Humanyms

Priming Time: Photo Logic

When I’m taking pictures of people I’m increasingly conscious of my bias, of what leaks in as sub-text because of my bias or around it. When a photo is in isolation from the event, what makes the cut?

Joe Rosenblatt of Lunatic Muse signs a book for Alexander, in this case Brides of the Stream from 1983.

I like the intensity of postures, it being self-explanatory of what is going on.

I try to portray people at their most visibly engaged. Partly because people have enough negative mental images in their heads of themselves without making it worse with an unflattering shot of a permanent unhappy looking shot. Partly because it’s challenging because engaged generally is with motion.

At that engagement point a lot of people move their heads. My camera doesn’t have the speed for freezing that. I don’t like any shot where the face is blurred. I am quite content to get arm and hand blur. That is interesting and makes a blend of animation and still, but a face blur alone feels like a kind of violence to identity. If the whole person is blurred, then it is different. It’s a capture of gesture not portrait.

If there’s a motion blur with food, fine. It brings life back to an inanimate shot.

Other things I’m conscious of when I take photographs: The notion that one keys into stereotypes, that one can cue someone to archetypes, that one can raise consciousness about stereotyped narratives and promotes notions. How is the various category of person portrayed?

I am conscious that if there are mostly males in a picture, or one male and one female that she should not be the only one smiling. All or none.

On a formal panel, if a she is photographed talking, then is she portrayed as dominating? But if a he is talking and she is listening, then is she, arguable, portrayed as passive? It’s a no-win. If people are posing or in idle conversation, the effect isn’t there.

Joe Rosenblatt and Andrée Christensen in the Alliance Francaise Gallery where her collage art is on exhibit in November. She translated to French his book Parrot Fever into Le perroquet fâcheux / Parrot fever in 2002 by email correspondance, but this is at their first face-to-face meeting.

Few pictures of people with their mouth open in mid-word work neither does mid-laugh; it tends to look mad.

There’s an ideology in photos of what is left out. I have an uncle who always avoids pose and tries to catch those mid-facial expression and awkward gestures because he feels that’s the majority of life and should be documented. It doesn’t need to be made selectively pretty, nor selectively gritty. His view is that Random is Accuracy. I can’t concede it as useful. People need dignity like they need water, food, and air or things inside start to shut down.

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In the course of conversation, body language tends to erupt in conflict with facial expressions or language. I tend to not flag as keepers shots where people’s body language is leg-crossed standing or arms crossed over chest defensiveness.

Part of my idiolect of pictures, part of my camera propaganda is being conscious of what is in frame. I crop out beer or alcohol ads as much as possible. Partly because labels tend to be brightly colored and color draws the focus of the frame. Partly I skew what actually was present because the ubiquitousness of beer makes me feel like I’m shooting brewery ads.

Most of communication is neutral-faced listening. A lot of life is waiting for Godot, trying to hobble together a narrative. Listening-face tends to happen when the whole group is listening. It’s audio-channel time so a photo isn’t fitting. That in freeze-frame looks rather grim. I aim for flattering to represent the world as a positive place, selectively let the 90% of less fun on sand wash away, and keep the communicative 10% for carving into granite, (so far as digital capture can be that).

Sometimes I want some representation of an event going on but got nothing particularly good. Neutral, I’m told by a friend, is one kind of offensiveness. Nonetheless, I go with the best I have at times. I sometimes think a picture is too bland but then on flickr even my flat shot of oatmeal got added as a favorite. There’s no accounting for tastes.

A nature walk

Almost every time I see a scene like this, I hear my dad’s voice remarking how an animal would need to be in it for it to be complete, then my cousin’s voice adding that it would be even more complete if he had a 22.

But then I have to shoot as I see fit, what my narrative is. I have to project my own sense of what dignity looks like.

Somewhere I came across Tony Fouhse who opened up the crackerjack box of taking portraits of crack addicts in town. It seems some feel this is controversial and taking advantage, yet it is documenting lives and the subjects are part of the process. We are submerged in photoshopped flattering moments of thin white strangers selling us things. What about the people really around?Like the neighbours who will be trying to stay in our stairwell or entryway to warm up, or have sex or use their glues, as the weather gets cold.

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Sometimes I’m aware of not blogging of something because of the rule of no photo, no one will skim. Part of that may be due to the medium. In print I could make rest stops of white space. In html, the only rest is an image. When this is the case I’m letting myself be driven by format rather than content.

I tend not to show my hand on why I’m selecting a topic. I would like to be an information conduit, letting viewer decide what is useful and to not clutter the information stream with my take, to the degree possible. I tend to under-elaborate across the board in an attempt to not be belligerent in belief because strong non-equivocal strongly-worded opinions tend to make me disengage rather than engage. They tend to shut down dialogue than open up, for me. The opposite is true of others.

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Any visual people scene is quite complex and I try to filter out the complexity. I did one writers festival event by shooting only the foot positions on the panel. That was the proxemics linguist in me. It was fascinating how the leg positions were all having their own conversational track. Unfortunately I didn’t have the script to place back along time markers to reconstruct who felt what when. I try to strip off the interactional intimacy that isn’t my business from any public photos. There are often complex dynamics at play in body gestures.

[re: Michael D. Gumer on
fear-grin being misinterpreted] First, the macaques were said to have bared their teeth in a sign of aggression. But this display is known as the ‘fear grin’. Macaques don’t display such a grin when they are about to attack; they display it when they are surrendering. The grin is similar to the fake smiles that humans show sometimes, assuring their superiors they know their place.

I tend to aim for smiles of shared humor of someone’s spark of wit rather than social smiles.

Even thought it is natural for people to laugh or peak-smile seconds out of time of one another. It’s normal that there’s a cascade of response and some people shift faster or slower thru reactions. One shot is to represent the entire and person out of step represents the scene as if that person was always out of step. I’d rather not misconstrue that. It could isolate a person as looking humourless.

What to do with shots where people look profoundly ill-at-ease? Even if it true, it’s not useful. What is fair to capture? Whatever I’d avert my eyes from tactfully to not exacerbate someone’s sense of threat or discomfort I would tend not to photograph. I try not to intrude with photos so that people would feel in a fishbowl, compromised whenever they are outside their own door. People are sensitive even of crowd shots when they are small of some tilt of head. It gives the public hard data, more than memory of who sits near who. It gives fodder for making life more complex or contentious. There’s a fine line. I don’t like to document who was where when or it is a disincentive for people to go to events feeling like they are going to be tracked. I want to honour that sense of being in privacy in public.

At artist-run galley 101 where AB series hosted Joe Rosenblatt Nov 13. Art in the background is by Roger Crait.

Photography can be a kind of gossip. Not being there, if the photograph isn’t done tightly enough, it is a kind of telephone game of misconstructing from clues. Is something else being said? I guess that’s why I like crowd shots that don’t reveal too much. If the point is to say, good-sized crowd, it doesn’t need to also say, look at person X and what they were wearing or doing. Or information gap of who was or wasn’t there. People read between lines no matter how tightly spaced they are or how many there are, and mis differently interpret. But to slice away to a tight zoom leaves one with soulless clip art that has little to hold attention for long. It’s a hard balance, oversimplified, or overly complex.

Poetry Link: At any rate, for more account of the Rosenblatt readings, see here.

Quote: “The funny thing is no matter what I say that the truth actually is, either for the book or the film, the thing that drives me to tell the story is the fact that I don’t have an answer to that. If i did there would be no story this story only works because of this absence.” – Emmanuel Carrère, director, The Moustache