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03/06/2007 10:27:21 PM · #76
Originally posted by xianart:

i just looked it up, looks like a lot of fun. however - nowhere does the site explain where it came from.


IIRC, the Festival happened when Nederland's rather distinct hippie culture needed a way to continue to pay for Grandpa's air conditioning, so to speak, since once the Bredo clan left the city somehow became responsible for the upkeep. Nederland being such a small town, the city budget couldn't really afford it. Someone, probably quite high at the time (and that's not necessarily an insult or terribly surprising if you know Nederland) suggested a festival as a way to generate money for it, and it just grew from there.
03/06/2007 10:33:02 PM · #77
Originally posted by zeuszen:

I was trying to show, dear A., that there is a whole era of poetry, nearly as long as the history of photography, which shares this very same connection. Not only it is a shared premise but also one poignantly articulated by various poets, the names of two of which I already provided.

The assumption you make here "Poets create entirely in the plance of symbolic, figurative." is simply uninformed.

Perhaps you (or someone else, for that matter), can explain how a poet can use real time-space to create symbols. I can imagine how a poet could write a poem with no semantic that would (sort of) use real time and space, but if he were to create any kind of symbols, he would have no choice but create them in imaginary time and space, or so it seems. Perhaps an example is in order.

p.s. I am quite ignorant when it comes to Western poetry, my little appreciation of poetry lies mostly with the XX century Russian poets, and even there I am not too well versed. I have not read anything by the poets whose names you provided. I have a bit of a difficulty appreciating English poetry in original, and translations usually do poetry no good. The only Enlish poet, whom I like reading, is, (oddly?) e.e.cummings, but I think that I only "get" a very small fraction of the richness of his poems. Perhaps, poetry is not a good choice of analogy if you want to illustrate your point to me. But if you chose to continue doing that, please bear with my poor understanding of this subject.
03/06/2007 10:37:56 PM · #78
This is pretty esoteric.

Here's my 2 cents...

If a poet uses a dictionary or the thesaurus is his poetry no longer poetry?
If a musician plays music on an eletronic Kurzweil keyboard instead of an acoustic Steinway piano, is it not still music?

Lenses, cameras, mirrors, shutters, film, chemicals, paper, sensors, computers, software,etc. are tools -- such as words; or wood, ivory, hammers; or wave transformers, circuits, audo DSP algorithms; etc.

Aren't all these just tools (or means) to an end? The end is the human expression in the poetry, music, images....

03/06/2007 11:10:11 PM · #79
Originally posted by agenkin:

...So, rightfully, Christian asks, in essence: "How come, having liked the image initially, you changed your mind later, after learning about the post processing? The image is still the same!"

A simpler way to pose this question would be: do the methods matter, as long as an independent viewer cannot tell the difference between the real thing and the fake?...


actually, i don't think that's the same thing at all. i'm trying very hard not to be insulted by this. did i misrepresent the images? i don't think so. ok, this has gone far beyond the personal, but, arcady, remember that, while we are artists and it's important to discuss ideas like this, we are also artists who put our vision and souls on display. we welcome critique, but it needs to be constructive.

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.


W.B. Yeats (1865–1939)
"He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven"
from the Collected Works of W.B. Yeats

03/07/2007 12:55:31 AM · #80
Originally posted by xianart:


actually, i don't think that's the same thing at all. i'm trying very hard not to be insulted by this. did i misrepresent the images? i don't think so. ok, this has gone far beyond the personal, but, arcady, remember that, while we are artists and it's important to discuss ideas like this, we are also artists who put our vision and souls on display. we welcome critique, but it needs to be constructive.

Christian, it was never my intention to insult you, or to devalue your artistic work. I have but most respect for you, you are among the few people here who don't give in to the chase of ribbons, who present an original vision of the world, whose individuality leaks into their images. I was looking forward to discussing this with *you*, because you are an interesting interlocutor. I appreciate your choice of a poem, perhaps I am stomping too loudly and carelessly. The fact that we are doing this over an impersonal Internet connection does not help, for this was only meant as a friendly argument in pursuit of better understanding of one's likes and dislikes.

I started this thread in response to your, as I though, invitation, in your question in the removed backgrounds thread. Since the question had no relevance to that thread, I started a new one. If I offended you, I am sorry. If this whole thing looks like an attack to you, please don't feel obligated to respond, you did not deserve to be in a position to have to defend yourself.
03/07/2007 01:29:24 AM · #81
Interesting discussion. I am new to this forum and new to DSLRs. I have shot film most of my life and find myself a little unsettled with digital photography because of this very topic. When is the photograph made? I follow the Cartier-Bresson (photojournalism) idea that the moment in time that the shutter is released is as much a part of a photograph as all the visual elements. I'm not giving the notion of the "decisive moment" the greatest of explanations. To me the art in photography is at the moment the shutter is released. That is what makes a photograph. What happens after that, whether in a darkroom or in Photoshop is not important. I worked as a custom darkroom tech through college so I know that good photos can be made better in the darkroom but great photos are always made at time of exposure. So the combining of two images into one doesn't make sense to me no matter where or when it is done. Even too much dodging and burning doesn't sit well with me.
03/07/2007 01:44:23 AM · #82
Originally posted by pixelpig:

It seems to me that it's impossible to do pure photography with anything more than a camera body, a prime lens, film, light meter, & photographer. Contact prints only. Otherwise, it's not pure photography, a process or post-process has intruded. Maybe I explained myself, maybe not.


Oh, it's actually worse than that. Ansel was famous for his large-format negatives and his contact prints. He made a contact printing frame that contained a large number of light bulbs, and he would vary how much light each part of the image received. So his contact prints were not "pure"... And he, of course, was a member of Group f/64....

R.
03/07/2007 02:00:19 AM · #83
Originally posted by agenkin:


Perhaps you (or someone else, for that matter), can explain how a poet can use real time-space to create symbols. I can imagine how a poet could write a poem with no semantic that would (sort of) use real time and space, but if he were to create any kind of symbols, he would have no choice but create them in imaginary time and space, or so it seems. Perhaps an example is in order.


******

The sun sets unevenly and the people
go to bed

The night has a thousand eyes.
The clouds are low, overhead.

Every night it is a little bit
more difficult, a little

harder. My mind
to me a mangle is.

- Robert Creeley

*******

Riprap

"A cobble of stone laid on steep, slick rock
to make a trail for horses in the mountains"

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way,
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles --
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.

— Gary Snyder

*******

Unfortunately the Snyder does not show the intricate, interwoven line breaks that give it shape on the page. I don't know how to make them in this forum.

Equally unfortunately, I can find no actual Charles Olson content (poems) on the web.

R.

R.
03/07/2007 07:29:33 AM · #84
thanks for some wonderful poetry, robert. lovely to read. i can picture how the snyder poem might be laid out, like a twisting mountain trail?

i'm not taking this as a personal attack, but i think it's important, arcady, that you consider the effect of your words. i'm sure you don't mean to, but you often seem inadvertently to hurt or insult others in these discussions. ok, people seem to have thin skins on the internet, but we all have a resposibility to consider the way we say things, not just what we say.
03/07/2007 10:47:06 AM · #85
Originally posted by Bear_Music:

Unfortunately the Snyder does not show the intricate, interwoven line breaks that give it shape on the page. I don't know how to make them in this forum.

Equally unfortunately, I can find no actual Charles Olson content (poems) on the web.

Hi, Robert:

Thanks for the examples. I recognize that these are beautiful, intimate poems. Are you saying that these poems use real time-space? How?

The symbols that are created (setting sun, night with a thousand eyes, the clouds), are created in the plane of imaginary, that is to say, in the author's imagination. All the events (people go to bed, the mind being a mangle, sequence of nights) occur in imaginary time, which the poet created in his mind. When we read the poem, the symbols and the events occur in our minds, but, yet again, in an imaginary time-space continuum.

If I understand correctly, Snyder creates shapes on paper with his words. The shapes that he thus "draws" on a page, are also created in the imaginary plane. In this respect, they are no different, than, for the sake of simplicity, an image of mountains on the horizon, drawn by a painter: the painter created the mountains in time-space that he made up.

The fact that the symbols are very realistic still does not change their nature.

In contrast, a photographer has *real* time and space to work with when he crates his symbols. This is what Pashis says is a unique trait of photography, which makes it (photography) different from painting, poetry, writing.

Message edited by author 2007-03-07 10:49:05.
03/07/2007 12:19:24 PM · #86
Originally posted by agenkin:


Thanks for the examples. I recognize that these are beautiful, intimate poems. Are you saying that these poems use real time-space? How?

The symbols that are created (setting sun, night with a thousand eyes, the clouds), are created in the plane of imaginary, that is to say, in the author's imagination. All the events (people go to bed, the mind being a mangle, sequence of nights) occur in imaginary time, which the poet created in his mind. When we read the poem, the symbols and the events occur in our minds, but, yet again, in an imaginary time-space continuum.

*********

The fact that the symbols are very realistic still does not change their nature.

In contrast, a photographer has *real* time and space to work with when he crates his symbols. This is what Pashis says is a unique trait of photography, which makes it (photography) different from painting, poetry, writing.


Arcady,

I do understand what you are trying to say but I offer this for your consideration; in your last paragraph quited above, you speak of "the symbols" the photographer "creates", and that they derive from "real time and space". So, by your own words, you acknowledge that as photographers we do (or at least can) deal with symbols; that photography, in other words, can be metaphorical in nature.

The distinction you are drawing, basically, seems to be that in photography the actual capture of the symbols, as it were, takes place in a fixed span or segment of space/time.

Now, the Creeley poem, in particular, is extremely grounded in that same ethos or philosophy: each image of it (save the last mind/mangle image) is a "picture in words". And one can (and arguably should) see them as being, in effect, a "mental snapshot" of the poet's "reality" at an instant in the time/space continuum. There is nothing "imaginary" about the making of this poem. It is pretty much entirely "objective", if one can accept an assessment of one's own mental state as an objective thing.

The point here, of course, is that other arts than photography can be, and have been, grounded in the "real", and yet (at least among scholars and critics) there's no demand that they BE this one thing, or the other for that matter. There's a genre of painting called "photo-realism" that produces, freehand, images that are indistinguishable from photographs. Artists in the high Renaissance, before the invention of cameras, used a "camera obscura", a small, portable "room that functioned as a pinhole camera you could sit within, that projected a scene on the wall where you could trace it, and this became the basis of their painting.

********

You speak of how "When we read the poem, the symbols and the events occur in our minds, but, yet again, in an imaginary time-space continuum." — but this is also true when we view a painting, or a photograph. We will always bring ourselves to, and usually into, the work presented. The particulars of its creation become largely irrelevant in the remove of viewing the finished work.

*********

So, what some of us are debating with you is NOT that photography is (or can be, usually is) grounded in what Pashi ascribes as "the unique trait" of photography. We can all agree that this is true enough, even if we argue that other arts may be (can be, sometimes are) similarly grounded. No, what we are debating is your contention (possibly Pashi's as well, I don't know if he actually says this) that BECAUSE photography is unique in this way, this represents a limit on how it "ought" to be used. Or, perhaps more accurately, that the use of a camera in any other way is not "photography".

**********

What it boils down to, Arcady, is that you're taking the position of a "purist"; it sounds to most of us like you're saying something like this:

Photography, of all the arts, is the only one that can deal precisely with the here-and-now, without embellishment or adornment. Any work made with a camera that does not adhere to this philosophy of "the decisive moment" is not, by my definition, "photography", but should instead be lumped with (say) the decorative arts in general as an object designed to please and flatter.

I realize I've overstated the case (that is a rhetorical device, of course), but this is nevertheless how your position is coming across. And let me hasten to add that it is an interesting position, this "definition" of photography espoused by Pashis. I'm enjoying discussing it. I just don't think that whatever makes a thing unique is, by definition, all of the thing that matters.

Robt.
03/07/2007 12:29:56 PM · #87
^^^ Yeah, what he said :) *gulps*
03/07/2007 01:49:06 PM · #88
> Bear_Music and agenkin

As an illustration, here is an excerpt from Olson's "Kinfgishers", in a somewhat less "lyrical" style than Creeley's. (Please note that the "..............................." have been inserted by me to indicate blank space).

"What does not change / is the will to change

He woke, fully clothed, in his bed. He
remembered only one thing, the birds, how
when he came in, he had gone around the rooms
and got them back in their cage, the green one first,
she with the bad leg, and then the blue,
the one they had hoped was a male

Otherwise? Yes, Fernand, who had talked lispingly of Albert & Angkor Vat.
He had left the party without a word. How he got up, got into his coat,
I do not know. When I saw him, he was at the door, but it did not matter,
he was already sliding along the wall of the night, losing himself
in some crack of the ruins. That it should have been he who said, "The kingfishers?
who cares
for their feathers
now?"

His last words had been, "The pool is slime." Suddenly everyone,
ceasing their talk, sat in a row around him, watched
they did not so much hear, or pay attention, they
wondered, looked at each other, smirked, but listened,
he repeated and repeated, could not go beyond his thought
"The pool the kingfishers' feathers were wealth why
did the export stop?"

It was then he left

2
I thought of the E on the stone, and of what Mao said
la lumiere"
..............................but the kingfisher
de l'aurore"
..............................but the kingfisher flew west
est devant nous!
..............................he got the color of his breast
..............................from the heat of the setting sun!

The features are, the feebleness of the feet (syndactylism of the 3rd & 4th digit)
the bill, serrated, sometimes a pronounced beak, the wings
where the color is, short and round, the tail
inconspicuous.

But not these things were the factors. Not the birds.
The legends are
legends. Dead, hung up indoors, the kingfisher
will not indicate a favoring wind,
or avert the thunderbolt. Nor, by its nesting,
still the waters, with the new year, for seven days.
It is true"

[Charles Olson]

edited to correct spelling

Message edited by author 2007-03-07 19:34:08.
03/07/2007 02:09:37 PM · #89
As a further illustration, I am posting one of my own:

"I did what man
can, and he

cannot raise the dead
quite as easily, father,
who thou art, in any case,
any village, people

out of sea and cracked clay

no questions can be asked of the form that is
itself a principal question of form and resource.
Whatever causations are

conditions as native as houses, and of such stones built,
and as many tents, of hides made, poles
instead beams, raised (no struts)

a roof where the sky is / heaven is what,
reports Tacitus, they fear above all

/ceiling"

[Zeus Zen]
03/07/2007 02:13:57 PM · #90
Thanx, ZZ

R.
03/07/2007 08:36:20 PM · #91
Originally posted by Bear_Music:

I do understand what you are trying to say but I offer this for your consideration; in your last paragraph quited above, you speak of "the symbols" the photographer "creates", and that they derive from "real time and space". So, by your own words, you acknowledge that as photographers we do (or at least can) deal with symbols; that photography, in other words, can be metaphorical in nature.

Please allow me to quote the source again, before replying:

Originally posted by A.V.Pashis:

A photographer-craftsman works only with real objects, in real domain, in real time. A poet, a composer, or a painter works, mostly, in semantic, symbolic domain and imaginary, made-up time. The distinctive area of a photographer-artist's expression is the thin line, where the space-time continua of the semantic and the real meet. If an author works only in the plane of the reality and of the real time, he is just a fixator, not an artist. However, if he expresses himself only in the domain of the semantic and the symbolic - he is not a photographer. The task of a photographer-artist is to use a frozen photographic composition to make the viewer perceive an image symbolically, figuratively, when everything in the image cries out of the opposite: that the depicted subject is real.

So, yes, photo art can and must be metaphorical. This is what it has in common with, pretty much, any other genre of arts. But it is the dual nature of photography that makes it exciting and distinct (more on that below).

Originally posted by Bear_Music:

The distinction you are drawing, basically, seems to be that in photography the actual capture of the symbols, as it were, takes place in a fixed span or segment of space/time.

Well, the word "capture" may be a bit confusing here, I think, but, essentially, this is right. Let's say that the photographer uses real world objects, recorded in real time, to create the metaphors/symbolis in his work, whereas this facility is unavailable to painters, writers, and poets (well you have yet to convince me otherwise, although you are making progress :), more below).

Originally posted by Bear_Music:

Now, the Creeley poem, in particular, is extremely grounded in that same ethos or philosophy: each image of it (save the last mind/mangle image) is a "picture in words". And one can (and arguably should) see them as being, in effect, a "mental snapshot" of the poet's "reality" at an instant in the time/space continuum. There is nothing "imaginary" about the making of this poem. It is pretty much entirely "objective", if one can accept an assessment of one's own mental state as an objective thing.

Aha, I can finally see what you and ZZ meant before, thanks. This is a very interesting (and new, for me) idea, it made me think a lot, for which I am grateful. To determine the bases, I agree that a mental state can be though of as a reality in time.

So you are saying, that it is possible to (1) take a snapshot of one's mental state, (2) represent that mental state by means of characters on paper, (3) for the reader to unambiguously receive that snap shot by means of reading the characters, (4) reconstruct it in his (reader's) head, and (5) use that mental snap shot to create symbols in the reader's mind, which can carry some semantics.

There seems to be a lot of ifs in this process, and most of them seem to be unverifiable, and, well, very iffy. Note that for the analogy to hold, the mental state needs to be transferred unambiguously (while the metaphors that are represented by that mental state can be ambiguous, just as the metaphors in photography and other arts).

Originally posted by Bear_Music:

There's a genre of painting called "photo-realism" that produces, freehand, images that are indistinguishable from photographs. Artists in the high Renaissance, before the invention of cameras, used a "camera obscura", a small, portable "room that functioned as a pinhole camera you could sit within, that projected a scene on the wall where you could trace it, and this became the basis of their painting.

The fact that photo-realism drawings may be indistinguishable from photographs does not modify their nature, unless they are produced in the same time as the time, depicted in them. While the camera obscura artists may be, perhaps, called the first photographers. I don't think this undermines anything.

Originally posted by Bear_Music:

You speak of how "When we read the poem, the symbols and the events occur in our minds, but, yet again, in an imaginary time-space continuum." — but this is also true when we view a painting, or a photograph.

Aha, but here we are talking about the processes happening during the interpretation of the metaphors, contained in a photograph/painting/poem. There is no contradiction, this aspect is, indeed, the same for most art genres.

Originally posted by Bear_Music:

what we are debating is your contention (possibly Pashi's as well, I don't know if he actually says this) that BECAUSE photography is unique in this way, this represents a limit on how it "ought" to be used. Or, perhaps more accurately, that the use of a camera in any other way is not "photography".

Yes, I would say that the latter is how I feel. If one accepts Pashis's definition, than this follows. But please read the important remarks under the last quote below.

Originally posted by Bear_Music:

What it boils down to, Arcady, is that you're taking the position of a "purist"; it sounds to most of us like you're saying something like this:

Photography, of all the arts, is the only one that can deal precisely with the here-and-now, without embellishment or adornment. Any work made with a camera that does not adhere to this philosophy of "the decisive moment" is not, by my definition, "photography", but should instead be lumped with (say) the decorative arts in general as an object designed to please and flatter.

Putting the negative spin ("designed to please and flatter") on non-photographic images is, really, a wrong thing to do, I have always said that other arts are just as respectable as photography.

Another point is that the camera, by design, records, as you say, the here-and-now, so this is why the controversy in this discussion has been around the things that happen in the *post-processing* stage. My claim is that too much post-processing destroys the wonderful and exciting link of a photograph to the time-space captured in it, and, thus, turn a photograph into something else, a photo-painting, for the lack of a better word.

Edited: some minor improvements.

Message edited by author 2007-03-07 20:42:32.
03/07/2007 08:47:26 PM · #92
Originally posted by zeuszen:

As an illustration, here is an excerpt from Olson's "Kinfgishers", in a somewhat less "lyrical" style than Creeley's.

Thanks for the example. I have to say, that, having printed both poems on paper, I had difficulty comprehending them (well, it was easier with the example Robert provided).

Nevertheless, I think that, even though I could not experience the idea, I can understand it on a rational level. Please see my response to Robert's post and let me know if I understand it correctly.
03/08/2007 12:10:13 AM · #93
Originally posted by agenkin:

...I have to say, that, having printed both poems on paper, I had difficulty comprehending them (well, it was easier with the example Robert provided)....


That's the thing, A. There is no poem to comprehend. The poem is, the way a chair or stone is. It is very much an object or, if you will, an "esoteric document" (a term originally coined by Robert Duncan, if my memory serves), even to the author.

We are accustomed to conventions of a closed poetry, which (probably falsely, but certainly with some arrogance) has poets as purveyors of meaning, whereas open poetry (projective verse) has poets themselves in awe at the possibility of taking in verse the way we look at and esteem, say, a painting by Bracque, Picasso or Rauschenberg for what it is and without any presumptions.

Just read or hear the poem for the news, not the gravity.
And when Robert speaks of "a picture in words" and a "mental snapshot", I think, it might help to ask what the hell it is such a poetry is hammering out that is so different from any idea. And that idea, too, in English, means nothing but 'form'.

The mental snapshot, to be sure,
is content, with the form of it shaping as it comes,
the way light is reflected, the way
events, hurricanes, thought happens,
wham!

And metaphors too, in the practice of authenticating a natural process,
are less carefully crafted (as many critics appear to be fond of) but occur
as if, and as rarely,
as nature's response to atrophy.

It is, with this poetry, the play of the mind the poet is after,
nothing arcane or "subconscious" and also
nothing self-consciously composed via "characters written on paper"
but had plainly via the ear,

the mnemonic music of the blood,
syllable, breath, one

realization immediately
following the next, the way

light reflects
human sound

'The blue dogs rue'.*

As abruptly.

* From 'the moon is the number 18' by Charles Olson

Message edited by author 2007-03-09 11:08:37.
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