Pictures of Circles

rstk_0006-1_cln, originally uploaded by escott sukotto shiinga.

I suppose most people like pictures of things - people mostly, maybe flowers or dogs; something they can identify or identify with. People like bold images too; pictures that leap out at them and arrest their eyes. I guess there's a logocentrism in us that wants a clarity of idea and of purpose; facts that somehow maintain a neat lock-step with their representations. From "what a horrible war" and "look at the heights to which mankind can achieve" to "what a lovely flower" and "what a cute kitten", there is a narrative and the picture is firstly an illustration of that - or at least is expected to be. Expected to be an illustration in lock-step with its pictorial depiction, there isn't even an allowance for a paper thin gap between what's contained in the image and what the image contains.

I remember being in school and having a guest artist/lecturer who was doing a print series called "The container, contained, remains", and while I can't remember his name or if the print series was ultimately successful to him, the title has stuck with me.

I guess I like pictures of stillness and ambiguity sometimes - pictures of circles and pictures where the sense of wonder is conveyed on the face of the viewer rather than in a face depicted in the image.

Photos of photo ops

R0020329, originally uploaded by escott sukotto shiinga.

I think it's fascinating to take pictures of people getting their picture taken, and especially the environment around it. Often it's a festive occasion with people dressed up or trying to capture a big moment. Here I was taking some pictures on a cruise I went on for a family reunion. I especially liked all of the studio lighting that was set up to take the portraits for which people were posing.

A boy and his camera

Sometimes there just seems to be a connection between a photographer and a particular camera; I'm currently in a love affair with my old 1930's Rodenstock 6x4.5 folder. It sports a 75mm f2.9 triar lens, some weird focus distances and even weirder fstops and shutter speeds. Are any of them accurate? who knows? and really - who cares? It continues to give me pictures that I am fascinated by.

I'm not sure if it's the size of the negatives, the lens, the film, ... I do know that it has nothing to do with focusing, autoexposure or even accurate framing - It has none of that. I do a lot of guess work, and move the release lever with an awkward motion of my finger while trying not to get my hand in the way of the lens.

Like a lot of half-frame cameras, this one defaults to a portrait aspect ratio. I like that because it gets me out of the cinematic image space or the landscape default of most cameras. I wish digital cameras, like my Ricoh gx200, would offer a half-frame alternative in addition to square. I suppose it's just as easy to zoom in a bit and turn the camera sideways, but there's just something different about these.

Color

This doesn't exactly have a picture to go with it. It's more of a rambling. I have noticed that there have been very few color photographs that use color in the same way that black and white photographs have. This is true in film and video as well as photography.

I think this started as a topic of mine when I saw the movie "Under the Volcano" by John Huston. I was impressed by that film, not only for Albert Finney's fantastic portrayal of the alcoholic expat, but also how color was used to tell the story rather than to just show it. I think that in large part, that is the distinction. The difference between telling a story and showing a story. The abstraction of black and white automatically casts the scene as being in a reductivist locale of narrative. It requires an immediate, and obvious mediation step to decode the form into meaning. Color seems to require less mediation and therefor appears more as an innocent signifier, closer to the signified.

Anyway - maybe there's something unique to our relationship with black and white images, but I'm very interested in exploring color images to see if there's some aspect of them that can function to the same ends as black and white. What is the problem set?

Inside Outside

I'm always captivated by examples of separation - windows, walls, linear elements that break the picture plane - barriers, real, formal or metaphoric. I was captivated by reading, what over the past 15 years has amounted to 20% of, Derrida's _The_Truth_in_Painting_, where he writes at length about the parergonal, the frame, the boundary between the picture and the not-picture, and how the primary question about painting happens within this edge.

This picture interests me because of my co-conspirator, thus your co-conspirator, in a seat up ahead. He's an image of us - lurking in the shadows under the yellow light, hiding behind the window. Yet the picture plane casts him as the lurker; our observation point let's us watch and conspire to watch.

This picture reminds me of a design exercise involving order and chaos that my graduate adviser taught to art students at Northwestern. It involves containing as much disorder as you can create within a very restrictive grid. There's a tension that exists in that balance both visually and creatively. Photography is interesting in this regard, because it is so much about that one moment of solidifying shapes and signs and light into a rectangle. But it's also about manipulating that rectangle - sometimes tortuously, changing crops and tones and color balance. I'm just glad that part is in a computer for me now - though I do miss how printed images emerge from the paper like magic.

Exploratorium

The Exploratorium is one of my favorite places to photograph. The mix of technology and old architecture, kids and old folks -- where it seems everything old, really is, new again. I like to take the kids there and watch them rediscover new things in the exhibits. Seeing that magic of learning through their eyes is a wonderful and exciting thing.

The building itself is such an incongruous place. Turn of the (20th) century girder, shell construction - like an old airplane hanger, salvaged statues, all in huge bays big enough to house two floors of exhibits all in the open. And the light is a fantastic mix of filtered natural light and exhibition lighting.