October Monthly Special: Seeing the invisible

In his well known text "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (well known in academic circles, that is), Walter Benjamin writes, "The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses."

Something about the camera's power to freeze time and to organize and limit the chaos of the world opens up new sense perception. Benjamin would have us consider, for example, an enlargement: "The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject."


Similarly, in The Photographer's Eye, John Szarkowski notes that the new medium led (even forced) the photographer to explore new vantage points: "From his photographs, he learned that the appearance of the world was richer and less simple than the mind would have guessed. He discovered that his pictures could reveal not only the clarity but the obscurity of things, and that these mysterious and evasive images could also, in their own terms, seem ordered and meaningful."


This month, I wanted to do a non-Photoshop theme (although I will do at least 2 Photoshop posts) and instead, focus on seeing "the invisible." A good ghostly theme for Halloween, right?

The inspiration for the theme comes from an unlikely source: a portable outhouse.


I was walking around a lovely neighborhood in Paris with streets named after famous French photographers, when I saw "voir l'invisible" (see the invisible) crudely painted on the side of one of those portable toilets used at construction sites. Exactly, I thought. Why was I wandering around early in the morning searching for things to photograph? It wasn't to remind myself or others that I'd been to Paris—the function of souvenir/tourist photography. I was hoping to notice something new, to see something through photography that would have been invisible to me otherwise.


Because of that, I noticed the rescued Winnie the Pooh characters clinging on to the street cleaner's broom for dear life.


Because of that, I noticed the little cushion of leaves that had sprouted beneath the feet of a graffiti kindred spirit since I last saw her.


The mundane took on an alternate life as graphic art.


I used photography to look at things rather than through them. It may sound odd, but sometimes the superficiality of photography is what helps increase our awareness and appreciation of the invisible. In the case of the yellow mailbox set against the green restaurant, the functional purpose of each becomes irrelevant as everything is reduced to shape and color. And yet, the simplification makes the overlooked worth noticing. In the case of the chalkboard menu, I no longer see through the surface as a mere reference to my lunch options. Instead, I look at the surface and appreciate it in a new context.

When you pause and think about how many things you see through each day, you start to realize that we are surrounded by ghosts. And so, "seeing the invisible" is the perfect October theme.

I encourage you to use photography to look at the overlooked this month. If you can, do your own post on your discoveries and share your link in a comment in any post during the month. I'm excited about the theme and I hope you'll take up the challenge.

Some people who posted on the challenge:

Fritsch

huhs, hmms, and ahs : three very short stories

Let me forewarn you that these one-photo stories probably won't make any sense. Worse still, once I explain, you may wonder why I bothered posting them. But I'll get to that, I promise.

story 1.

Discarded organizer outside the headquarters of "Le Monde" newspaper

story 2.

Pockmarked sidewalk


story 3.
By a stairwell outside the Kenna exhibit

I tell my students that I like writing assignments more than memorization-based exams (names, dates, that kind of stuff), because I can still remember essays I wrote in 7th grade, but I forgot my chronology of all the rulers of France a week after the final exam. Who am I kidding? I forgot some of it during the final exam.

There's something about the act of writing that makes the story stick with you. But maybe that's not the case with you. Maybe you're a numbers and dates kind of person. A former part-time secretary in my department could recite birthdays, phone numbers, or any other number with meaning attached to it with zero effort. Having just figured out that I'm a year younger than I thought I was (and I had the midlife crisis all planned out!), I can't even wrap my mind around that kind of numbers memory.

My memory likes images. I remember my first meeting with the museum director who wanted to discuss the possibility of an exhibit about my research. He was surprised at how quickly I converted written thoughts into visual form. What he didn't realize was that I saw all of my ideas as images before I wrote them. Converting the images in my mind into words on a page was the hard part.

The three image "stories" above were all taken within the last few days. The first two are from a walk I took today in an area with streets named after photographers like Atget and Brassaï. The third image was in the library where I researched most of my dissertation, and therefore the easiest to spin into a story with deeper meaning, which would be dishonest. Here is the extent of each story:

1. I noticed the organizers outside the newspaper building and thought that I could use them back at home, but didn't feel like carrying them around. Then I noticed the labels indicating they were sorting things by region (Brittany, Corsica, etc.) which made me think about the decline of the newspaper industry and the fact that regional reporting is one of the first things to go.

2. I noticed the little craters in the sidewalk created by pits or nuts from the tree above. Could a falling nut create that kind of damage? Maybe if the sidewalk had been resurfaced and was still drying or maybe if that is a patch of tar that melted during a heat wave. But why resurface a sidewalk only to let it a tree launch a full scale attack? Hmm.

3. The Kenna exhibit was just so beautiful, so moving, that I had to take a photo immediately outside just for the sake of release—by impulse, like applause at the end of a play.

Not compelling stories? Don't say I didn't warn you. The idea I want to put out there is this: a photo can be the story of how you think. It may not have the wide appeal of something pretty, but it might be a way for you to capture your thought process. I am imagining how a book of these moments, not the famous Oprah "aha!" moments, but more like the "huh"moments that capture the natural flow of your mind. This is what Rousseau was after when he walked around collecting plants during the last years of his life. He wasn't trying to make any great botanical discoveries. He was gathering his own thoughts.

It's not about gathering events or photos of loved ones. It's not about great philosophical reflection. It's just about the flow of thoughts and feelings we usually never document.

More than just photos...stories

Plus que des photos, des histoires (More than just photos, stories) reads Canon's current slogan, seen on huge banners right now inside the Salon de la Photo in Paris. Naturally, it made me think of this month's theme. And I'm glad that it did, because thinking about story turned an otherwise crowded, hot, zoo of an atmosphere into my own personal safari.



The difference between the expo-as-zoo (complete with caged displays) and the expo-as-hunting-expedition was a sudden shift in my perspective. To return to (and mistranslate for my own purposes) the huge Canon banner— it's all about your reflex and your objectives. My initial reflex when I stepped inside the large exposition hall was to remember the PMA convention in Vegas not so long ago, say "been there, done that" to myself, and leave.

But then I looked at the Canon banner and found myself agreeing with their premise. Not the ridiculous commercial premise that photos taken with a Canon are superior (although I do use a Canon, so I wish it were true), but with the idea that not all photos are stories. In fact, I think that a lot of photos are not stories. Some photos are more like "to do" lists (Me in front of Notre Dame. Check. Me in front of the Eiffel Tower. Check.) or doodles (bokeh experiments, abstract streaks of light in long exposures, etc.). Sometimes a photo is a fragment of a sentence. But whole stories are not always so easy to come by.

Everyone taking the same photo of a model.

The photo I took of what was happening beneath their feet.

My best piece of advice from the experience is that if you want stories, you need to stop looking at the thing, and start looking at the story of the thing. When I made a conscious decision to look for stories at the photo expo, I became more interested in my environment. When people were all crowding into a space to look at a display in the way the vendor intended, I didn't feel the need to compete. Instead, I could step back and observe the competition itself.

From their end—elbowing other photographers to take a photo of a girl in front of a giant "Olympus" sign. From my end—no elbowing necessary, and I get a photo of the girl and the fight to photograph her instead of a camera ad.

I imagined a parent applying this same attitude to a kid's soccer game (I say "a parent" because we haven't had a kid in soccer since Max was 4). I imagined that parent taking a more documentary approach to the event, one that included other parents reacting to the game, other kids. One that included the other team.


Maybe I'm preaching to the choir, but if the general public is anything like it was yesterday at the photo show, I would venture to say that most people gravitate toward the same spot to take the same photo. Again and again.

Watching people interact with people will likely lead to some kind of story.

When I changed my objective from shopping mode to documentary mode, the stories began to appear.

"Older man befriends group of goth teens" was a nice story to witness.

If this "monthly special" about story and that Canon ad hadn't triggered a change in objective for me, I would have spent ten euros on a photo show only to leave after five minutes to spend 10 more at the movies. The movies are still in theaters. The photo show ends tomorrow. And even though I was not interested in any of the products, I am glad I got to see the stories.

Your shoelace is untied.

Three photos about dogs followed by one simple lesson.

Inside the Musée d'Orsay

Outside the Centre Pompidou

Inside our apartment

A unified theme can create a story between different subjects and circumstances.

I was at the Photographer's Gallery in London last week where I saw an inspiring exhibition of André Kertész's photos of people reading. Photos of people reading on balconies, in parks and cafés, but also people reading from piles of trash, on top of discarded newspaper, photos of people reading in painting, and so many declensions of the theme that it struck me how much a unified creates its own story. Walking from one photo to the next, I felt a connection between cultures, classes, circumstances. Not that we-are-all-the-same sentiment that my cynicism interprets as willful ignorance cloaked in charity, but more of a look-at-this-human-impulse-at-work-in-such-varied-situations moment of awe. Together in that gallery, photos taken over the course of years and across continents told me a complex story about a subject that matters to me.

Before leaving the gallery, I visited the bookstore and bought the book On Reading, as well as an irresistible little contemporary work called Mrs. West's Hats—a book that features self portraits of Helen Couchman wearing hats left to her by her grandmother. I immediately felt attached to Couchman's book, not because of any particular photo in it, but because of the collection as a whole and the thought and emotion that it represents.

After returning to Paris, I prepared a brief introduction to Atget for my students and found myself thinking again about how a theme creates a story.

For this post, I rapidly pulled up three photos of dogs: one taken this week in the Musée d'Orsay, one taken a few weeks ago near the Pompidou Center and one taken tonight of my 4-year-old daughter's collaborative project with her grandpa (six dogs and a brachiosaur). My quick experiment made me think more about dogs and the people who feel compelled to portray them (in museums, on walls, on refrigerator doors...). It's certainly no On Reading. Nor is it Mrs. West's Hats. Three things that prevent it from becoming so are time, attachment, and development. Beyond this post, I don't plan on any dog-themed books (there are too many of those in the world already). But it is making me think more about how theme relates to story. And maybe it will start making you think about grouping your own photos into stories simply by organization.

October Monthly Special: Story

This is your life, but processed. Hammered into the mold of a good screenplay. Interpreted according to the model of a successful box-office hit. It is no surprise you've started seeing every day in terms of another plot point. Music becomes your soundtrack. Clothing becomes costume. Conversation, dialogue. Our technology for telling stories becomes our language for remembering our lives. Our framework for perceiving the world. (Chuck Palahniuk, Stranger than Fiction)

In spite of an all-time low in terms of "monthly special" participation this past month (Shanna should receive some kind of award, I think), I am continuing down a path suggested by the August (triptychs) and September (points of view) themes by looking at "story" in photography.

Too many years of graduate training in literature have only worsened my ambivalence toward the conventions of storytelling. By age 9, after countless Sunday School lessons in the genre of "Susie had an iron lung" and "Johnny got hit by a train," I learned to become wary of the devices meant to illicit an emotional response from an audience—devices that, when overused, condition some people to measure spirituality in the number of teardrops shed.

In 17th-century France, back in the heyday of Cartesian body-as-machine enthusiasm, pulpit orators tried to get their rhetoric down to a science. A well-placed metaphor here, just the right simile there, and your audience laughs or cries at your command. Fast forward a few hundred years and you find everyone from semioticians to ad agencies trying to figure out the recipes for different kinds of stories.

Look through some of your photos—or better yet, a scrapbook—and ask yourself what kind of stories they tell. Do the photos stand on their own? Are they part of a sequence? Does text play a role?

This month I want to encourage you to pay attention to the story in your photographs. Think about when story matters to you and when it does not. Look for patterns in your storytelling. Are there recipes? Should there be?

I plan to look at those questions and more this month, and I may even throw in a Photoshop tutorial, who knows? And if I'm really lucky, maybe I'll see some stories from you.