Category Archives: Thoughts

Photography and reality: the truth

July 19, 2010

We have art in order not to die of the truth
– Friedrich Nietzsche

I was listening at a conversation between a fine art photographer and a radio journalist in a gallery. The fine art photographer was telling that most of documentary photographers don’t like his work, because of the heavy way he uses Photoshop for his stuff. The radio journalist replied that he saw a photojournalist manipulate reality by moving objects and people, thus depicting relationships that  didn’t exist in the first place. After this short duet, both agreed with the fact that in the moment that you frame reality with your camera, you’re not telling the truth anymore, because your picture frames only a small part of the world.

I heard this argument several times and I think that it’s junk. I will explain you why with an experiment:

In this moment you are looking at my words on your monitor. The monitor might be on a desk or on your lap or wherever it is. Just look at it. Is it real? Is it true? I assume that you are sane enough to answer “yes.” Now close your eyes and keep them closed for ten seconds, use this short time to think about the reality you just experienced, maybe talk to yourself as you wanted to describe it to a friend, then open the eyes again. Start now.

Welcome back! Is your monitor real? Yes, just as before. There might be some stuff or some people behind you. Did these people or this stuff play some kind of role in your inner description of reality? If not, does this mean that you lied to yourself?

A human being can’t produce a complete description of reality, because you can’t experience it in the first place. This doesn’t mean that a photo must be a lie. It can be, but it also can tell the truth. Yes, a partial one, but nevertheless the truth.

The purpose of art must not necessarily be that of telling the truth. It’s a choice, but I don’t like it when fine art photographers feel the need to justify themselves telling “also photojournalists lie.” Yes, some do, but there’s nothing wrong if you say: “my art is a lie, but I like it like this!”.

By the way, I never moved an object in any of my photos, nevertheless I liked the work of that artist.

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Nsala

May 31, 2010

Nsala

After coming back from a trip to Africa, I started read the book Africa, A biography of a continent from the British author John Reader.

A week ago I stumbled upon the story of Nsala. Nsala was a man living in Congo during the rule of Leopold II of Belgium over the country at the end of the 19th Century. At that time people were extracting rubber from trees and some special vines, but there was no special use for the product. When the automobile industry started expanding and someone discovered that if you use tires for a bicycle, it will go much smoother than whatever they were using before that time. This put an incredible pressure to the production of rubber in Congo.

The production was given in concession to private enterprises  who started exploiting the people in a way that was described as an “enormous and continuous butchery.”

A report made from the British Consul Roger Casement tells: “We tried, always going further into the forest, and when we failed and our rubber was short, the soldiers came to our town and killed us. Many were shot, some had their ears cut off; other were tied up with ropes around their necks and bodies and taken away. The white men at the posts sometimes did not know of the bad things the soldiers did to us, but it was the white men who sent the soldiers to punish us for not bringing enough rubber”. These concessions were employing something like 20.000 soldiers at that time.

These reports were already making their way to Europe, but king Leopold was able to counter it. It all changed with the invention and the diffusion of photography. People traveled to Africa and started bringing back evidence.

“One horrifying picture among many shows a man named Nsala sitting on a missionary’s porch, looking sorrowfully at the small hand and foot that lie before him. This was all that remained of his five-year-old daughter. She, together with his wife and son, had been killed, dismembered, cooked, and eaten by armed sentries.”

Before the arrival of these enterprises in Congo, the population was estimated to be around 20 million people, in 1911 there were only 8.5 million people. The photographs, apparently raised a big scandal, but no way could damage Leopold II, neither in his rule nor in his richness.

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Photography and reality: time, part 3

March 23, 2010

I can’t stop thinking about time and how it relates to photography as a representation of reality. I could summarize part 1 saying that it has to do with the way time affects our own perception of reality and part 2 regards the act of capturing a certain lapse of time with a camera.

Photography doesn’t end here, because there is also the part that affects the consumption of a photo, how a photo is seen by a viewer.

Other forms of art, like music, cinema, theater and to some extent even literature, impose a strict control over the time that a spectator, a listener, or a reader will spend the artwork. A song that lasts 3’13″ will always be heard in 3’13″, if heard in its’ totality; a movie’s length will always be the same. How much time is spent looking at a photograph? The fruition of photography is much more similar to the one of paintings and differs completely from the fruition of a movie.

You can hang a photo on a wall and never look at it, you might spend hours looking at a photo of your family album or a viewer might spend minutes looking at a photo in a museum. There is no way to predict how much time someone will look at a picture.

Light rays, eventually coming from different parts of the world or the universe, expose your film for a certain amount of time, then the time is stretched again from a few seconds to some minutes (too keep it easy). An event that was recorded in a 1/125th of a second now is observed for a longer time, a kiss or a wave last forever,  a star trail that took half an hour exposure is viewed for a couple of seconds, or moving people become an indistinct mass.

The information recorded in a photograph is static, it will not change during reasonable amounts of time. This means that the amount of information available to the viewer is immense: how long can you look a person’s face from a close distance without generating some social embarrassment? Not to mention that the person will surely move or change expression. The sharpness of a photo taken in 1/1000th of a second, is not otherwise available to the naked human eye.

Time becomes like an accordion: you take a short or long amount of time and squeeze it in an object that is almost timeless, then the viewer will expand it again to his wish. A portrait can be examined with the rapid glimpse that you would exchange with a passerby on the street or with the same dedication that you can spend studying the face of a sleeping lover.

Is this still a true representation of reality, or has a distortion occurred?

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Photography and reality: time, part 2

March 5, 2010

Time enters in photography most blatantly by setting your camera. How long are you going to expose this picture? Just looking at my practice, I see that I shoot most things in the 1/125th -1/250th of a second range. Does my eye see that fast? No!

Movies are a sequence of still pictures that scroll before your eyes at a rate of 50 frames per second and give you the impression of continuous motion. Human eyes can’t see faster than this. Our brain reconstructs the information missing between a frame and the next and builds the illusion of motion(1).

The first big lie that photography tells us is about time. Photography can leave us with the inability to distinguish the speed at which people and objects were moving when the photo was taken. How can you tell if a photograph of an apple on a table was taken in 1/60th of a second or with a long exposure of 2 minutes?

Would “true” photographs only be taken at the speed that our eyes and our brain use to see the world, or more poetically at the speed at which our heart beats?

We observe a scene happening before our eyes, we keep the detail we are interested in, by focusing our eyes and moving them and moving our head to grasp the decisive or interesting elements of scenery or an event while discarding the rest(2).

If I take photographs of people walking with a speed of 1/60th of a second, people will be most likely blurred. Thus the photograph will miss the detail that the photographer might have found interesting, say facial expression of a passerby, while the background would be sharp. An inversion occurs: the eye of the photographer perceives an interesting person walking and the street doesn’t really matter, while the photograph shows a sharp street with a few blurry people walking.

If the shutter speed is fast enough to freeze the action, assuming that everything is sharply focused, another representation of reality is present: people, streets, cars, and building will all have the same hierarchy in the frame. The viewer can decide to dismiss the people walking and look at the garbage bins or do exactly the opposite. It is a democratic view.

Democracy, also in the realm of photography, consists in the illusion of having a choice. It’s only an appearance.

(1)    In an experiment two blinking lights were shown to a certain number of people. If the frequency of the blinking and the distance between them was right, people would perceive the two moving lights as a single moving light. If the two lights had different colors, then people would see a single light moving and gradually changing color. The most interesting part is that people would perceive the intermediate color before the second light would turn on.

(2)    Our eyes perceive detail only in the fovea (the high resolution part of the retina). The detail we see is constructed by the brain, stitching together several images taken by the fovea at different moments of time.

Time enters in photography most blatantly by setting your camera. How long are you going to expose this picture? Just looking at my practice, I see that I shoot most things in the 1/125th -1/250th of a second range. Does my eye see that fast? No!

Movies are a sequence of still pictures that scroll before your eyes at a rate of 50 frames per second and give you the impression of continuous motion. Human eyes can’t see faster than this. Our brain reconstructs the information missing between a photogram and the other and builds the illusion of motion(1).

The first big lie that photography tells us is about time. Photography can leave us with the inability to distinguish the speed at which people and objects were moving when the photo was taken. How can you tell if a photograph of an apple on a table was taken in 1/60th of a second or with a long exposure of 2 minutes?

Would “true” photographs only be taken at the speed that our eyes and our brain use to see the world, or more poetically at the speed at which our heart beats?

We observe a scene happening before our eyes, we keep the detail we are interested in, by focusing our eyes and moving them and moving our head to grasp the decisive or interesting elements of scenery or an event while discarding the rest(2).

If I take photographs of people walking with a speed of 1/60th of a second, people will be most likely blurred. Thus the photograph will miss the detail that the photographer might have found interesting, say facial expression of a passerby, while the background would be sharp. An inversion occurs: the eye of the photographer perceives an interesting person walking and the street doesn’t really matter, while the photograph shows a sharp street with a few blurry people walking.

If the shutter speed is fast enough to freeze the action, assuming that everything focused, another representation of reality is present: people, streets, cars, and building will all have the same hierarchy in the frame. The viewer can decide to dismiss the people walking and look at the garbage bins or do exactly the opposite. It is a democratic view.

Democracy, also in the realm of photography, consists in the illusion of having a choice. It’s only an appearance.

(1) In an experiment two blinking lights were shown to a certain number of people. If the frequency of the blinking and the distance between them was the right one, people would perceive them as a moving light. If the two lights had different colors, then also a shift of the color was perceived. The most interesting part is that people would perceive the intermediate color before the second light would turn on.

(2) Our eyes perceive detail only in the fovea (the high resolution part of the retina). The detail we see is constructed by the brain, stitching together several images taken by the fovea at different moments of time.

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Photography and reality: time

February 26, 2010

I think that it is interesting to explore the relationship between photography and reality. Reality is what exists, what is out there, in opposition to what is immaterial or not tangible. You can’t take a photograph of something that doesn’t exist in our physical dimensions. A photo is always an index pointing to something real, a trace of an event or a group of events that occurred in a particular time frame.

Which is the time frame? An answer could be that the time frame is the one that the shutter takes to trip from one side to the other of the film. This is not fully true: imagine a photograph of a person walking, with the sun visible in background. The photographer presses the shutter in the exact moment when the person’s head covers the sun, to have a backlight effect. What your eyes and the camera see is the person some billionths of a second after he was there and the sun 8 minutes after it emitted the light that now hits the film’s surface. The fact that these events are seen as happening together is a pure coincidence, depending from the fact that you’re much closer to the person than to the sun.

The paragraph above is needed to understand that knowledge is always relative to the position of the observer. A photograph taken from the Hubble telescope will show events that occurred thousands or millions of years from each other, as they were happening all at the same time. An alien sitting on the other side of the galaxy would see a completely different scenario.

These statements don’t hold true only for photography. It doesn’t matter if you write what happens, or record the sounds or just place these things in your memory and keep them there, there is an intrinsic distortion of the observer’s knowledge, therefore of his perception of reality, based solely on his position.

In most practical situations the difference in time will not play any role, but every image recording is a recording of the past even before the light hits the film surface or the retina of the eye. It might be interesting to notice that the 10 billionths of a second that the light takes to bounce off a person a few meters away and then arrive to the lens, are enough for a desktop PC to perform a handful of operations.

When I show the photograph of the person walking in front of the sun, am I showing something real? Yes, the event occurred in that particular time and was visible from a particular point in space. Like people gathering in a certain point, regardless of how much road they walked to get there.

Instead of dismissing the concept of reality or abandoning objectivity, we could ask ourselves: “How would this look from another perspective? How would this look one second before or after?”

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