After the Gap

Matthew did take the turban off; in fact, he took everything off, showed himself as he was. He's a portraitist, so was capable of giving me a portrait.

I'm going to post the portrait series that has grown since then on my website . These are pictures which have resulted from a desire to photograph people rather than things, and from a continued grapple with the problem of high-resolution colour photographs. Meanwhile, here's Matthew.

The big image, particularly the museum-oriented one, can have an alienating effect on the viewer. It is very difficult, sometimes impossible, to become as one with the picture, a process which occurs in a delightfully satisfying way with all other figurative visual arts to which the viewer is attracted.

The Boring Old Fart has been more than helpful in attempts to get to the bottom of this apparent problem. He suggested that it would be worthwhile trying to find out what's going on when we look. This led to the Bible of seeing, Vision Science, (Stephen E. Palmer, MIT Press 1999). For all I know, it's already out of date but, even if that's so, it creates a fundamental shift in an understanding of how we see.

Cutting to the chase, I am now convinced that attempts to make photographs more "realistic" are the root of the alienation problem. When we look at a painting, however super-real it might be, there comes a close-point where we can see the brush strokes. This allows us to become complicit with the artist, to form a direct connection, which then admits us to the interior world of the picture. The viewer can then move in and out, look at the picture as an object, go through it as a gateway, and taste its constituent parts. In short, it allows us to see in something like the way the artist intended.

The processes of sharpening and noise reduction in photography have the unintentional effect of preventing the possibility of this happening in the print. Their purpose is to remove, as far as possible, any awareness of the pixel. This implies a lack of respect for the very thing that makes these pictures possible. Further, pixels are what we use to see - they are the starting point for the vision process.

These little workhorses act both individually and in concert. It is the relationship between them that creates the image we see. Realising this, I have been attempting to give the pixel the clear light it deserves. If they are squeezed into smaller spaces, they group together in natural alliances, and produce something like fractal versions of themselves. These groupings can open up that gateway which was formally closed to photographs.

All this, of course, is about the photograph as an object, which is my main concern. Sharpening and noise reduction are completely valid in the photograph as a record, when the object itself should be as transparent as possible.

I will continue to post on Photo-Bof about progress. Should anyone happen on this blog, I'd be more than happy to enter into debate with them about all this. In the meanwhile, let's all show a little bit more respect for the pixel.