Tempus Fugit

There are not enough hours in the day. I have so much work to do that I don't where to start. I have at least two articles in my head, a laundry list of illustrations pending, a fiction piece that needs to lose around five hundred words, my research dissertation rewrites, and I promised myself I would illustrate several Christmas cards this year. Oh dear... I feel like Lewis Carroll's White Rabbit muttering "I shall be too late!"

The blog is now up and running, and I can begin to work on the outstanding projects. I guess I should embrace linear narrative for once and start at the beginning. The Christmas cards are the most time sensitive. Watch this space for the designs.

Art and Photography

As a writer my innate preference in art, and I use the term in its broadest possible context to mean all the products of human creativity, falls into the textual; but the more I explore the written form, the more I find it difficult to separate it from the visual arts. The written word is in itself a graphical representation of oral communication. And so it is with painting, photography, and, to a similar extent, sculpture. They are all representations of an element of our physical or internal metaphysical world.

            So where does the boundary between written text and visual art lie? Do we draw the distinction that text is ‘the main body of written work as distinct from illustrations or footnotes’? If so, what happens if we examine oriental calligraphy? Suddenly this classic boundary seems wholly inadequate.

            In Japanese there are three distinct writing systems: Hiragana (ひらがな), Katakana (カタカナ), and Kanji (漢字). As a written text I don’t understand a single one, but as a piece of visual art I find a great deal of beauty in their construction. Both the Chinese and Japanese seemingly do too, as a great portion of their traditional artwork involves delicately wrought calligraphy.

            And what happens to our definition if we look at the work of Bob Cobbing? Bob Cobbing was a British sound, visual, concrete and performance poet and a central figure in the British Poetry Revival; and ultimately the incitement behind my fascination with the idea of text as ‘Art’. His work reached beyond the written word as word, and into sound and visual art. In his own words, “Gone is the word as the word, though the word may still be used as sound or shape. Poetry now resides in other elements.” – Bob Cobbing, 1969.

            As a young poetry undergraduate I remember being shown a Cobbing poem that was unreadable as a traditional piece of text. The title eludes me, but I remember feeling so challenged by it, that I became a little obsessed. Below is an example of his work.

 Detail from kurrirrurriri (1967)

The more we examine, It seems to become clear that for all the wealth of ‘text depicting actual words’, a strict definition between written forms and visual arts can never be declared with any authority. Modern poetry and post-modern works aside, this is evidenced in oriental cultures where the written form and visual art were so intimately interwoven from their beginnings, as to be nigh on indistinguishable. So perhaps it’s not the definitions that matter, but the intent behind the piece of ‘Art’?

            And when examining the intent of a piece of art, it now becomes possible to draw several, albeit flimsy, boundaries between the classical forms of ‘Art’. These boundaries do not deal with definitions of the forms, but rather attempt to qualitative the efficacy of differing forms when imparting a particular idea. Simply put, when does classical text, photography, painting, or even music operate as the most efficient vehicle for meaning? Would Van Gogh’s Starry night have been better as a poem, or maybe a piece of music?

            I think we can say ‘no’ with a degree of certainty, but it is this form of distinction that we can draw between the forms. A contemporary example would be the motion picture Troy. From my literary standpoint, the film was a dreadful adaptation of a great text; it just didn’t work. Thankfully Homer didn’t have the medium of film to consider when writing his text.

            So how do we decide which form to work in? Truthfully most ‘artists’ don’t have a choice. We may excel in one medium, but fail dreadfully at another. I am a writer so I write. I would love to think that I could write and perform a song instead, but as anyone who has heard me sing will attest, I really shouldn’t.

            But were I possessed of talent in all creative arts, then to make the decision, I would have to examine the benefits of each form individually. And it is this examination that leads me, for this blog, to consider photography.

Photography has one of the heaviest social burdens of all the arts. We will all be familiar with the popular maxim that ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’, and nowhere is this clearer than in the News media. A captured image has the power to deeply affect the viewer on an almost visceral level. Below are several examples of images that are instantly familiar, and extremely evocative.

Photographs can be so powerful that governments will go to great lengths to censor them. China and the Tiananmen Square Massacre is one such image. The unknown rebel, armed with his shopping bags, standing defiantly in the path of the army’s tanks is, to my mind, one of the most powerful images ever captured. In the west we are all familiar with it, but in China it has never been seen. Censorship is so absolute that it can’t even be found on the Chinese internet.

So what is it about photography that makes it so powerful? In the most reduced terms, photography gifts us with the ability to view an event or object in its exactitude that we were not present to witness. But it is not this ability alone that makes it so powerful.

            To quote another maxim, ‘the camera never lies’; an unedited photographic image is an objective, that is unbiased, representation of an event or object. However, even if the process of capturing images is objective, the act of capturing them is purely subjective. The photographer decides what to capture, what to include and discard, how to frame the image. In this regard a photograph will always attest to the many differing facets of the photographer’s personality, along with the subject material. Susan Sontag argues in ‘On Photography’ that “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting one’s self into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge, and therefore like power.”

            So in every photographic image we are viewing pure objectivity and absolute subjectivity. It is this embodiment of dichotomy that marks photography as a true and powerful art form. These seemingly simple representations afford us a chance we rarely ever experience in our day to day lives. To, in a small sensory way, experience the exact perception of the world from the photographer’s viewpoint.

            It is an act that will never be precise. The biological visual process means that my perception of the colour red will differ from yours. Not to mention the idiosyncratic psychological, sociological, and even experiential baggage that we each bring to the viewing. For example, the colour red is considered to be lucky in China, and this feeling will never be divorced from an image that includes red.

            But, I would argue, it is these differences that ultimately validate photograph and render it precious. In each image the photographer is giving us a similar escape from reality that we find in good fiction; and we the viewer interact with a similar suspension of disbelief in the hope of being shown the photographer’s world. Ultimately this process of interaction is subconscious and requires little to no effort on the viewers behalf.

            Is it this effortless instant journey from own perceptual reality to that of the photographer’s that makes photography important to me. This experience is becoming increasingly needed in modern society. As technical modernity speeds up our daily lives, photography, at least for me, offers a moment of respite and beauty; a reason and experience to pause and reflect over: A chance to be reminded that our existence is so much more than our daily routines.