Photography, Channels, Vision, Choice

As I have been processing the hundreds of street and brick images, I have been thinking much about the visual choices and assumptions in vision, and especially in photography. Through photography having been a major part of our culture for over a century, we have become used to seeing photographic imagery and its shorthands. We become used to the processing, as if the photographic results are true, as true as reality, and in some cases more true. Photography foreshortens, brings into relief or flattens out what we see. It makes a more precise image than our eyes perceive unaided, and that becomes a truer version of reality than looking with our eyes.

Photographs frame, in all the senses of cutting out a vista thus changing its parameters and context, and also frames in a more psychological sense by freezing or capturing a moment, a view, a viewpoint. The old family photograph becomes our memory.

Technology has clearly come to the stage where images are instantly processed and available on our camera phones. We can snap and then check the image against the subject, as if to check the veracity of what we apprehend.

My own grandfather was a chemist and one of those early pioneers of photographic processing; one of many enthusiasts who splashed about with chemicals and equipment. I too have spent many hours in a dark room, although not for some time - now I think of my digital and computing equipment as a faster sort of darkroom, but I still approach photography in a more analogue way of thinking. I'm glad I learned how to process photographs the long way, as the insight, and that knowledge which would have been more clear to earlier and more hands-on photographers, is much more apparent, even in a virtual darkroom.

Taking photographs with a manual camera and processing images from a negative proves over and over that there is not one definitive or true version of a photograph. There is not one correct exposure, depth of field, angle, camera speed, size of aperture, amount of light and flash, and so on, that renders a true image. Automatic processing in digital disposable cameras has become so fabulous and efficient that we take it as read they come up with the best and truest version of the image.

The truth is that  all photography is just as false and as true as unaided vision, that is, equally false and true. Our belief in the truth of our visual perceptions is bolstered by photography - it gives us unending and physical proof, and we believe in that one slice of the spectrum.

Vision is a spectrum, a layered series of interpretations, some shared, some individual. Variations in individual perceptions range from physical differences to emotional states, personality types, aesthetic choice and other sensibilities. And yet the photograph generally presents a standard view.

There are many exceptions, many photographers and artists who explore the nature of photography itself, as opposed to those who explore the nature of imagery and content, by manipulating what is photographed. And then there are cameras themselves, which also show the exception over and over - leaks of light, strange inadvertent effects which reveal a wider visual spectrum. Photoshop, airbrushing and setups are all somewhat outside the realm of this train of thought. I am considering the photograph itself as a layer of reality.

If this was a piece of academic writing I would cite Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag and James Elkins for their insights in this field. I would mention certain artists and photographers whose images are forming in my mind and memory as the most appropriate examples, and I will come back to that another time.

Back to the bricks and the street compositions, the images I have been processing. The camera, any camera, has its choice set amongst its parameters in what it produces - my material. Treating that production as raw material, as a negative to process, leads me to making choices. It used to be with film (it still is) that certain brands favoured certain colour casts. Perhaps now certain brands of digital camera favour certain colour saturation levels, and so on. Probably. Again, there is no standard, no universal setting, there is only a range which is the common denominator. So I either make some choices or accept the default choice. In my way of thinking, the default choice is for snaps, for memories, family, times where aesthetic choice is the lesser concern over commemorating an event or treasuring a memory. The default choice is not for art.

Art is not default imagery. It is deliberate, not accidental, even if it incorporates the accidental - that is a planned spontaneity.

I find the brick and the street images beautiful and fascinating. They work for me, in how they isolate the graphic elements, recontextualise them, reframe them, transform them. I know from our group crit that they are not without meaning to others also - partly I know that is by sheer cataloguing - you present any collection and the viewer makes connections and begins to see what the collector sees. But for art, I believe there must be more.

In art, imagery, photography, the image must look more like itself than with the unaided eye. There must be certain elements emphasised, even if the emphasis is stripping out elements. As if I was completely in control of the processing from beginning to end, I choose the levels, the depths of colour, the editing and framing. In digital terms the idea is channels of colour or lighting, and so there are channels of blues or greens or reds, which can be increased or lessened. Remember, these choices are already made by default within automatic processing, as if we have a favourite brand of film which emphasises the reds or favours high contrast.

My imagery is prosaic and mundane. It is ordinary. It could hardly be more everyday. It may well make a viewer look twice, just because I present it en masse and as a reframing of a familiar series of sights, and yet how can I truly reframe, identify, isolate and emphasise the exact elements which have meaning for me. How can I remove all the unnecessary elements. If I go too far, and make the images look very different, or alter them with effects, I lose the significant layers, and they become mere images again, without depth or meaning - designs which look like something but do not carry the weight of deliberation.

I am looking for the version of the images which both look familiar and unfamiliar, a way of rendering them which does not deny what they are and emphasises their innate abstract qualities which I framed by taking the photographs, choosing the subjects and collecting them together. I am choosing the channels and layers to make them look more like - themselves, my idea of them, what I hope to find in them, what I believe they can convey, and so on.

I must find my version of them, the layers or channels which alter them enough not to change them, which makes oblique that which remains in plain sight. I do like tinkering about at these paradoxical edges.

31st July 2013