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

Second Exposing the Mead -- Photographs of the Abstract

Backyard
Aaron Siskind
1940
AC 1985.79.8

On Tuesday, March 1st, we hosted our second Exposing the Mead discussion. Like the first event, it brought together a diverse crowd of students, faculty, and Amherst residents for a night of stimulating discussion and artistic stimulation. For everyone who was able to make it, thank you for showing your support and your interest in photography. For those who couldn't, hopefully this summary will show you how much you missed out on so that you'll make it to the next one! The topic for this week’s discussion was the role of the abstract in photography, as demonstrated in two works by Aaron Siskind and B.A. King. The discussion was led by Thea Goldring, a photography and modern art enthusiast, who began her talk with some contextualization of the Abstract Expressionist movement and then began the discussion.

We began by talking about whether a photograph can really be abstract. Since photography is usually marked by its ability to capture the world exactly as it is, to represent what is in front of the lens, it seems strange to think that the camera would have the ability to make an image that was not representational and had no context.

Thea then revealed that the name of B.A. King's photograph was "Abstract Thought" while Siskind's is titled "Backyard." We agreed that Siskind's appeared less abstract and more representational: we could tell what it was showing and even the title tipped the hand a little bit. But we were hard-pressed to determine what the physical subject of the B.A. King photograph was, so perhaps photography did have some ability to create something outside of context, outside of rational understanding?

B.A. King transformed his photograph into an abstract image in several ways. The perspective of the photographer was disembodying and impossible to imagine, transferring the objects from the physical world to an imagined one. The background was monochromatic and undescriptive, it was also almost impossible to tell it was water (if not for the tiny ripples that could be seen on its surface when the photograph was examined closely). And the work had a distinct, black frame around it, which further separated it from the world and made it truly seem like an abstract thought, floating in King's head, that did not actually exist in the world.

Despite initial appearances, we eventually uncovered all sorts of ways that Siskind's photograph was also abstract on its own right. Siskind's background approached King's in its flatness, particularly with the almost infinite background of bricks. Both works used lines to order their composition: "Backyard" has strong symmetrical diagonals that frame the photograph. Although we can tell that these lines are created by real objects, we begin to forget that as Siskind employs them more and more geometrically. Finally, the dramatic angle that Siskind shot his photograph from also contributed greatly to the objects in the frame losing their meaning as regular objects.

The talk concluded with a new definition of photography: in Siskind's words "a set of relationships between shapes and tones." Siskind's work, despite its literal trappings, was very much headed in the direction that B.A. King's image embodied: an abstract thought, captured in a photograph.

All in all, the discussion was a successful one and a great continuation of our series Exposing the Mead. Please attend our next discussion on the first Tuesday after spring break, March 22, in which we will be discussing the role of text in photography.

-Alex

The Abstract in 1916?

Untitled from "Camera Work" (plate 9, vol. 49, 1916)
Paul Strand
1916
AC 1989.17

Although Aaron Siskind was certainly a key figure in the move that photography made towards the abstract in the 1950s, abstraction did played a role in the medium from much earlier. For example, in the 1910s, under the influence of Modernist painting, photographers began to make use of formal abstractions in their photographs -- focusing less on the subject material and more on the shapes, tones, and lines in the frame. Paul Strand, influenced strongly by Alfred Steiglitz and Edward Steichen, made this shift in the 1910s as well, making photographs that were much less representative than his predecessors. This famous photo by Strand, titled "Wall Street" is a good example.

http://iconicphotos.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/wall-street-1915-paul-strand.jpg

The Mead holds another example of early abstract photography in the photo above. At first glance, this untitled work appears like a purely mundane object: a white picket fence, a front lawn, a row of houses. One could hardly imagine a more idyllic and representative picture of our land. But look a little closer and the subject material starts to fall away. The background appears fuzzy and indistinct. Nothing about it seems to jump out at the viewer. Instead, the blindingly white fence posts dominate the picture. And not just as fence posts, which they are, but more and more as abstract shapes and forms against a dark backdrop. Squint a little bit, and you see definite white shapes framed by the darkness behind them; the fact that the photo is showing a fence, and a lawn, and a house becomes much less important. The top third of the picture maintains its reality pretty firmly, but if you cover that with your hand, the photo really becomes almost a complete abstraction.

Strand achieves this effect very intentionally. He chose his aperture to have little depth of field so that the fence would be in focus and the background would be indistinct. Similarly, he used the focus on his lens to make the fence sharp while de-emphasizing everything behind it. He picked his exposure, either in the camera or in the darkroom, to make the pickets of the fence as sharply bright as possible, making them stand out more as forms than as what they really are. In sum, Strand did not stumble across this abstract presentation, he knowingly crafted it.

Like the Siskind photograph that we discussed on Tuesday, the nod towards the abstractions that are to come are evident, even though Strand was working decades before Siskind picked up a camera.

-Alex