Publication #1

Publication is a new street photography magazine published in London by Nick Turpin.

“The launch edition of PUBLICATION: Inspiration is now printed and available to order. Featuring essays by Michael David Murphy, David Gibson, Hin Chua and Nick Turpin and the work of photographers including Joel Meyerowitz, Tod Papageorge, Martin Kollar, Trent Parke, Roger Mayne and some wonderful images from comparatively unknown Street Photographers.”

I ordered my copy today. I’ll maybe write a few words about it when I receive it. Got via The Sonic Blog.

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 1/60^th 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 1/60^th 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.

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?”

La Paz, Bolivia, 2009 - silver gelatin print

Now, really, it’s not about the photos: it’s about being there.

Horse Races, Santiago, Chile - silver gelatin print

Rio Gallegos, Argentina - silver gelatin print

I started to print some photos again after almost 2 years of absence from the darkroom. Hence, what you see above isn’t the output of a digital camera or an inkjet print, but the scan of a silver gelatin print. I promised myself several times to stop publishing negative scans and concentrate myself on printing, let’s see if this time I can keep it.

A few sparse prints will come in the next days, then I’ll concentrate on finishing a series I called “The Wind Stole My Words”, taken in Patagonia in 2009. The picture above, belongs to the mentioned series.

As the pictures you see are objects present in the physical world and not a mere amount of bits, you are encouraged to inquiry for prices, if you like them.