Revisionist Theory

Every aspect of photography is interpretive. We hold photography to a different standard than any other creative media in that we ascribe it a certain amount of documentary fidelity. And it can serve this purpose. But with photography we tend to get increasingly upset as the finished product drifts further away from the “truth” of what the photographer saw. In it’s ability to be both representational and creative, photography is more similar to writing than any other medium. Writing can be rigorously descriptive, as in legal writing or traditional objective journalism; or it can explore the limits of meaning, as in poetry.

In my photography I strive for a balance. I want the viewer to believe they are seeing something truthful, yet, like the poet, I want the viewer to be left on the ledge of interpretation. I want her imagination to be tickled, tempted to engage in some creative interpretation of the very real place and time that I have photographed. Every step of my process, from composition to production in my digital darkroom, is informed by this goal: to engage the viewers creative potential. This process typically incorporates several dozen steps, and varies from image to image. To make an image like “Along the Ridge” (at left) comprised of 6 different individual photographs, some of them toned for effect and then blended together for dynamic range and toned and refined again, I may go through a process of 50 or 60 steps. Each of these steps contributes to the overall feel and success of the image.

Occasionally my schedule permits me time to go back and review work I’ve done in the past. Because so much of my process is done in the digital darkroom, it is eternally possible to re-work the original images.

My specific process has its roots in the chemical darkroom I learned photography in at Humboldt State University. Here, in my digital darkroom, the process is much faster and allows me a greater variety of control (though there will always be potentials in the chemical darkroom that are not possible in the digital work environment). This week I reworked these two images shot in Northern California in the fall of 2011. I had rushed through the first production process because my schedule was hectic. After reviewing the work several months later, there were aspects of each image that I felt created technical barriers to the instigation of the kind of effect I want the images to impart. My mentor in college, Don Anton, once told me that technique can betray you if it is recognizable in the image.

To that end, in the image on the left, “Along the Road”, I wanted to smooth out the gradients between different tonal areas in the image, and  to make the stitching part of the panoramic process smoother; thus reducing the harsh angle the road takes as it moves from the first set of images to the second. In the image on the right, “Painted Skyways”, I wanted to address the gradients again, and change to tonal range of the sky and middle ground, to create an image that is more believable. In both cases I have attempted to push the images, through these revisions, closer to “reality”. For me, “reality” is a platform from which the viewer can make the leap into the imagination. The more stable that platform, the more comfortable the leap.

Familiarity within the Foreign

Stepping into the Saipan air is walking into a mild sauna. The air isn’t so much air as it is warm water with an extreme distance between molecules. My body reacted to non-evaportaive properties by producing still more sweat; my physiology would not figure out the futility of that strategy during my 2 week stay in the most populated island of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.

After the air, you begin to notice the familiar couched in the foreign. TSA is typically unsmiling, and the Department of Homeland Security runs the immigration and customs booths, but cars are parked… motionless, in front of the terminal, with impossible numbers of family pouring out of small Japanese SUV’s, smoking cheap cigarettes, and chewing betel nut while waiting for passengers. The tightly knit family unit in Saipan is comfortingly permeable… waiting for my partner to get the rental car, an uncle asked me, unsolicited, if I needed to use his cell phone. A fisherman we were photographing offered us fish, another took us home for akule (atulai in Saipan) poke; Amazing with tuba and bud light. Yet another Chamorro elder introduced me to the ruins of an ancient piece of architecture. The warmth you hear of when islander culture is discussed fails to meet the reality of the welcome you feel on their land.

The infrastructure is essentially American. You drive on the right side of the road in the rental car you reserve with your visa/master card. You can get Coke, Gatorade, and Marlboro’s at the Shell or Mobile station with American dollars. Everyone speaks English, some with thicker accents than others, but there’s plenty of Japanese, Korean, Tagalog, and Russian to boot, as the local businesses cater to evolving tourism trends. You can eat almost any kind of food from Korean BBQ to Sushi, to local Kelaguen or Tinala’ Katne.

It would be easy to remain in the enclave of tourism facilities on Saipan, but you’d miss out. It’s incredibly rewarding to move around and interact with the people who live on Saipan. There is a rare kind of cultural hospitality engrained in these people that is a striking contrast to the contrived subservience of the hospitality sector. They enjoy meeting you; they can talk story for hours, unbelievably eager to share their stories and their experiences, especially those that are rediscovering (and sometimes reinventing) the traditional cultures of the people who inhabited Saipan before empires convened on the Marianas Islands.

It’s easy to get to Saipan, and I’m not talking about travel, though that is accommodated sufficiently thanks to the large number of tourists who frequent the island. It’s easy to get to the heart of Saipan’s beauty, what makes her unique. But you have to muster the effort to reach beyond the facade built to extract an economy out of visitors. I was fortunate beyond my ability to express gratitude that I was there for a purpose and had a reason to meet the people who live, work, and love Saipan. The island comes alive in the passion those people have for the islands, a passion that is greater than the turquoise water of the protected lagoons, more than the enthralling limestone caves and sinkholes and the fields of coral that stretch out over underwater hills beyond the limits of vision. Their passion rises above the superficial in metaphorical proportion to the monumental scale of the islands themselves rising out of the deepest ocean trench on earth. In their passion, the character of the island shines.

Fear-Mongering in the Mass Media

“2nd body identified in Ohio Craigslist ad scheme”
“Thanksgiving Plane Crash: New Details“
“Florida A&M band suspended after suspected hazing death”
These are three of the top fourteen headlines in the US section of Google News today, November 26, 2011. They indicate a pervasive use of negative stimulus to motivate readership… and something greater. Whether or not the corporate-owned mass media machine intends any affects other than increased readership, fear-mongering in the production of news has altered the way citizens participate in society.

Much is made of the use of fear-mongering in the mass media. Fear-mongering dominates the liberal understanding of corporate mass media. Michael Moore reiterated it in a recent forum moderated by The Nation magazine regarding the state and future of the Occupy movement.

As increasing technology moves us from the old mode of corporate dominated, vertically integrated information dissemination Goliaths and into the new mode of decentralized, individually driven social media in which the individual has greater potential for interaction in the media exchange than at any other point of history, a critical understanding of fear-mongering will become vitally important in the creating new media paradigms that require self-determination in the common person.

Mass media fear-mongering creates in the information consumer a teetering, fragile security coupled with a paralyzed willpower. When the viewer is presented with horrors happening to others, it creates a simultaneous sense of relief that she is currently safe, and an uncertainty of his ability to produce positive change through direct action. The unseen forces that create the dreadful situations described in the mass media are understood to be beyond understanding; the reader is left to attribute the causality to nebulous concepts such as evil, insanity, hatred, envy, or sociopathic behavior, among infinite others. In creating this ironic confusion in which interpretation defies understanding and relies on a perverse form of faith (in the sense that the horror’s source is unknowable, but certainly existent), the fear-mongers create a populace that wishes to avoid victimization but cannot understand the mechanism that leads to victimization.

The mass media use fear mongering as a cattleprod to attract readership, but there is a perhaps unintended side-effect that is not a typical fear based reactions; a populace that releases its self-determination to any authority that promises security, often in exchange for conformity. Fear is an impulse that initiates action in an individual. The fight or flight impulse is such a reaction; even paralysis can be a defensive mechanism incurred when an imminent threat is present. But these reactions are only effective in situations where the perceived threat is tangible and in close proximity. By contrast, fear-mongering in mass media presents us with threats that are both distant and unknowable. Absent the ability to directly engage the source of the fear, the information consumer is induced to release the obligation of response to an any authority presumed capable of handling the threat. The priest will pray for your well-being; the police will keep the streets safe form criminals, the Commander-In-Chief will wield the military to protect you from terrorists, etc.. In each scenario, the individual’s ability to determine her own fate is released to the authority of others.

The irony is that the individual’s response to the fear-mongering is not a fear response. It is not a fight or flight, nor a play dead until the threat passes response. Rather, it is a surrender of free will. It is an acquiescence to a set of conditions implied by a cultural authority in exchange for security. Further, the security is illusory. No authority can stop death or injury. It is the nature of the living to incur injury and death. The only control the living individual has is over how he chooses to live. And the acquiescence to those who would promise the undeliverable is a cowardice; a lame impotence to stand up, live by personal choice, and take responsibility for ourselves.

While the reality of that may sting like shame, the impotnet acquiescence is not where the fear-surrender equation does the most damage. The real damage comes with the understanding that when we deprive our ability to engage our personal mistakes we deprive our ability for personal growth; and we remain, emotionally and intellectually, in a juvenile state, unable to develop our potential.

In the new media paradigm, as disseminated information sources erode the prevalence of fear mongering media conglomerates, information consumers will be faced with a much greater challenge: to own our own behaviors and choices. To embrace our faults and create our own potential; to reclaim our self-determination and create our own standards of excellence. In the new media paradigm, our individual truth will resound with millions of co-valid truths, and the harmony of this resonance will inform the next phase of human culture.

The Generative Moment

I attended the latest free [off]hrs event at 39 Hotel on Thursday night. [off]hrs is an awesome concept… the idea is to bring together local creatives into a community discussion. To me this is critically important for Honolulu, a place struggling to forge its cultural identity amid a sea of preconceptions. [off]hrs sets up a speaker with a topic and opens the floor to discussion fairly quickly. This week’s speaker was Joseph Tanke of the philosophy department at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa. Tanke was tasked with discussing the nature of creativity, a challenge he met with a prepared 5 page assertion that culminated with the idea that the creative space is found in a state of what he described as “disinterested pleasure”. His paper was loaded with references to philosophical achievements that may have been hard to digest by those who have not spent a huge amount of time studying philosophers of the past 130 years, but his concepts were explained just enough that a very attentive listener could at least follow the outline of his argument if not the nuance.

Tanke began with an assessment of how we appreciate aesthetic beauty, basing his argument on the assertion of Immanuel Kant, and the corresponding critique of Kant’s aesthetic by Martin Heidegger. As I gathered, Kant was establishing that there is distinction between a physical sensation of pleasure, and the kind of pleasure that arises from the perception of aesthetic beauty. Heideger critiqued Kant by declaring that Kant’s description of the spectator’s experience as “disinterested pleasure” undermined the set of experiences and perceptions brought to bear on a subject (presumably a work of art in this context) by the spectator. Tanke, drawing toward his conclusion, sought to defend Kant’s idea of “disinterested pleasure” by asserting that the moment of creation can only be accessed through a position of “disinterested pleasure”; and so Tanke has said that the position of “disinterested pleasure” is not the vacuous passive state described by Heidegger, but rather is a state of receptivity that is by nature generative for the creative individual.

The open conversation was disappointingly focused on the premise of Tanke’s argument, rather than the intriguing notion of exploring the state that creativity occurs in. The artists, full of ambition toward making meaningful statements accessible to a largely apathetic culture were offended by the word “disinterested”. The philosophers in the crowd wanted to argue Tanke’s interpretation of Kant and Heidegger. The conversation did not turn toward a subject that is pivotal for me, what is the nature of inspiration, and how does one put themselves in the position to receive it; which is exactly the subject that Tanke was trying to address.

Ultimately, Tanke is saying that a creative finds a space in which they are removed from concerns of personal benefit and ambition; that practical concerns are deprioritized, and a receptive state is attuned… not by becoming passive, but rather by removing one’s interest from day-to-day concerns, and placing them… somewhere else. In this state, the creative can become open to understandings that are transcendent…

I’ve been considering inspiration for the past two years. I find Tanke’s approach interesting in that it is a highly intellectualized approach to a problem that I see as only partially intellectual. I believe that the creative space is not intellectual, though the intellect plays a part in it. I find that emotions have to be balanced in order to find true meaning. Unbalanced emotions have proven for me to lead to revelations that are not actually realizations. In an imbalanced emotional state I will come to conclusions that are actually justifications for my own imbalance, rather than discoveries of a truer nature of things (and thus valuable beyond my personal experience). I further find that an element of connection to something… anything beyond myself is necessary. It is not sufficient to isolate myself from the world and seek independent analysis of the world… rather, a creative epiphany occurs when the intricacies of how connected I am to the world are expounded upon in my awareness.

Balance is key to accessing the creative moment, or, inspiration. Tanke relies on a spacial metaphor that implies that creativity happens outside of day-to-day practical concerns. I think this metaphor is insufficient to describe inspiration. Inspiration occurs in a space that encompasses practical concerns (rather than setting them aside) and also incorporates emotional and relational concerns in such a manner that no dominance is established by any minority of concerns. A state of advanced awareness of the totality one’s concerns without fixation invites new understanding and interpretation, and it is this refinement of our relationship with our own concerns that is generative.

And so I think that the state of “disinterested pleasure” is better described as a moment in which some set of stimulus strikes a resonant chord, for either the creator or the spectator, that makes coherent the interconnectedness of a greater portion of the whole of concerns present in a persons experience.

Regardless of my ramblings, [off]hrs is a wonderful event in which ideas about art, culture, and philosophy can be discussed amongst community. It was… inspiring.

Aplasticism

This is the last image I’ll edit from the Shark’s Cove shoot on August 26. This is the outer shelf of the above-water reef formation at Shark’s Cove… a place I’ve only seen in the treacherously large winter swells before this shoot. This day was calm, with the occasional swell lopping water over the top of the shelf. The way the shelf formed, with small fissures creating independent pools segregated from each other, reminded me of the compositions of Piet Mondrian. While I was tempted to go for a full abstraction in the style of Mondrian, I couldn’t get away from the desire to show the beauty of the different elements present in the scene: the shelf, the ocean beyond, and the sun setting in the sky pocked with clouds. As I reflected and researched the name for this piece, I came to find a parallel concern with what Mondrian and the Neo-Plasticists were dealing with, but an impetus to deal with it from a nearly opposite point of view.

The Neo-Plasticists were concerned with a utopian view of the world in which their interpretation of human potential was maximized through an adherence to minimalist formal qualities; namely, straight lines and primary colors. Their concern with the representation of a straight line is particularly telling.

Theire is, in actuality, no physical manifestation of a straight line. Anywhere you look in nature every line is broken, no edge is contiguous. The only place where a straight line is possible is within the mind’s conception of nature, but nature defies this conception. I find this fascinating because the ability to conceive a straight line has much to do with the foundation of civilization. Imagine any kind of engineering without the application of the idea of a straight line… it can’t happen. And yet, straight lines are an interpretation of reality with no example present in reality. This is the power of the human mind… the ability to create concrete principles based on what is ultimately an abstraction of reality.

This is the point at which my personal ideas diverge from those laid down by the Neo-Plasticists. Mondrian was establishing a minimalist aesthetic through which people can simplify the chaos of nature into digestible bits of information. Through this process, it was hoped a utopian ideal obvious to everyone would emerge. Operating nearly a century later, I have concluded that there is no Utopia… no single right way for everyone to live… no single correct solution to any problem. I prefer to present images of nature’s constructions, through which we choose which lines and which shapes to interpret and create meaning with. I am working in the opposite direction of Mondrian, presenting the viewer with compositions that are not defined, but are intentionally left open to interpretation, in the hopes that we will come up with different ideas, different philosophies, and different approaches to challenges that affect each of us in unique ways.

Hanau

In Hawaiian, Hanau translates as to give birth. My understanding of this image is still evolving… much of the meaning I take out of my work is a process of discovery, and this one is slower than most. For me, the dominate symbols are the tranquil pool surrounded by the jagged rocks with the reef and ocean and epic sunset behind. I received a comment about how the pool reminded a viewer of the womb, and I kind of agree. There is something to be said about the challenge of being born into a beautiful but deadly dangerous world that promises uinimaginable beauty. I also considered for a title, “whelping”, after reading that it refers to the birthing of carniverous animals. And I think an element of that meaning is applicable in this image, but it’s more vicious than what is here.

New Image: Identity

I reach into the potential of all behaviors and scoop out what is transiently valuable to me. I hold it upon the surface of my personality, and I reflect the reality I'm immersed in. What makes me unique is not my quality, but my position. From this aspect, these things I cherish reflect this way. This is who I am. That which I cannot understand or cannot hold on to slips over the side and back into the ocean. All that "I" am is the light of life passing through me, altering it slef through me, and coming out the other side of my experience.

So I’ve known for a while now that the sunsets on the North Shore are more dynamic during the summer than on the South Shore where I live. But I find many reasons not to get up there. Last week my friend and astounding photographer Aaron Feinberg (afeinbergphotography.com) came over from Kaua’i and asked if I wanted to shoot Shark’s Cove with him. Not being one to refuse an omen, I went along.

Aaron’s enthusiasm is infectious, and I found myself bouncing from composition to composition, playing with the scenery. Shark’s Cove is an old fossil reef made up of primarily of sandstone, beach rock, and fossilized coral. The shape of the reef creates a large tidepool area protected from the swell by a large wall on it’s outer rim. On the other side of the wall is a ledge that, during the relative docile swells of the summer months is passable (do not walk out there during the winter when the surf is up). We spent all of our time there, on the ledge. Because I recently moved and my life is only now slowly crawling back toward anything identifiable as “organized”, I managed to get out there with only one memory card. I shot what I thought was my fill until just before sundown, then sat down to enjoy the scenery and wait for Aaron to finish his shots.

I like these opportunities. When I’m shooting, I translate the world into 2 dimensions, and I lose the ability to grasp the entirety of nature’s beauty. As I sat, breathing contentedly, the dynamics of the sunset and the clouds and the water turned the sky, and the water reflecting it, and the rocks bathing in the light purple. I don’t mean there was  a lavendar hue. The whole world went purple. I got a little agitated that I wasn’t shooting, but didn’t react until I saw this ledge dripping the water back into the ocean after a larger swell gurgled water up onto the ledge. I couldn’t control myself. I borrowed a memory card from Aaron and set up for this shot.

Comission Project completed

This is the first time I’ve attempted to shoot a mountain… though this section of the Ko’olau range is better described as pali, or cliffs. It’s been an incredible learning process as I’ve wrestled with adapting the techniques I’ve learned shooting oceanscapes and dramatic sunsets/rises to the challenge of capturing the beauty of a static subject of monumnetal size. Water and clouds change dramatically and quickly, redirecting the light in a chaotic kaleidescope. A mountain though, holds firmly to it’s position, and I have to wait patiently as the light slowly drapes it’s warmth over it’s surface through the perforated clouds.

I find that when I shoot something that I manage to intellectualize as a new category, it is a journey of understanding and of innovating an approach and new techniques to deal with the new subject. This shot marks the beginning of this kind of journey. I am electrified with anticipation of what direction this imagery will lead my photography in.

This shot was a commissioned by Ryan Schmidt who had to leave the islands after enjoying a view of this section of the Ko’olau range every morning. I am indebted to Ryan for the challenge.