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Students generally take to comparing
and contrasting objects of study since they can use their observational
skills to draw conclusions about a given topic. With such diverse objects
as Romantic landscapes and 20th century photography, students enjoy the
challenge and opportunity for creativity. The following sections show parallels
between seemingly disparate forms of representation. Where applicable,
I’ve provided links to Kodak's "Top
Ten Techniques for Taking Pictures" and their "Beginnings
of Photographic Composition." While the objects in the photos differ
from those in the picturesque, their optical perception derives from the
same way of thinking about subject-object relations and the space in which
the objects appear for the viewing subject. Having students connect ways
of seeing and then applying them to their own picture taking is the goal
of this exercise.
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Kodak’s first rule is to Always
Keep a Camera Ready. After all, "How many once-in-a-lifetime pictures
have you missed because you didn't have a camera with you? . . . Spontaneous
moments make priceless pictures. To capture them, you need a camera with
you." Gilpin begins his essay on picturesque landscapes from his Three
Essays on the Picturesque with this same sense of urgency and immediacy
for his tourists:
The first source of amusement to the picturesque
traveler, is the pursuit of his object--the expectation of new scenes
continually opening, and arising to his view. We suppose the country to
have been unexplored. Under this circumstance the mind is kept constantly
in agreeable suspense. The love of novelty is the foundation of this pleasure.
Every distant horizon promises something new; and with this pleasing expectation,
we follow nature through all her walks. (Gilpin 47)
The Kodak moment commodifies the ephemeral quality of temporal
experience by promising to capture the "priceless" moment for the mere
cost of film and development. Landscape aesthetics commodifies sight as
tourists "capture prospects at every ten paces" (Gray 1107). Tourists'
need to go further, see more, and catch new prospects, so they can lay
claim to having mastered a given topography; the land becomes a possession
of the spectator’s gaze.
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Simplicity.
Diverse objects are brought together in a unified whole by selective framing
and by choosing a particular object of focus. Wordsworth in his Guide
to the District of the Lakes harmonizes a mountain scene by using a
tarn as his central object: "one of these pools is an acceptable sight
to the mountain wanderer; not merely as an incident that diversifies the
prospect, but as forming in his mind a centre or conspicuous point to which
objects, otherwise disconnected or insubordinated, may be referred" (40-41).
Just as Wordsworth's tarn provides unity to the diversity of objects in
the landscape, Kodak recommends a similar sense of unity in composition:
"The first and perhaps the most important guideline is simplicity. Look
for ways to give the center of interest in your pictures the most visual
attention. . . . Arrange other parts of the picture area in such a way
as to complement what you choose to be the center of interest." One of
the elements governing unity is the duration of time one can capture in
a picture or a
flick of a camera shutter. Unlike a video camera that provides a panning
movement through a scene over time, the aesthetics at work in the picturesque
and the Kodak camera are governed by the still life. The picturesque eye
works like a camera shutter. For example, in Kant, the human eye responds
to the sublime in an augenblick, the blink of an eye. In a snapshot
instant, the eye needs a single object of focus from which to arrange the
framed scene (Burke 4.10). More than one focal point favors diversity over
unity and causes an optical
distraction. To keep distraction to a minimum, Kodak suggests simple
backgrounds: "A simple background focuses attention on the subject and
makes clear, strong pictures. Take control and move your subject or your
camera to find a simple, uncluttered background." And in a like manner,
Gilpin explains: "You must contrive to hide offensive parts with wood;
to cover such as are too bald, with bushes; and to remove
little objects, which in nature push themselves too much in sight,
and serve only to introduce too many parts into your composition"
(Three Essays 70). Additionally, consider the implications of a
camera that automatically focuses on a central point in its field of view.
The camera has built into its design the idea that the primary subject
should center the picture and that this subject occupies a single area
of focus, a middle ground, not fading too far back or too far in front
of the focusing cross-hairs.
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Line.
Clarity of line is so valued in the picturesque that one can hardly read
a text that does not mention it. Clear lines belie the abstract and geometric
construction of sight. For Descartes, corporeal bodies are objects with
extension but bereft of secondary qualities we impose upon them. The eye
presents to the mind objects with both primary and secondary qualities.
But the mind with its "innate geometry" transforms optical perception into
clear and distinct ideas (Optics 67). Coinciding with Cartesian
optics is the birth of linear perspective. Prior to the Renaissance, painting
concerns itself with individual objects, but the space which they inhabit
fails to embrace or dissolve the differences in scale and position between
bodies. Space acts as a simple superposition, a still unsystematic overlapping.
With linear perspective comes an abstract spatial system capable of ordering
objects as geometric points along a grid. Making the space of nature correspond
to the space of geometry, both Gilpin and Kodak favor abstract spatial
configurations. Consider Gilpin's geometry: "A little north of Brugh, the
ground on the left, makes a singular appearance. A hill, on which a fair
is held forms an exact, semi-circular convex. Scarce a knoll, or
a bush break the regularity of the line. . . . Perhaps no disposition
of ground was ever more totally unpicturesque; and yet even this if
it be only bisected, and in a small degree adorned, is not wholly disagreeable"
(Gilpin Guide 2.170-71, emphasis mine). Likewise, for Kodak the
trained eye is one that can find clear, clean lines: "You can help yourself
develop an artistic eye by studying pictures to find the strength of their
lines,
geometric shapes, and balance." Murky lines find disfavor in the picturesque
most essentially because such vagueness disturbs clear and distinct ideas
about what constitutes an object. While objects should harmonize and colors
may blend, objects themselves should not merge
into other objects in the landscape such that their identities become
questionable. Gilpin's system of classifying bodies of water (lakes, pools,
and tarns), elevations, and even picturesque animals (the cow rather than
the horse and preferably in spring rather than summer) depends on the ability
to distinguish clearlyelements in the landscape. The ability to name and
categorize objects marks the taste and sensitivity of the observer.
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Winners
. Kodak's gallery of exemplary photos announces, "Here's another winner.
Why? Well because it's an extremely interesting picture that makes good
visual sense, and that's just as important as our list of guidelines."
Developing a "good visual sense" works much like developing taste in the
aesthetics of the picturesque. One becomes indoctrinated by seeing masters
at work, by studying scenes, and by travel to picturesque sites. Developing
the habit of a "good eye" means training the physical eye and the mental
construction of space to meet the strictures placed upon vision by optics
that complement the picturesque and the Kodak moment. Finally, bending
the rules becomes part of the rules as well. So as not to appear too much
like a scientific treatise, the interplay between reason and the imagination
should allow for some moments of "inspiration": "So study the photographs
you especially like. Do they follow the guidelines we've mentioned? Do
they bend the rules and exercise what might be called creative license?
As you search for these answers, you'll start to develop a photographic
eye of your own. Have
fun!"
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Peter Galassi considers the history
of linear perspective in art according to two dominant styles. From the
Renaissance to the early 1800s "the point of view and the frame--the visual
pyramid--are established first, creating a measured stage" while from the
early 1800s onward "the world is accepted first as an uninterupted field
of potential pictures. From his chosen point of view the artist scans this
field with the pyramid of vision, forming his picture by choosing where
and when to stop." (Galassi 16). In the earlier style, disparate objects
are brought together and synthesized as a whole on a canvas that serves
as a universal and stable "measured stage." The later style considers the
world to be a three dimensional setting from which artists chose a particular
point of view to render only a small part of the whole set of possible
scenes. The result is immediate, discontinuous, and unexpected forms. According
to Galassi, photography comes into being as painting moves from the canvas
as a synthasizing whole to the canvas as analyzing a part of a much larger
scene. For Galassi, the immediacy, discontinuity, and intimacy of candid
photos corresponds to landscape sketches of small, simple scenes such as
John Linnell's rustic cottages as opposed to the "measured stage" of Cluade's
or Poussin's landscapes. Kodak's web site suggests "keep
folks busy" to provide candid shots and shoot
close to the subject to provide intimacy. Despite these exceptions,
most of Kodak's rules correspond to the painterly canvas as a synthesizing
whole. Kodak wants pictures that represent a unified and architecturally
balanced field as do many of the writers on landscape aesthetics during
the Romantic period.
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It is worth exploring what is lost
by the "measured stage." Those photos and landscapes that render only bits
and pieces of the whole scene still utilize Cartesian perspective, but
they do so with more awareness of the contingency and subjective experience
of seeing. Ultimately, only by a loss of sight as the primary sense and
figure for knowing can we hope to gain what Merleau-Ponty refers to as
the felt relatedness of experience. Ponty rejects the Cartesian empiricist
construction of vision as a camera obscura: "We have to reject the age-old
assumptions that put the body in the world and the seer in the body" (Visible
138). In its place, he suggests we consider how experience comes to us
all at once before experience is "worked over" by differentiation among
the senses and even before subject-object distinctions. Ponty's representation
of space accords with Wordsworth's spots of time where the patterns of
the picturesque give way to a transformation in the poet's relation to
the landscape. The tension between representation by rules of the picturesque
and a rebellion against the "tyranny of the eye," both evident in Wordsworth's
work, is likewise part of our own frustrations with the position we occupy
as subjects under a pervasive scopic regime. The challenge is to find other
ways to produce "the spontaneous organization of things we perceive" (Sense
and Nonsense 13). I hope that as students play with forms of represention,
they will gain a better sense of what is at stake as they take their experience
of a particular place and transform
it into a landscape to be viewed by others.
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