In Our Opinion
Making Pictures the Write Way Part 1
|
In My Opinion Why People Make Photographs Part II Why People Make Photographs Part III In Our Opinion Picture taker or Picture Maker? |
During the past few years Greg Erf and myself have developed and implemented an online history of photography course through Eastern New Mexico University (www.enmu.edu/photohistory). This article begins a series by both Greg and me that examines our collaboration in terms of exploring ways the written word can be critically used to analyze how and why photographs are made and understood.
Resourceful photographers can rapidly share their vision with the world. After control is gained over the aesthetic and technical aspects of the medium, your vision and skill can emphasize what you deem significant about a subject. Often photographers capture and rebuild the world as evidence of their existence. A psychologist might call this a "controlling complex" that fulfills a need to order our world. Children collect objects, from baseball cards to Barbie dolls, to exhibit creativity and command over the things around them. The manner in which you collected and arranged things as a child is probably similar to how you now make photographs. It is still a creative act, but experience and maturity presents the opportunity to critically examine your artistry.
Part of the creative process is intuition, those "inspired moments" from knowing that you have recorded something of personal importance. Another piece is critical thinking that includes your ability to objectively reflect, analyze and judge your photographs in order to incorporate changes in new inspired moments (the outcome). This can include how a photograph is cropped and printed or other post visualization methods like collage, hand coloring, and toning.
Collecting and photography are visual manifestations of the creative desire. As children we learn visual communication is easier and faster than writing. However, as we mature writing can become a tool to scrutinize our creative acts. Creative and critical thinking combines right and left brain activities. The right hemisphere reflects creativity (the visual) and the left hemisphere reflects analytical thought (reading and writing). Looking at your work with both hemispheres can transmit knowledge and skills that will take you beyond your current level of understanding. Most people learn the craft of photography in the same manner as their multiplication tables; by drill and practice. These left brain methods of learning can give the appearance of understanding a subject, but it does not always hold up in real life situations. Genuine understanding is an inner knowing that combines your analytical and creative perspectives into a whole brain experience.
Critical thinking is about looking at your creativity (inspired moments) with a knowledgeable eye. A way to perceptively examine your work is to transcribe what you see into written form. Writing about your photography can build analytical left brain knowledge from your right brain visual experiences. Critical thinking develops as you use adjectives and verbs to describe your inspired moments. The difference between the expressive qualities of photographs and the written word is not exact, but the act of transcription directs more precise thinking about your photographs.
Consider the last outstanding photograph you made. Probably your intuition said everything was "right", the light, the color, and your composition came together when the shutter was released. Basically you operated from an emotional level of your right hemisphere that told you the scene conveyed how you were feeling about the subject. Critical thinking entails looking back and using your left hemisphere to imagine the subject and linguistically representing it. The act of memory combined with writing about your photograph can reveal conscious and unconscious choices, empowering you to create new meaning and order from the recorded events. Try the following steps to transcribe your right brain visual experience into left brain
analytical thought.
Writing Guidelines:
1). Describe the Photograph and its Artistic Qualities: Make a descriptive list of the photograph using as many adjectives and nouns as possible. Then utilize words like balance, color, contrast, shape, and texture to describe its artistic structure.
2). Write About the Photograph: Use your list of adjectives and nouns to tell a story or capture an emotion.
3). Evaluate the Photograph: What are the similarities and differences between the photograph and your written description? How does the photograph vary your original mental image of the subject? What have you learned? Did anything unanticipated happen?
Writing Example:
The photograph by Greg Erf that accompanies this article serves as an example to highlight this narrative exercise.
1. Descriptive List
One 28 year-old white male looking right, one 28 year-old black male looking forward, white male peeking at black male, black male with eyes closed, both in casual dress (T-shirt and jeans), head to toe close-up, back alley urban environment, graffiti on wall, most readable words are "I hate my race", bleeding paint along top edge with other taggings, indirect mid-day light, continuous tone black-and-white image made up of four collaged photographs to form one slightly disjointed picture, bold and sharply focused composition, irregular lines, scale, a busy symmetrical background, and a tactile representation of space.
2. Writing about the Work
Two men of different racial backgrounds are standing together in a back alley. Graffiti surrounds them representing an urban battleground with the most decipherable words being "I hate my race". Four individual photographs, slightly misaligned, have been pieced together to create a single work adding a sense of discontinuity and time. "I hate my race" is centralized between the two figures and forms a barrier. The close proximity of the two men may suggest friendship as opposed to hatred, but the lack of eye contact still hints at the presence of racial differences.
3. Evaluation
Erf intentionally made this collage as a response to the hate crime that occurred in Jasper, Texas in 1998, which took the life of James Byrd Jr. Making four separate exposures allowed Erf to get close and reveal detail in the faces of the men and the graffiti while using the wall to act as a stage of shared ground. This approach unexpectedly presents the total image as a disjointed puzzle that becomes relevant to an uncertainty about contemporary American race relations. Race relations result from how one group of people consider themselves to be different from other groups. Here Erf sees the words "I hate my race" instead of "I hate your race" as representing a shift in racial perspective. For Erf, the change of adjectives from "your" to "my" symbolizes a rethinking of prejudices that has taken generations to produce and is a result of more people seeing both themselves and others through a similar lens.
Erf's difficulty in exactly aligning the images also introduced an unanticipated sense of time to the work. When looking at the person on the right side of the frame, the angles are dramatically different. This difference actuates a perception of extended time because this picture was built over time rather than taken from a single instantaneous moment. This additional time is reinforced through the text on the wall that encourages viewers to linger over the picture's complexities. Erf discovered that while a single picture would have satisfied his initial thoughts, had he stopped there the outcome would have been less thought provoking. Erf's writing clarified what these unintended elements brought to his imagemaking and now consciously incorporates them.
Now it is your turn to use this guide to make conscious changes in your future photographs and how you interpret the photographs of others. We invite readers to submit one of their photographs and their written exercise to be considered for the new Photovision Website. Include your text in the body of the email and attach your image as a JPEG file only, no larger than 5 x 5 inches, 50k and 72dpi. Email to: Hirsch@photovisionmagazine.com
To be continued...
Robert Hirsch is the author of the newly released second edition of Photographic Possibilities: The Expressive Use of Ideas, Materials, and Processes (Visit: focalpress.com).
Greg Erf is a Professor of Art at Eastern New Mexico University and curator of the exhibition Dis/content held in conjunction with PhotoArts Santa Fe, Santa Fe, New Mexico, July 2001.
© Robert Hirsch & Greg Erf 2001.
. |
 |