Composition 3x

A strange progression occurred to me a few weeks ago and I’ve meant to jot it down. It’s hard to identify exactly what it is that interests me. People who link my site don’t necessarily have much of a clue. I put some things on my about page, but these things really don’t explain much about the diversity of things that I have written about in the past, and hope to write about in the future once I get past this hellish semester. What I’m really interested in is composition, in the broadest sense of the term.

I first became interested in composition as a viewer of pictures (perhaps at the age of ten or eleven). For some reason, certain pictures fascinated me more than others. It wasn’t just the subjects, but the way that the images were put together. I used to sort them into piles, ranked by the relative level of obsessive compulsion to look at them they held. It wasn’t simply proportion, or composition in the usual sense—there was just something troubling about some pictures which had more to do with how they were put together rather than what they were ostensibly about. When I became a photographer as an adolescent (a calling that seemed almost religious at the time), I did the same sort of thing with my own pictures. I’d arrange them into groups and tack them to every square inch of wall available, staring at them obsessively. I hoped something would come to me about them, especially as I began to notice my tendency to take what seemed almost the same picture over and over until I got it right.

At first, I wasn’t really very subtle about it. Simple graphic things fascinated me for a while, but eventually it seemed like the real way to stay interested in a picture was to make it complex. The more levels, the more ways of looking at it there were, the better I liked it. Then it seemed like that was a trap too. It’s hard to present anything that has “meaning” when your mind is racing too many directions at once. Eventually, I settled on a fairly organicist view—I was done with complex Mondrian-like block constructions and more interested in vortexes and swirls, what seemed to me to be more suggestive of life. I noticed that this fit well with my general taste—I always liked pictures that sort of sucked you in and refused to let you go. Not in the sense that they were optically confusing, but rather that the congruence or incongruence between the subject and the object which represented it was problematic in one sense or another. Not just simple irony (all the rage in 60s and 70s photography) but a deeper sense of complexity brought about by a particular arrangement of items in the visual field. But the subject never became secondary to me—what a picture was supposed to be about was still important, it’s just that I wanted them to be arranged in a more interesting way.

I wrote quite a bit as an adolescent, but I was never able to take any classes in literature or writing. Writing and literature classes were forbidding, full of gatekeepers that slammed doors shut. Photography was open, by comparison. But I’ve always read a lot. I never realized that just through reading a person learns to write pretty well anyway, without help. When I came back to school in my late 30s, I thought I would get a degree in art history, since I’d been studying that all along. But I was seduced by literature instead. What interested me most about literature was the way that things were put together—why some things hold your interest, regardless of subject. I was particularly fascinated by William Blake, not only for his thought, but also for the way that he put words and pictures together in a way that seemed so much greater than the sum of their parts. But getting a job as a literature professor seemed like a pipe dream for someone my age. Instead, I focused on technical writing, or more properly, rhetoric, because it was indeed about the way words were put together to make sense and convey messages. The job opportunities are better for writing teachers, and besides that, I am less interested in aesthetic judgments and more interested in just how things are composed.

Now I find myself obsessed with a third, and perhaps the most intense dimension of composition—the philosophical one. Just what is the relationship of parts to wholes? How is meaning composed from an aggregate of elements (verbal, aural, and visual). That’s how I got into this mess. It’s mainly my interest in composition. I never dreamed, as I was looking at things and sorting them into piles, that it could get this damn complex.