Category: tPA 5

Oh, Snap!

Jeff

Connie Nielsen and Robin Williams in One Hour Photo.jpeg
“According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “snapshot” was first used in 1808 by an English sportsman by the name of Sir Henry Hawker. He noted in his diary that almost every bird he shot that day was taken by snapshot, meaning a hurried shot, taken without deliberate aim. Snapshot, then, was originally a hunting term.”1

I had always meant to check this quote. It is basically accurate, except for some minor details. It was Peter Hawker, an English army officer (not sure about the “sir” either). The diary entry was dated 1808, but it wasn’t published until 1893, though their are similar usages noted from 1846 as well. Herschel applied “snap-shot” to photography as early as 1860. The comparatively recent deployment of the term makes it dubious to suggest any sort of originary hypotheses or hunting heritage based on Hawker alone. It’s easier if you trace down “snap” (sans shot). I love the OED.

Why does this matter? Because terminology always comes with a sort of baggage, a network of associations that persist even though the term is deployed in new contexts. I was reminded of that vividly by a chapter by Carolyn Miller on topos invoking the venatic (hunting) tradition in rhetoric. Photography, it seems to me, has even more direct ties to hunting and its rich tableau of associations. It is facile to simply associate hunting with predatory behavior as Sontag in On Photography, with critics in subsequent decades nodding along without challenge. The venatic tradition is, as Detienne and Vernant suggest, an alternate paradigm that simply does not fit in with the emergent classical world view2. Consequently, hunting doesn’t sit comfortably in modern consciousness either. There’s a lot more to say about that than I can possibly manage here.

What drove me to explore this again was an interview with Joan Fontcuberta on Eyecurious:

MF: With the proliferation of digital technology, more still photographs are being made than ever before, despite advances in other media like video. Do you think that people would still be as attached to photography if it were no longer perceived as a document of reality?

JF: Yes, certainly. Photography is dissolving into the magma of images. It is losing its historical specificity, but is beginning to fulfil other functions. I just published a book titled Through the Looking Glass about cell phone photos and their circulation through the Internet and online social networks. Teenagers are not interested in photographs as documents but as trophies. When Martians finally invade the Earth, green lizard-shaped aliens will emerge from their spacecrafts. They will fire at us with laser guns but we won’t hide nor protect ourselves. We’ll take our cell phones and we’ll photograph them to prove that we saw them, to prove that we were there when they arrived.

I have difficulty understanding why Fontcuberta thinks that “trophies” are a separate and novel category from documents; photographers have been taking “trophies” since the beginning of the medium. Roger Fenton’s Crimean War photographs, for example. They are documents, yes, but they are also trophies of a strange and far away place. The trophies returned to England from Egypt were not simply archeological plunder, but stereo views of places that prove the intrepidness of their publishers. Dissolving into the magma of images? Oh, snap! The onslaught of images began sometime in the middle ages, if not before. I began to wonder about the vocabulary involved: the venatic vocabulary.

Just what is the linguistic relationship between documents, monuments, and hunting?

Snap seems to enter the English lexicon as a verb around 1530 with reference to biting both by animals or humans; a bit later (1586) it is associated with the sound, the snapping of fingers. But by the early 1600s it moves to on a more criminal tack: a snap, also known as a cloyer, is a pickpocket or thief. But there’s foreshadowing in the phrasal use of snap up in 1550: “Whan we lyue in ydlenes in all luste and pleasure, the deuyll snappyth vs vp.” The nominal use is evidenced prior to this slightly; In 1495 snap designates a bite or bite mark. The predator/prey dynamic is clearly at the core of the term.

In the same time period c.1550, trophy designated both a type of monument erected at a battlefield, and also the spoils of war. Used figuratively, “Anything serving as a token or evidence of victory, valour, power, skill, etc.; a monument, memorial.” Interestingly, one of the earliest synonyms for “spoils” was prey, in usage c. 1385.3 The prey/monument connection is positively ancient. Famously, Foucault remarked that modernity was engaged in the practice of transforming documents into monuments. It seems that the first monuments were prey or the symbolic representation thereof. It seems impossible to neatly sever the relationship between hunting and memory/memorial. The predatory isn’t value added/observed; it’s the historical core of the practice. Far from “losing its historical specificity” photography ultimately returns to traditonal social practices.

Of course, this is contingent on granting a sort of “shape-shifter” definition of imaging: images are transformed by technology (i.e., wood-block to metal plate engraving, halftone dots to pixels on a screen) but have a relatively consistent core amid outwardly changing manifestations/deployments. Nonetheless, I am interested Fontcuberta’s latest work. I was not able to locate any evidence of the “book” he refers to, but I suspect it’s the catalog to this exhibition. The closest bit to the topic he suggests in my prior quotation here:


REFLECTOGRAMS

Mirrors and cameras is a work which describes the panoptic and scopic character of our society : everything is given to an absolute vision and all of us are guided by the pleasure of viewing.
With the proliferation of digital cameras and their incorporation into mobile phones a new extremely popular genre of images has turned up, as evidenced in blogs and forums on the net : numerous self-portraits taken by youngsters and teenagers in front of the mirror (in which to close the perceptive circle the camera itself appears as a recording device ). Mirrors in intimate spaces like baths, student rooms , hotels, club toilets and other leisure premises , fitting rooms of clothes shops, car rear-view mirrors , elevators…

In these photos the ludic and selfexploratory character prevails over memory. Self photography and the dissemination of these images through social networks is part of a seduction game and of the rituals of communication of new urban subcultures.

I suspect that Fontcuberta is aware of the fact that his name for the series is appropriated from the well established imaging practice of reflectography, an infrared technique used to locate drawings and other hidden images behind paintings (such images are also called reflectograms). The self portrait, again, is hardly new. But Fontcuberta’s emphasis of the “ludic and selfexploratory character” is admirable. Does this negate “memory” though? I suspect not. As people age, they are slow to update their self-image. It has long been a commonplace among participants in social media to use old snapshots (either of themselves, or sometimes of strangers) as icons— particularly baby pictures. Memory is simply redirected, playfully, and not negated. The high seriousness of fixed representation is replaced with a sort of polymorphic shape shifting. This, in the end, is what I find fascinating.

In their quest to uncover the logic/paradigm behind the venatic tradition, Detienne and Vernant focus on metis (cunning intelligence), tracking it through Greek literature like hunters themselves, “in areas which the philosopher usually passes over in silence or mentions only with irony or with hostility so that, by contrast, he can display to its fullest advantage the way of reasoning and understanding required in his own profession” (4). The divisions, promoted by philosophers in couplets: being and becoming, or the intelligible and the sensible, leave little or no room for the functioning of agency or the logic of the hunt.

Metis is characterized precisely by the way it operates by continuously oscillating between two opposite poles. It turns into contraries objects that are not yet defined as stable, circumscribed, mutually exclusive concepts but appear as Powers in a situation of confrontation and which, depending on the outcome of the combat in which they are engaged, find themselves now in one position, as victors, and now in the opposite one, as vanquished [emphasis mine]. These deities, who have the power of binding, have to be constantly on their guard in order not to be bound in their turn.

Thus, when the individual who is endowed with metis, be he god or man, is confronted with a multiple, changing reality whose limitless polymorphic powers render it almost impossible to sieze, he can only dominate it— that is to say enclose it within the limits of a single, unchangeable form within his control— if he proves himself to be more multiple, more polyvalent than his adversary. (5)

The struggle to bind a continually shifting world, to seize it, underwrites the struggle to document and monumentalize the world as evidence of our domination changes its shape but not its intent. In some ways we’re still out on the savannah chasing prey.

And like a cat, we often play with our food before consuming it.

1 I would have used the actual clip from the movie, but Fox blocked display of my upload of the 50 seconds I needed to illustrate my lead quote. Frickin’ copyright police.

2I cited Miller when I was working on my last RSA paper on Willis J. Abbot and his role in the invention/discovery of Panama in the popular consciousness. Shortly afterward, I dug through to find one of her primary sources on the venatic tradition and its influence on ancient thought,
Cunning Intellegence in Greek Culture and Society by Marcel Detienne & Jean-Pierre Vernant. Excellent stuff.

3Amazingly booty is late to the party only entering the lexicon c.1474; booty in its modern, sexualized sense is a very recent development c.1926 “bootylicious” enters the lexicon c.1992.

Aural detectives

Jeff

Early humans first adapted to nature’s acoustic geography: open savannas and mountain ranges. Modern humans adapt, in a weaker way, to the acoustic architecture of urban centers and of enclosed dwellings and gathering places. Both natural and fabricated environments are relatively constant and difficult to change, but by changing their vocalization behavior, those who occupy them adapt, whether as individuals, groups, or species. Every acoustic arena is an application of the principle that social groups select or create an environment, which in turn, determines the resources of their acoustic arena. The vocal behavior of a social group creates an acoustic arena as a geographical region that supports an acoustic community. (27)

. . .

Reverberation gives rise to an interactive experience, with the space entering into an acoustic dialogue with its occupants. It is difficult to enter a reverberant space surreptitiously because the sound of your footsteps produces an acoustic reaction for all to hear. Metaphorically, the reverberated sound of footsteps is the reactive voice of the space; the spatial acoustics of a reverberant space announce the presence of active life by responding with an audible hello, as either a whisper or a shout. (62)

. . .

Although smaller spaces still produce reverberation, as a listening visitor, you experience it as changing the tonal color of the direct sound, not as enveloping you. The acoustic dialogue between you and the space changes, but it remains a dialogue nonetheless. The spatial acoustics of a shower stall may induce you to sing because a small space has numerous discrete resonances. When the pitch and overtones of your voice coincide with these resonances, the intensity of your voice decreases dramatically. Rather than remaining neutral, the space reacts to the presence of some frequencies and not others. Space may thus be said to have tonal preferences. A singer is an aural detective exploring an environment the way a child explores a toy. (63)

Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?, Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter.

As spaces become smaller, their defining characteristics are not set by their reverberation, but by their resonance. Resonance is a complicated matter; we are comfortable in certain spaces and uncomfortable in others. Comfort is certainly a cultural creation; it has to do with a sense of security and familiarity. Resonance is, by definition, reinforcement of a phenomena (sensually described in most cases). These descriptions nearly always make senses metaphorically overlap: e.g. tone color or anthropomorphized sound as quasi-conscious (the “dialog” example above).

McIntosh corporation has handy personifications typifying tone:

lost-07.jpeg

Harmonics are a flexible way of talking about the impure nature of most sounds, but it is much easier to simply dress them up in different clothes and imply a range of personalities (including our smug narrator in the kilt). Reverberation is involved, this time in a much more nuanced fashion because the harmonics of a sound grow/decay/reflect at the different rates.

Blesser and Salter make an interesting move by making space a partner in a dialogue with the beings that occupy it. It makes it easier to visualize even solitary spaces as social. The concept that space has a “preference” for certain types of tones and colors is relatively easy to grant (given the definitions of resonance, harmonics, etc.). But attributing personalities to space and objects within it is curious to say the least. Again, I defer to the little guy in the kilt:

lost-08.jpeg

Does music have a “message”? That doesn’t jibe well with the idea of the singer as an aural detective. Making sounds can simply be a way of exploring space. The McIntosh brochure is very much a product of its time (1952) with its modeling of aural space as an area where sound travels uninhibitedly without resonance. This is counter-intuitive to say the least. I find such notions of fidelity fascinating.

Listening to a 2008 interview with Roy Harper on the Stormcock podcast yesterday, Harper made some interesting assertions relevant to aural spaces. First, he described culture as a piece of architecture that we all live within, an “edifice” to be exact. Then, he went on to describe culture as “the history of interpretation.” This is a useful perspective in my (unrelated) discussion of aural space, because it is obvious that the McIntosh brochure provides a 50s interpretation/valuation of sound which emphasizes the purity of the signal as given. Taking things back a bit historically and culturally, Blesser and Salter seek to interpret/value sound within spaces, experienced as architecture culture: the edifice of culture as it were. Harper suggested, further, that meaning is created between the notes and between the words, of songs—the message isn’t something transmitted to a listener, but created by a listener. 

One interpretation of the “between the lines” concept is mystical and metaphysic (by definition, since metaphysic would be beyond the physically present message). But I would prefer to think that what Harper actually means here is that interpretation is the central and uncontrollable aspect of musical communication. We take songs and make meaning from them based on the psychological spaces we have available to them: messages are not pure and constant, but changeable over time. Messages, both musical and linguistic, find meaning through the resonances and harmonics they create within us.

Blesser and Salter provide a different view of the relationship of beings and sound by close comparison: sound/space/perception does not map the same as light/space/perception. We live in a world bathed in light that allows us to locate ourselves within it. Sound comes and goes based on motion and movement through life. The cues that we can use for location are transient, and interpretation of sounds are necessarily cultural and slippery. Not only that, they are profoundly accidental and unconscious. Reliance on “messages” makes understanding sounds quite mystical, particularly if the animated nature of sound is given preference.

Even though space reacts to all sonic events with its characteristic response, nobody from our modern cultures imagines that an enclosed space is actually alive. Using a similar concept, but without realizing that it still applies today, acoustic archeologists speculate that ancient shamans heard cave acoustics as the voice of the cave’s spirit. In ancient cultures, objects were animate, containing living spirits. Although, in modern terms, spatial acoustics have replaced animating spirits in describing the aural personality of a space, nevertheless, I prefer to believe that, however subliminally, some sense of spirits animating spaces resides within us even now. (ibid., 63-64)

Taken this way, the detective work of listening is analogous to spirit-catching. I like that idea quite a lot. The catch, however, is that such listening is as much a product of accidental transformation rather than conscious formation/transmission of messages. Spirit resides not in a “pure message” transmitted by an animate being, but rather in the dialog between messages (of animate origin or not) and spaces of/for interpretation.

Capital Improvements

Jeff
James Watt statue

Curiously, icon of the Industrial Revolution James Watt seldom claims to have “invented” anything, rather, he claims the title “improver.” Huxley’s assertion that he was an “inventor” of time appears to be primarily a twentieth-century invention. As the Wikipedia article suggests, it seems curious to think of patents as a mode of communicating discoveries rather than essays and articles— but this was Watt’s way. Reading the 1853 “history” of Watt’s “inventions” it seems clear that the legend of the industrial revolution is cast as a myth of originality and invention rather than evolution and improvement is only in a nascent phase. The facts show that his work/research was quite social in nature, and the labeling of him as a “great man” to the exclusion of his cohort occurred relatively slowly in cultural history. Even Huxley mentions him in conjunction with an heir to his improvements, H.F. Stephens.

Watt really seems more like a skilled repairman and tinkerer than an inventor. The events narrated after his repair/improvement of the Newcomen steam engine follow a similar pattern. I was tickled by the tale of Watt and his organ (as told by Professor Robinson):

A mason-lodge in Glasgow wanted an organ. The office-bearers were acquaintances of Mr. Watt. We imagined that Mr. Watt could do anything; and, though we all knew that he did not know one musical note from another, he was asked if he could build this organ. He had repaired one, and it had amused him. He said “Yes;” but he began by building a very small one for his intimate friend Dr. Black, which is now in my possession. In doing this, a thousand things occurred to him which no organ-builder ever dreamed of, — nice indicators of the strength of the blast, regulators of it, &c. &c. He began to the great one. He then began to study the philosophical theory of music. Fortunately for me, no book was at hand but the most refined of all, and the only one that can be said to contain any theory at all,—Smith’s Harmonics. Before Mr. Watt had half finished this organ, he and I were complete masters of that most refined and beautiful theory of the beats of imperfect consonances. He found that by these beats it would be possible for him, totally ignorant of music, to tune his organ according to any system of temperament; and he did so, to the delight and astonishment of our best performers. (cix)

So, rather than just the improver of “fire engines,” Watt was a dabbler in many areas, including “perspective machines,” in Watt’s description:

Perspective-Machine.jpg

The perspective machine was invented about 1765, on the following occasion. My friend Dr. James Lind, brought from India a machine invented by some English gentlemen there, —I believe a Mr. Hurst,—which consisted of a board fixed on three legs perpendicularly, upon which close to the the bottom and near the ends, were fixed two small friction wheels, upon which a horizontal ruler rested, and could be moved endwise horizontally, . . .[elaborate description of original machine] . . . This instrument very readily described perpendicular or horizontal lines, as these accorded best with its natural motions. But in diagonal or curved lines it was difficult to make the index follow them exactly, and the whole motions were heavy and embarrassing to the hand. Moreover, the instrument was heavy and too bulky.

I wished to make a machine more portable and easier in its use; and, at the suggestion of my friend Mr. John Robinson, I turned my thoughts to the double parallel ruler, an instrument then very little known and and at all used that I know of. After some meditation, I contrived the means of applying it to this purpose and making the machine extremely light and portable.

. . .The whole of the double parallelogram and its attached slips, (which were later contrived to be easily separated from the board,) were made capable of being readily folded up, so as to occupy only a small space in the box formed by the board when folded up. The sight piece also folded up, and readily found its place in the box, which also contained the screws for fixing the legs of the instrument; and the box, when shut, could be put into a great coat-pocket. The three legs were made of tinned iron, tapering, and one a little smaller than another, and formed a walking stick about four and a half feet long. (cxi-cxvii)

That the father of the industrial revolution (in elementary school textbooks, anyway) experimented with portable pantographs isn’t all that surprising, but the extent of his involvement in reproductive technologies is. To put Watt’s innovations in perspective, I need to return to Lewis Mumford, who lead me to consider all this in the first place:

This brief view of the course of the reproductive processes in art, from the wood engraving to the colored lithograph, from the photographic painting to the photograph proper, capable of being manifolded cheaply, does not take into account various subsidiary efforts in the same direction in many of the other arts, such as the reproduction of sounds, by means of the phonograph and the talking film; to say nothing of the fortunately abortive attempts of James Watt to find a mechanical means of reproducing, in the semblance of sculpture, the human form, an effort on which the inventor of the steam engine curiously wasted some of the best years of his life.

(Art and Technics, 95)

Just what Watt “invention” was Mumford on about here? I had to find out. Turns out it was the Polyglyptic Parallel-Eidograph. “The best years of his life” turn out to be his later years, because this machine is the last thing he worked on. He turned to it after giving up on inventing the first computer. Watt’s “arithmetical machine” of 1785 was never built, though he speaks of making an attempt at making it. His forward thinking attempt at stone holograms, however, had some success. I don’t know why Mumford dismisses it so cruelly.

But one engrossing occupation, nearly akin to those of his earlier, but what we can hardly call his better days, Mr Watt also found in gradually perfecting a sculpture machine: a highly ingenious invention, the idea of which was suggested to him by an implement he had seen and admired in Paris in 1802, where it was used for “tracing and multiplying the dies of medals.” He foresaw the possiblity, if only some mechancial difficulties could be overcome, of so enlarging its powers as to admit of it making in wood or the softer kinds of stone,—nay, even in marble,—copies of works of sculpture, which should be perfectly true to their originals, although of a smaller size; and the imagination of such an exploit seems to have been particularly delightful to him combining as it did some elements of more than one of his other favorite inventions.

. . .By April, 1809, he had made “considerable progress with the carving machine and it seemed necessary to christen it with a Greek name,” which to Professor Young, then the accomplished Professor of Greek at Glasgow College, he suggested might be Iconopoia, Iconurga, Iconoglypta, Aglamotopiea, Glyptes, Polyglyptes, Glyptic Machine, &c.., names to which he afterwords added those of Bust-lathe, Statue-lathe, Pantograph, Double Pantograph and Double Parallel Lathe. (ccxlii-ccxliii)

The machine was not an “abortive attempt to reproduce the human form” but rather a prototype for what would now be named a CNC lathe, and it was according to the source I found, completed:

The invention having been thus fully completed and having been publicly used by Mr. Watt in making the frequent copies of various specimens of sculpture which he, from time to time, distributed to his friends, operated, in more than one instance, to prevent patents from subsequently being taken out by others for similarly ingenious machines.

. . .The sculpture machine, —the youngest of his mechanical offspring, —the child of his old age and of his right hand,1—had always been a great favorite with its venerable progenitory; and it is not difficult to imagine the sort of charm he must have felt in thus “searching for the beautiful forms in the hearts of marbles and of bringing them out into full daylight.”

1See Gen, chap. xxxv,v.18 “His father called him Benjamin;””i.e.(adds the marginal interpretation) “the son of the right-hand” (cclii)

Watt did attempt to further push this into a machine that could carve forms from life, but never managed it. His biographer suggests that it was not necessarily a huge loss.

Only one problem, now seems to remain for such means to achieve; that, viz. of at once copying from a living model, in materials of lapidary hardness. For hitherto, in the object to be copied an inflexible surface has always been requisite, to enable the guiding point of the machine to traverse it with firmness. But even this appears to be a difficulty which may in time be overcome; possibly by the power being applied solely by the cutting tools, but their direction being regulated by a guiding point delicately moved over a soft surface, or even in air.

It is, perhaps, neither to be expected nor desired that such a process, which, however exact, must still be entirely mechanical, should ever supersede the freedom of inspiration which breathes in the works of a Praxiteles or a Phidias; any more than the angelic grace of a Raphael or a Correggio, or the glorious coloring of a Titian or a Guido, should be eclipsed by the photographic result of mere chemical action of light an a combination fo optical media.

. . .The classical “garrett” and all its mysterious contents,—the Polyglyptic Parallel-Eidograph with all its tools and models included,—have ever since been carefully preserved in the same order as when the hand and “eye of the master” were last withdrawn from them, and he crossed the threshold never to return to his work on earth. (cclv)

James Watt's Workshop

Time and the Machine

Jeff
Time and the Machine by Aldous Huxley (1936)

Time, as we know it, is a very recent invention. The modern time-sense is hardly older than the United States. It is a by-product of industrialism – a sort of psychological analogue of synthetic perfumes and aniline dyes.

Time is our tyrant. We are chronically aware of the moving minute hand, even of the moving second hand. We have to be. There are trains to be caught, clocks to be punched, tasks to be done in specified periods, records to be broken by fractions of a second, machines that set the pace and have to be kept up with. Our consciousness of the smallest units of time is now acute. To us, for example, the moment 8:17 A.M. means something—something very important, if it happens to be the starting time of our daily train. To our ancestors, such an odd eccentric instant was without significance  –  did not even exist. In inventing the locomotive, Watt and Stevenson were part inventors of time.1 [emphasis mine]

Another time-emphasizing entity is the factory and its dependent, the office. Factories exist for the purpose of getting certain quantities of goods made in a certain time. The old artisan worked as it suited him with the result that consumers generally had to wait for the goods they had ordered from him. The factory is a device for making workmen hurry. The machine revolves so often each minute; so many movements have to be made, so many pieces produced each hour. Result: the factory worker (and the same is true, mutatis mutandis, of the office worker) is compelled to know time in its smallest fractions. In the hand-work age there was no such compulsion to be aware of minutes and seconds.

Our awareness of time has reached such a pitch of intensity that we suffer acutely whenever our travels take us into some corner of the world where people are not interested in minutes and seconds. The unpunctuality of the Orient, for example, is appalling to those who come freshly from a land of fixed meal-times and regular train services. For a modern American or Englishman, waiting is a psychological torture. An Indian accepts the blank hours with resignation, even with satisfaction. He has not lost the fine art of doing nothing. Our notion of time as a collection of minutes, each of which must be filled with some business or amusement, is wholly alien to the Oriental, just as it was wholly alien to the Greek. For the man who lives in a pre-industrial world, time moves at a slow and easy pace; he does not care about each minute, for the good reason that he has not been made conscious of the existence of minutes.3

This brings us to a seeming paradox.2 Acutely aware of the smallest constituent particles of time – of time, as measured by clock-work and train arrivals and the revolutions of machines – industrialized man has to a great extent lost the old awareness of time in its larger divisions. The time of which we have knowledge is artificial, machine-made time. Of natural, cosmic time, as it is measured out by sun and moon, we are for the most part almost wholly unconscious. Pre-industrial people know time in its daily, monthly and seasonal rhythms. They are aware of sunrise, noon and sunset, of the full moon and the new; of equinox and solstice; of spring and summer, autumn and winter. All the old religions, including Catholic Christianity, have insisted on this daily and seasonal rhythm. Pre-industrial man was never allowed to forget the majestic movement of cosmic time.

Industrialism and urbanism have changed all this. One can live and work in a town without being aware of the daily march of the sun across the sky; without ever seeing the moon and stars. Broadway and Piccadilly are our Milky Way; out constellations are outlined in neon tubes. Even changes of season affect the townsman very little. He is the inhabitant of an artificial universe that is, to a great extent, walled off from the world of nature. Outside the walls, time is cosmic and moves with the motion of sun and stars. Within, it is an affair of revolving wheels and is measured in seconds and minutes – at its longest, in eight-hour days and six-day weeks. We have a new consciousness; but it has been purchased at the expense of the old consciousness.

1I located this essay through the article on James Watt on Wikipedia, which referenced a magazine article from 1973 which cited the emphasized quote. It turns out that this six paragraph essay was printed in a wide variety of writing text books, including An American Rhetoric by William Whyte Watt. I love this Amazon review of An American Rhetoric:


This book is, unfortunately for the literary world, out of print although it is probably only of interest to ‘true and thoughtful’ followers of English composition and literature. I am interested in the teaching of Mr Watt and also other leaders and instructors who developed the notions of creative and responsible writing that influenced writers of the period from the 1950s through the 1980s, after which, sadly to say, literature seemes to have ‘gone to hell in a handbasket’. I believe it is unfortunate that these fine Professors of detail and research have fallen into disfavor. I purchased the book at a premium price in order to once again enjoy the detailed works and guidance of one of the few who clung to attention and to fact and extactness. [sic]

2  The usage of this essay for evaluation of comprehension has persisted, a evidenced by this notation of the 2002 New York State Regents English Literary Arts Exams:


3. Day Two, Part One: The “Compare and Contrast” Essay: The exam uses the last two paragraphs of a six-paragraph essay by Aldous Huxley, Time and the Machine. The altered passage now begins with the sentence: “This brings us to a seeming paradox.” Students cannot know what “this” refers to, without the preceding paragraphs. Compounding the problem, students are asked to answer a question about what the “paradox” refers to.

3 This paragraph, elaborating on the paradox of the culturally specific creation of time, was perhaps the offending part to the NYS examiners. Huxley’s deployment of cultural difference was not politically correct, but it was hardly racist. These days though, it seems accurate because I suspect no corner of the globe can be characterized as “pre-industrial.” This oversimplified version of culturally relative “time” doesn’t wear well into the twenty-first century. It’s more far more complex than six paragraphs can describe.

St. Louis Arch

Jeff

Modern architecture crystalized at the moment that people realized that the older modes of symbolism no longer spoke to modern man; and that, on the contrary, the new functions brought in by the machine had something special to say to him. Unfortunately, in the act of realizing these new truths, mechanical function has tended to absorb expression, or in more fanatical minds, to do away the need for it. As a result, the architectural imagination has, within the last twenty years, become impoverished: so much so that the recent prize-winning design for a great memorial, produced by one of the most accomplished and able of the younger architects, was simply a giant parabolic arch. If technics itself could not, by itself, tell the story of the pioneer, moving through the gateway of the continent, the story could not, in the architectural terms of our own day, be told.

Lewis Mumford, Art and Technics (114)

Object-oriented

Jeff

My way of working is just a long series of personal discoveries. I can’t give anyone any secrets, something that I promise will work, because, finally, it depends on one’s skill and intuition, and other things. But I can give hints, the benefit of some experience in the things that have happened to me. . . .

Many people don’t realize these truths because they have never been close enough to real wood, beautiful wood in its natural state. They’ve seen veneered surfaces; they’ve lived with wood secondhand, and they are just not aware of the richness that is to be found in individual pieces, logs, and planks. So part of my struggle through the years, both with visitors in my shop and in some of my brief writing, has been to remind people of these things, to tell them not only about the richness of the material, but the connection between the material and how some few people, a very few people, work. In a way I can prepare them to receive these objects, or to meet these objects, and expose themselves to them with a degree of sensitivity which these objects, I hope, deserve. (A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook, 12-13)

I have been building a basement wood shop for about a year now. I have little to show for it in the manner of objects (save shop fixtures and jigs), but the philosophy has enriched me immeasurably. I suppose it began when I moved to the village of Fayetteville, one of the centers of the Stickley universe. The Arts and Crafts Movement coincides with the historical period that fascinates me in photography though prior to locating myself here I had never really thought much about furniture design. I was immediately drawn to the beefiness and practicality of the Stickley designs, but wasn’t really quite sure what to think about Krenov’s spare bird-like pieces.

What becomes instantly apparent when you read much woodworking literature is that it is dominated by machine expediency. The philosophy of people like Gustav Stickley is stripped away in favor of quick-and-dirty methods of replicating the Arts and Crafts look. One has to search pretty hard to find Stickley’s thoughts on craft and life, but it’s findable (though a subject for another day).

Reading Krenov has been a revelation. His thoughts on originality, composition, and materials are first rate concepts for consideration for anyone considering matters of craft. In making sense of things, I cannot help but compare Krenov’s concepts with the craft I dedicated such a huge swath of my life to: photography.

This might seem a bit forced, given that wood is an organic material and photography is currently dominated by talk of megapixels and evanescent virtual bits, but I think that the real gist of photography is just as organic due to the shaping of its human subject. The materials that all photographers work with are primarily time, space, and light.1 The education of a photographer should always begin with a sensitivity and embrace of those three essential elements.

Fall Drive

I am reminded of an incident shooting outside CaTony’s diner last week.

A woman (perhaps “Cathy” of CaTony’s) came out and interrogated me: “What are you taking pictures of?”

“The light, mostly. Isn’t it beautiful?” I answered. The blank look on her face just broadcast suspicion and a complete failure to grasp what I was saying at all. Most people aren’t all that sensitive to light, I guess. If I had answered that I thought her ice-cream shaped lights were distinctive and novel, I might have gotten a more collegial response; it was as if I was speaking a foreign language to her.

Photography is most easily understandable when it addresses the novel, the unusual, the out-of-the-ordinary (celebrity, unusual natural phenomena, etc.). The actual materials of it are subsumed in searching for matters of more impressive visuality. Krenov actually centers this emphasis on visual novelty geographically as the passage quoted above continues:

This is truly an unexplored chapter in the United States. Expression in wood, if I may say so, is a bit heavy handed there; oversimplified. So often the emphasis is on form— as in sculpture. It is primarily a visual experience, with the wood not always having its say, not always as important as it should be—sometimes not important at all. Some artists in wood order their material by telephone, and admit it is not of that great importance. This is not a criticism; it is merely stating that there are different relationships to the material. (13)

Krenov expands his thoughts on visuality and originality in his second book, but this early passage really seems to dig at the bulkiness of most of the Arts and Crafts furniture as exemplified by Stickley and his imitators. Sensitivity to objects, and sensitivity to the tools that create them is central to Krenov. He has little love for the perfection of machines (a quality that Stickley embraces to a much greater degree than his English/European counterparts in the Arts and Crafts Movement). But it would be facile to take this as simply a matter of preferring one sort of form over another. The relationship of material in form (as objects) is what Krenov emphasizes:

So we talk about tools, we talk about objects, and I hope that gradually I can get across this relationship, this love affair or whatever you will. How it comes to be that woods whisper to you about tools and methods and shapes—shapes within shapes, really, because when you become aware of certain ways of using wood, then you realize something about a straight line. To me there is no real life in a perfectly straight line or a perfect circle. But in wood you can make a rectangular object, give it tension and countertension and balance without complete symmetry, and you can give it rhythm by choosing the wood. You may have just a rectangular frame, but you can make it almost soft, almost a sensation of oval for the eye, if you choose the wood in the right way. And you can do the opposite; make it unpleasant by making the wood bow slightly upward and inward so that the corners appear extremely sharp to the eye; this will be disturbing, whereas the other is harmonious. But it is not dead, or lax, because wood is a living material when used in this way. You are always experimenting. You are playing with textures, tensions, the things that happen, and, if you are sensitive, if you are lucky enough, then you exceed your expectations. (14)

I will never forget my first impressions of the work of my mentor Harry Wilson— it seemed as if space itself curved in his photographs, as if you could sense the bulge of the earth. But it was not a lens distortion, or an optical illusion caused by strong and predictable lines. It was a subtle thing, a palpable feeling about space that was not a formal thing, but rather a subjective quality. This quality was real to me, though no one I ever tried to describe it to sensed it in quite the same way (even Harry himself). I just could tell that it was a Harry Wilson photograph because of the space and tensions within that space. It was personal, but at the same time it seemed to be more than that. It was not that Harry “invented” this space, but rather that he identified arrangements of objects in the world that were evocative of that particular space. The space was apparent even in his multiple exposure work, so it seemed to me a matter of selection rather than invention.

I’ve never believed that you have to be all that inventive. Form, for me, is not the primary thing, form is only the beginning. It is the combination of feelings and a function; shapes and things that come into one connection with the discoveries made as one goes into the wood that pull it together and give meaning to form. (Krenov, 14)

The materials of photography are, for me, the world itself which greets us with time and space and light. Photography, for me at least, is about the love affair that I have with the world. I tend to look at photographs as utilitarian objects that give me the chance to examine the world more closely, to know certain aspects that would be invisible without this recording technology.

The difficult thing, then, is dealing with the utter loss of photographs as objects in the contemporary schema of the world. I miss holding them, looking at them, and furnishing my space with them. I have yet to find the skill I need in ink jet printing (or furniture making for that matter) so I feel myself at an impasse. But one thing is certain: I want to focus my effort at creating, rather thans simply consuming, in the space and time that avails itself to me.


1These distinctions have been with me since I first confronted the problem of trying to teach photography at the University of Minnesota. It was a short class, but useful I think both to me and my students. It surprises me that I have never written anything about that (that I remember or can find).


Contriving the exclusion

Jeff
Mumford.jpg
Lewis Mumford

The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas—for my body does not have the same ideas I do. (17)


Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

When I read Vicki Goldberg’s excerpt of Lewis Mumford’s thoughts on the economy of images emphasizing the curmudgeonly proclamation that the proliferation of images had placed us all in hades, my gut feeling was that his view must be more complex than that. Three quarters of the way through his lecture series published in Art and Techics there is indeed polemic. But he sneaks up on it, making his way through photography on the way as a democratic process:

Now, by perfecting a mechanical method, the “taking of pictures” by a mere registration of the sensations was democratized. Anyone could use a camera. Anyone could develop a picture. Indeed, as early as the 1890s the Eastman Company went a step further in the direction of automatism and mass production, by saying to the amateur photographer—this was their earliest advertising slogan—you press the button we do the rest. What had been in the seventeenth century a slow handicraft process, requiring well trained eyes and extremely skilled hands, with all the rewards that accompany such highly organized bodily activities, now became an all-but-automatic gesture. Not an entirely automatic gesture, I hasten to add, lest any photographers in this audience squirm in agonized silence or break forth into a loud shout of protest. For after all it turns out that even in the making of the most mechanically contrived image, something more than machines and chemicals is involved. The eye, which means taste. The interest in the subject and an insight into the moment when it—it or he or she—is ready. An understanding of just what esthetic values can be further brought out in the manipulation of the instrument and materials. (92)

Mumford equivocates photography with “registration of the sensations,” masking his overwhelming bias toward photography as monosensual: visual to the exclusion of all other sense records. I suspect this is because it allows him to paint photography as gestural, contingent on a button press. Lately I have been thinking that the athletic edge to photography (street photography, as a prime example) invites examination of the invocation of multiple sense modalities. Taste, in its broadest sense, can be stretched to the appreciation of the spatial qualities of representation (beyond trompe l’oeil)— and thus be forced to confront the problems of bodies in space and their relations. The impact of scale, for example, as explored by many contemporary photographers can create special types of comfort, discomfort, and sensual response that are not, strictly speaking, visual. Esthetic values involve more than just the eyes.

The effort to understand the visual often tries to leapfrog over the body to get to the eye stalk. Nonetheless, it is admirable that Mumford does recognize the human qualities of photographs, and has a sense of photography’s history/pleasures

All these human contributions are essential. As in science, no matter how faithfully one excludes the subjective, it is still the subject that contrives the exclusion [emphasis mine]. All this must be freely granted. But this is only to say that in photography another machine art like printing was born; and that the standards of esthetic success in this art are not dissimilar than those in printing. If we consider those standards for a moment we shall have a clue to one of the most essential problems connected with automatism and reproduction.

As with printing, photography did not altogether do away with the possibilities of human choice; but to justify their productions as art there was some tendency on the part of early photographers, once they had overcome the technical difficulties of the process, to attempt to ape, by means of the camera, the special forms and symbols that had been handed down traditionally by painting. Accordingly, in the nineties, American photographs became soft and misty and impressionistic, just when impressionism was attempting to dissolve form into atmosphere and light. But the real triumphs of photography depended on the photographer’s respect for his medium, his interest in the object before him, and his ability to single out of the thousands of images that pass before the eye, affected by the time of day, the quality of light, movement, the sensitivity of his plates or film, the contours of his lens, precisely that moment when these factors were in conjunction with his own purpose. At that final moment of choice—which sometimes occurred when a picture was taken, sometimes only after taking and developing a hundred indifferent prints— the human person again became operative; and at that moment, but only at that moment, the machine product becomes a veritable work of art, because it reflects the human spirit. (92-93)

What this passage makes clear is that Mumford is concerned with the improper use of symbols and the clear role of human choice in art as opposed to technics, his word for technology deployed without the human element. That’s the primary reason for his coinage of techics— it is neither techné nor technology, though it is derived from them— it is the deployment of mindless or inhuman means of reproduction. It’s a shame that Goldberg neatly skips this part (quite photographer friendly) in her anthology.

It is this human element that interests me most in all this; to center photography on one sense (vision) tends to render it mechanistic. The sensual/bodily side of it is difficult to address without resort to subjectivity or spirituality. I think there are objectively verifiable, physical elements involved in perception that are ignored in discussions of reproductive technologies due to a tendency to compartmentalize the sense modalities. That’s why I can’t seem to stop jumping between audio/music reproduction, photographic and sculptural reproduction, textual production and reproduction, etc. It seems like it should all fit together as furniture for living.