" (a tennis match for example) "the action can become blurred and the detail missed". But they have come to the rescue because "motion clarity matters".

I'm pretty sure it's been asked before but I'll ask it again - what is the point of HDTV? I mean, how much detail do we actually need in a moving image? After all, moving images rely on our missing the spaces between each frame for the illusion to work. It's not about clarity, otherwise stunt doubles would never convince and Wallace and Gromit would painfully jerk their way through all their adventures.

In life we could, if we wanted, trace the flight of a swan or the arc of a cricket ball sailing to the boundary, but a bullet or an explosively served tennis ball could never be followed that way.

It is a nice irony that the urge of the early photographers to refine their technology so that it could stop life in its tracks was essential for the invention of the movies. The chemistry of photographic plates was improved so that they could be sensitive enough to record an image with just a fraction of a second of exposure. Combustible powders and primitive electronics were used to make workable flash systems that could compensate for dull light or illuminate pitch darkness. By the time Edweard Muybridge - often regarded, though not quite accurately, as the inventor of the movies - started getting curious about exactly what happens to a horse's legs when it's in full gallop, he had all the tools he needed to find out.

Muybridge produced his masterworks The Human Figure in Motion and Animals in Motion precisely to reveal details that cannot be seen in the flux of life. He approached the problem by setting up an elaborate test centre in California where he could break down a fluid movement such as the beat of a bird's wing or the leap of an athlete into some of its individual components by firing off a series of sequential photos.

It was a logical step for him then to try and recreate the movement he had fragmented in this way by stitching the images back together taking advantage of a toy that had been known since the 1830s. Muybridge's Zoopraxiscope, like the toy, relied on a phenomenom known as the persistence of vision. This is the retention by the brain of a kind of ghost image of quickly seen things that can be exploited to give an illusion of seamless motion by presenting a rapid sequence of images.

From their adverts, you'd think the TV manufacturers are trying to achieve an experience which does away with the gaps and the ghost images, leaving the viewer with nothing at all to do and making the smoke and mirrors dance of the TV into an exact equivalent of real experience.

Unseen Memories

Last week's edition of the BBC Radio 4 programme In Touch, had an item about a photograph album for the blind or visually impaired. Despite my own less than perfect vision, my first reaction was a rather uncharitable 'what's the point?' As much as people have an incredible capacity to deal with whatever life throws at them, being blind has one inescapable truth - it means you can't see. So what's the point, I wondered, of keeping photographs as prompts to memory?

The album comes with a few seconds of recording capacity for each picture so that the subject, or someone else, can record some appropriate words or other sounds.

I imagine the first instinct with this would be to describe the photograph. 'Little Chloe is in Dick and Julia's garden wearing her fairy wings and a tutu.' OK, as the user of this device, that tells me something and my mind's eye adds a bit more. But I could have got that image from a telephone conversation with whoever's doing the describing. I need more.

'Little Chloe looks glum because Julia has just told her that they won't be able to go to the pictures that afternoon which, by the way, was three weeks ago. The sun is/was shining.' No, that still won't do. I still could have got that information from the phone conversation. What's needed, I imagine, is a description of the photograph, not of what's happening in it. They aren't necessarily the same thing.

'It's early autumn and there are fallen pears around Chloe's feet.' That's better. It's a full-length picture of Chloe, then. '...and Chloe is to the right of the picture and in the space to her left we can see the trunk of the tree, the wooden fence and that patch of the raised bed that you're always finding cat poo in.'

I have never seen the photograph being described because I made it up. It's a wonder of words, though, that I do have an image in my mind. Presumably, this is exactly the situation that would face a blind person using one of these albums. They would rely on the recorded voice to give them a mental picture that may match the photograph in all its general features. But the photograph's riot of detail would remain unseen and be impossible to describe, pretty much making the actual photograph redundant.

It's probable that people would come up with more inventive and evocative ways of using the recording feature than simply describing the photograph. Also, I can imagine how a user of this album with diminished, rather than completely lost, vision might find the recordings really helpful in building an image and raising a memory or an emotion. But this still leaves the question of whether the picture in the album has to be a photograph - wouldn't a painting or a sketch be just as effective?

What I like about this idea of a photograph album for the blind is that, for me, it gets to the heart of one of the things that makes photography unique as a medium. It emphasises how it has, from the beginning, been a form of abstract art. Camera manufacturers jostle with each other to cram the most million pixels into their products and trumpet the virtues of detail, resolution and sharpness. Their claims of superlative accuracy echo all the way back to Fox Talbot and his wonder at the way his latticed window at Laycock was so faithfully reproduced by the paper negatives he was pulling from his little mousetrap cameras that he could, with a magnifying glass, count every tiny pane.

From the pin-sharp gleam of a Daguerreotype to the lush tones of an Avedon 10x8 negative, this level of clarity has become equated with the essential 'truth' of photography. We know it as a fact, for example, that a cat is covered with thousands of tiny hairs or a football pitch with so many individual blades of grass that their true number can only be discovered by some complex mathematical process. But we don't see the world that way, even with our glasses on. Whatever kind of truth there is in a photograph, it is not a visual truth.

In the 60s and 70s a group of American painters including Chuck Close and Richard Estes applied oil to canvas with such meticulous care that they produced paintings that looked on the surface to be giant photographs. The Hyper-realists as they were known were after a goal they knew they could never attain of some kind of ultimate refinement of detail. Aware that this is not the way the world appears to the human eye and brain, and despite the fact that their work seems to be the ultimate in figurative painting, they considered themselves to be abstract artists.

If photography has any claim to truth, then that is to do with another of its unique qualities. To an absolute degree, even in manipulated, montaged and sampled photographs, light from an exisiting thing must have reflected at some point in time through the lens and onto whatever sensitive surface was in the camera. Whatever subsequently happens to the image that is recorded and however it is interpreted, nothing can break that fundamental link. Maybe that's why a blind person can value a piece of glossy paper as the equivalent of a treasured memory - if they know it to be a photograph.