Pictorial Inquiry

6/16/2015

Now Look

After a long conversation with a Pakistani refugee spending his time in Vienna, Austria without being able to leave (his brother, by the way, is a refugee in Australia), this very first post in my Über-Blog sure seems quite irrelevant. Nonetheless, this conversation only alerted my once more to the importance to becoming aware of the moment and not deferring life.

Thinking about the ephemeral nature of the experiences we can hold on in our memories - aided by images, smells or sounds - I would like to slow you in your rapid consumption of online material and ask you to enter into the construct of a photographic image with me.

Look at an image and notice the many layers of information contained in and around it. Which information reaches you first? What clue can you extract from the image to understand it? How can you infer other details from the visual representations in the picture? When do you notice the composition without looking for a meaning? What thoughts does the photograph provoke?

Within the feeling of safety and comfort of this thought experiment, take a long moment and think about how you look at photographs!

Now, please share your thoughts! And images...

2 Comments

About the Author

Hello, I'm Elisabeth Stephan. Apart from being a photographer & many-media artist, and chef, I'm also a PhD student. Currently I'm working on my dissertation on photography as visual communication in social media.

I'm:
Counter-superlatives...
Pro direct communication...
For the overlooked...
Against mediated experiences...

Flossie & McKinley link

6/16/2015 07:55:16 pm

With the onslaught of Facebook and Instagram images are thrust upon the canvas at a whim. Just for the sake of feeling important or getting much needed attention, individuals crowd the airwaves with hoards of photographs, some very good, most lacking but common place. They have no real value because of the constant barrage.

I for one have decided that to join that onslaught of Facebook and Instagram would decrease my sense of individuality. Everyone does it. Everyone that does feels that because it is the new hip thing we all must do it. Most of us have forgotten how to send a letter or even type an email. We have a great tendency to move very fast and abbreviate everything. Even the images that we cast on those aforementioned sites are abbreviated. I wonder what Susan Sontag would have to say to this era in commercialization. She covered the strength of images quite thoroughly in "Regarding the Pain of Others."

We must have very little to do to spend hours on Facebook to say to all of those persons that you have not spoken to in 30 years that your grand daughter just learned how to use the toilet and here is her picture. Most of it is benign chatter with no commentary to go along with it. Our perception is easily wiped away by this excessive chatter.

Adolfo Doring link

6/20/2015 04:10:57 pm

First of all you look great in the photo. Those blue eyes so full of life have not changed in all these years, one would think that the flame of wonder would have been dampened by time, but not in this image, at that moment. However as full of life as you look, I am glad to see you took the guy in red to the arctic with you, he seems to know what he is doing or at least he has the right gear. Do you share the orange tent with him? So many questions and yet I now know much more about your trip as I had only heard about it over the phone.

Yes there is a deluge of images everywhere but it is very hard to figure out which ones are or will be or could become significant. Images come from the imagination and then they are re-created by a photographer, person, artist, child etc. Or they come from the ability of the photographer, person, artist, child, etc. to capture a moment out of the chaos created by the wake of time. The former is an exercise in transference from the minds eye to a formal medium and the latter is a gift from the inventors of photography.

The ability to capture a single moment - usually a fraction of a second - and preserve it, or a rendition of it, as an image in one of many mediums was a turning point in the history of time and man within it.

How many times now have we been introduced via the media to the physical identity of a mass criminal - the kid who shot Senator Giffords or the kid who committed the mass shooting in the movie theater or at the Sandy Hook elementary school - through their Facebook photos? Certainly those first images of the alleged shooter display many more clues as to their personality and or identity, than the traditional police station mug shot. These are images that might be banal on one day and instrumental in capturing a mass murderer the next. What is strange is the willingness with which people share them selves online. The massiveness of social media etc. allows for a fake sense of anonymity when in truth a Youtube video posted by a criminal can go from three likes to millions of likes overnight. It’s not that the video was being ignored, is just that it had no significance. It was diluted amongst the billions of posts like stars in the night sky, until it goes super nova.

I found myself starting an Instagram account https://instagram.com/adolfo.doring/ at a time of my life when I was being diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. It was a way to put out some of my work in an organized and controlled fashion. For one I was attracted to the square format, since most of my black and white images come from the 35mm format - all shot in black and white negative film – I found the crop to square appealing because somehow it made me feel like only a portion of the ‘real’ image was being shared. The fact that the image file gets converted to a reasonably small file also made me more willing to upload work that up to then was slated for some future book or show. But life-threatening illness has a way of accelerating things. I started 44 weeks ago as of today – June 20, 2015 – I have made 390 posts, have 1628 followers and am following 241 other instagrammers. I have not tallied the likes but they are probably - one would hope – from a wider audience than those who follow my account. There is a fair amount of comments as well and I find myself always being curious about as to their content when they show up on the home screen.

As an instagrammer I do feel a sense of community and I don’t believe it is completely imaginary. I am respectful of what other people post and usually give them a like because there must be a reason for them to post it. Even if it seems that their motivation is just to get some attention, so be it. If I can contribute to a tiny bit of dopamine being released into their brain I’m happy for that, after all we are finite beings.

Hopefully the person with the un-esthetic image of his/her shoelaces or turkey club sandwich has a life that he considers fuller and more meaningful than his on-line presence and certainly someone affected by social media to the point of criminality or self-harm would have been taken over the edge by Catcher In The Rye or I Am The Walrus in slower (better) times.

I will continue to contribute to your study as my experience within this construction that we call civilization and more precisely the construction within the construction that we call the inter-net expands.