The Larger Picture

Last night was the fifth and last Exposing the Mead of this semester. Although we plan to pick up where we left off next Spring semester (Spring 2012; and we hope you’ll join us again), the end of this semester’s run is still bittersweet. I imagine the students must feel how sweet it is, what with finals fast approaching, but I’m admittedly on the bitter end.

For me, and judging by feedback I’ve received, for others as well, this series has been extremely enjoyable and enriching and it's something I'll miss during the summer and fall hiatus. Thea, Alice, Perry, and Alex brought considerable insight to the discussions they facilitated, and our audience members really rose to the occasion with their own contributions.

Each discussion built on the previous ones in subtle but significant ways. Abstraction cropped up again in city photography, and bodies were important in our conversation on text and photography. Bodies, architecture, and text all made appearances when discussing age. Certain questions persisted as subtext throughout the series, such as “Can there be such a thing as an abstract photograph?” and “Is it possible to capture the essence of a particular subject?”

As a result, many of us left each conversation with fresh ideas about individual photographs, thematic groupings of photographs, and even about “the larger picture.”

 

What have you thought of the Exposing the Mead series and blog? Have any particular photographs or themes resonated strongly with you? Have you come to any conclusions on the "larger picture" questions I mentioned above? Has the series raised more questions for you?

We look forward to seeing you back at Exposing the Mead next Spring!

Youth, Adolescence, and Old Age

Larry Clark

Untitled, from "Tulsa" series, 1980

AC 1994.4.2

Like usual, last night’s discussion was inspired by Mead photographs but unlike the others, it was focused on your submissions. Three photographs from the Mead’s collection were featured: Wendy Ewald’s A group of the neighbor children standing in the street - René Jansen Van Vuuren, 1992, Larry Clark’s Untitled from the Tulsa portfolio, 1980, and Mary Ellen Mark’s Man in Suit on Beach, Miami, 10/1986, 1986, which inspired our theme of age. On display beside these were six submissions, two focused on youth, two on adolescence, one on old age, and one on death.

Alex, Thea, Perry, and Alice grouped the submissions together with the Mead photos into groupings of youth, adolescence, and old age and death. These groupings elicited discussion on concepts commonly associated with the different ages. For instance, we wondered why, even though they all featured solitary figures, we used words like “freedom”, “nonchalance”, and “rebellion” when describing adolescents in the photos but words like “isolated” when describing the older people. And we wondered why the photograph of a tombstone was associated with the photographs of older people, even though the tombstone marked the grave of a two year old.

How do you think photographs can or do reinforce or subvert these common associations?

I'd also be interested to hear your thoughts on other questions relating to photographs representing age:

How do the subjects in the photographs “act” or represent their age? How do we recognize and how do we discuss age? Do you think family photos differ significantly from fine art photos in how they describe age?

 

Thank you so much to everyone who participated in last night's event, either by submitting your excellent photographs or by joining in the conversation!

Call to Artists

A group of the neighbor children standing in the street - René Jansen Van Vuuren, 1992.
Wendy Ewald
AC 2008.83

Now it's your turn:
 
Submit a photograph of your own capturing your thoughts on youth, adolescence, or advanced age to be displayed and discussed alongside photographs from the museum's collection during this semester's fifth and final Exposing the Mead, April 26th at 8:00 p.m.

Submit work by April 25th to:

Amherst College

Attn: Exposing the Mead

AC #124, Keefe Campus Center

Amherst, MA 01002

Revisit the website for more information.

Recap of Tuesday, April 5

Sunday Night, 40^th Street, New York, 1925,

Edward Steichen

AC 1985.59.9

Our fourth installation of Exposing the Mead was our final discussion that was focused solely on photographs from the collection. The founder of the series, Alex Strecker, led an engaging conversation on photography and the urban environment. Most of those in attendance were our regular audience, who’s devoted following we really appreciate, but there were some new faces as well. Before beginning his discussion, Alex explained the student-work component of the final installment of Exposing the Mead. He asked the student photographers in the room to submit photos inspired by three photographs from the collection that represent different stages of aging. The fifth and final discussion will be focused on these submissions

Alex prefaced the discussion by asking the audience what we think the essence of New York City is because it is the subject of both photographs. People seemed to reach a general consensus that Alicia Keys did a pretty good job capturing the essence of the city, but Alex filled in the rest of the picture with his idea of New York. He left us with a quote: “If you’re extraordinarily lucky, you might just be able to capture the essence of a city in a single photograph,” to keep in mind as we proceeded. Can you truly capture the essence of an entire city, especially one as immense and multifaceted in a single photograph? This question served as a base for us to return to and ground our conversation in.

After giving the audience the opportunity to get up and examine the photos up close, Alex reconvened the discussion, focusing first on Steichen’s photograph. We agreed that the subject of the photograph was the space created by the buildings and turned our attention to the very geometric shapes created by the straight lines. The ambiguous light emanating from the street stimulated extensive speculation, with many audience members commenting on its strangely soft, organic quality. Thinking about the unique perspective from which Steichen captured the image—aerial yet not from the very top of a building—led us to the conclusion that Steichen presents his point of view of the city to create a specific state of mind.

Moving onto Paulin’s photograph of Times Square, we immediately picked up on the transience of the captured moment. The discussion took a turn when we started talking about the presence of humanity, or lack thereof, in the photographs. Though Steichen’s photograph seems at face value to be more cold and removed, many people felt that there was less humanity in Paulin’s photograph in spite of the hustle and bustle it portrays. Though the Paulin is full of bright lights and advertisements that are clearly constructed by humans, it does not show any faces or any interaction between people, giving it an impersonal quality.

Alex read a quote from Paulin about his desire to produce images that border on surreal and asked the audience to compare the reality and surrealism of the two photographs. The intense contrast between the dark and light of the Paulin makes it appear impressionistic, but many people thought that Steichen’s photo is more surreal because it is more focused on the shapes created by the buildings than the actual buildings themselves. Jumping off of Steichen’s rectangular shapes, we talked about how the straight lines contributed to a sense of stillness and quietude in his photo whereas the circular lines in Paulin’s photo created a feeling of dynamism and chaos. We wrapped up the discussion by concluding that it is impossible to capture the city completely in any medium, but photography allows us to capture particular perspectives and single moments that represent important qualities of the city.

Modern Building

The Modern Building

Shirin Neshat

1999

AC 2007.02

This striking photograph was taken by Iranian-American photographer Shirin Neshat. It depicts the back view of a woman cloaked in traditional Muslim hijab, walking alongside a starkly white modern building. To provide you with a little context on Neshat’s work, I will start off with a little background information on her life and artistic career. Neshat was born and raised in Iran, to a family that was open to Western values. As a result, she was encouraged to be an independent, free-thinking woman from an early age and was sent to the United States for her college education. She did not begin to practice art until she returned to Iran in 1990 and felt compelled to visually express the change she witnessed as a mechanism for coping with the discrepancy between the culture she now experienced and that of the pre-revolution Iran in which she was raised. Her work refers to the social, cultural, and religious codes of Muslim society, but she actively resists stereotypical representations of Islamic society.

The lone figure is in the foreground of the photo, just barely contained within the frame. By capturing her back turned to the camera, Neshat transforms her from the subject of the photo to a portal through which to engage the viewer. The viewer is facing the image in the same direction as the figure, allowing him or her to transplant him or herself into the figure’s position. By doing this, Neshat is perhaps encouraging the viewer to look at the building from the figure’s perspective, evoking the viewer to think about how this figure may perceive the extremely modern, Western building. The building dominates most of the composition, forming an imposing presence that seems worlds away from the displaced figure despite their physical proximity. The figure is parallel to rather than facing the building, emphasizing the unbridgeable disconnect between them. The two sets of spiral staircase have a strangely organic shape that breaks ups the linear, geometric configuration of the building. The first staircase juts out, looming over the figure as if threatening to swallow her.

The most important feature of the photo is the contrast between the dark, isolated figure and the monolithic building. Neshat also emphasizes this contrast through her use of sharp lighting. Instead of utilizing gentle lighting that would soften the contrast between the light and shadowed elements, Neshat highlights the building’s geometric sterility. As a result, the figure, dressed in all black, is even more pronounced against the almost blindingly white building.

In Modern Building, Neshat uses composition and lighting to create a provocative photograph that explores the tension between a globalizing world that is becoming increasingly dominated by Western modernity and traditional Islamic culture. Time appears to be suspended in the stasis of this scene, in which historic and modern forces come into contention.

--Alice

Exposing the Mead -- Photography and Text

Looking Back
Tom Young
1995
AC 1995.7


On Tuesday night, March 22, the Mead hosted the third installment in the Exposing the Mead Series. Alex, Perry, Alice and I really appreciated the support shown by students and the Mead’s faculty by both their attendance and their lively participation in the discussion. To those who could not make it, we hope to see you in a couple weeks, and in the meantime would be glad to catch you up on our in-depth discussion on text and photography, and how language can affect our visual experience.

Perry De La Vega ’13 eased us into the discussion by asking the audience to consider what the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words” meant to us, and then to think about where we generally see text within images. While at first the audience mainly brought up advertising, Perry demonstrated how rarely we actually experience images without words, pointing to captions next to works of art, titles, artist’s statements, and even credit lines in online search engines. The question then becomes, as Perry articulately stated, how does the relationship between typographic semiotic and the rendered image impact our experience? Or, how linguistic signifiers, for example words that are dependent on their social and cultural contexts, and the arrangement of these signifiers affect the audience’s visual experience?

The hope was that through the examination of the photographs in front us we would start to see this interplay between the visual language, image, and physical and social contexts in which they both exist, and how this interaction creates a complex system of meanings, which together form the piece as a whole.

To make these ideas a bit easier to swallow Perry related this process to code breaking. As he explained, since we already know that words are a code, we simply have to transfer what we know about reading codes to the photographic image. The layers we have to work through are: the one created by the words and their accepted meanings and the adjacent images; the mental images that the word evoke combined with the actual image; the meaning of the images and how that alters the words; and finally the words called to the viewer’s mind by the images.

First, we looked at Lesley Dill’s “A Word Made Flesh: Throat” (1994), which is a stunning photograph printed on mulberry paper. It depicts a woman looking skyward with her throat exposed to the viewer, on which is scrawled the words “I am afraid to own a body, I am afraid to own a soul”, which were originally penned by Emily Dickinson. The audience immediately picked up on the physicality of the work, and especially of the words, which are handwritten in an almost violent manner. People used words such branded, tattooed, and inscribed to describe the lettering, which Perry related back to the placement of the words on the women’s throat. He argued that the words could be a physical representation of the woman’s emotions as she struggles to speak. People also picked up on the careful placement of the words, and how the artist had matched them to the contours of the women’s neck to both elongate its shape and also simultaneously depict the woman’s almost choking on the words. Ultimately, the audience agreed that without the incorporated words the piece would be much less powerful, and would lose its darkness. Furthermore, as Perry brought up, this tension highlights the conflict that communicating our fear of owning a body by using an actual body creates.

The second photograph we considered was Tom Young’s “Looking Back” (1995), which depicts a mental institution. The piece is mounted on aluminum, and a small rectangle, in which the image of a woman obscured by a layer of words is suspended, projects from the plane of the photograph. The words, which seem to restrain the woman, unlike the Dill piece are narrative and come from her description of her time at the mental institution. The audience responded to the layering of text over a protruding image, which creates an eerie sense of the woman reaching out but ultimately unable to connect with the viewer. The aluminum and the murkiness in the photograph created by a double exposure add to this cold, spooky, detached feeling. Perry ended the discussion of the photograph with a reference to the physical size of the lettering, which requires the viewer to get extremely close to the image, and thus adds to the sense that the viewer is trying to decipher a whisper is coming from inside the dark walls of the building.

Unfortunately at this point we had run out of time and Perry ended the discussion. During the course of the evening he had led the audience to consider not only the images in front of them nor only the words in front of them, but also the relationship between the two. And we left with a greater appreciation for both photographs, as well as a better understanding of how language can shape a visual experience and how many layers are involved in that relationship.

We hope to see you next time, when Alex Strecker ’13, will be leading the discussion.

-Thea

Science, Art and Photography

.30 Bullet Piercing an Apple
Harold Edgerton
1964
AC 1996.64.7


Harold Edgerton was a professor of electric engineering at MIT who combined scientific laboratory tools with his love of photography. Most famously, he introduced the stroboscope, or strobe, to photography. The strobe slowed down or completely stops the apparent movement of an object, and by synchronizing an electronic stroboscope with a high-speed motion-picture-camera Edgerton was able to expose six thousand to fifteen thousand frames per second. A normal camera only exposes and projects twenty-four frames per second, so when Edgerton's photos are projected, high-speed events appear in extremely slow motion. The resulting images are visually stunning simply because of the unique events they capture, but their careful composition and the artist's attention to color transform scientific studies of motion into works of art.

.30 Bullet Piercing an Apple is a prime example of Edgerton's mélange of science and artistry. By placing the composition off center, Edgerton leads the viewer to interact with the composition as a whole. Neither the bullet, nor the apple, nor the explosion itself is the central focus, but rather Edgerton leads you to focus on the entire moment of explosion. Furthermore, in the photograph Edgerton plays with dimension. The strong and competing vertical and horizontal lines formed by the bullets ground the photograph with a two-dimensional plane, which the apple's stem then breaks out of, reminding the viewer of the fruit's three-dimensionality. Against these strong lines, the motion of the apple's explosion and its chaos are even more pronounced. Edgerton carefully balances the grid of the bullet with the diagonals of the explosion to emphasize the splatters motion versus the apple's stillness.

Edgerton also has an expert understanding of light and color. The composition is organized into light and dark areas, with shadows and highlights adding structure and balance to the piece. The use of light also adds drama to the piece as the bullet speeds from the darkness into the light. Furthermore, his use of light to highlight the apple and bullet contrasts the glossiness of the apple and bullet with the matte white of the explosion. Adding to this contrast is Edgerton's decision to only use white in the explosion while the rest of the colors are bright and saturated. Ultimately, Edgerton uses light and color to accentuate the moment of explosion.

In .30 Bullet Piercing an Apple, Edgerton uses his artistic skill to capture and highlight a moment captured by science. Through his eyes, a simple moment of stillness and movement becomes a balanced composition that plays with our sense of time and dimension. In the end, we are not only left with a unique shot of a normally unperceivable event but also with a piece that stands independently from the process that created it as a work of art.


-Thea