Reading Photographs
Jack Leigh
Last week we explored the power of silence. By letting go of names and words that are too small to hold our experiences, we challenge our limiting beliefs, liberate our imaginations, and return to a sensual, dynamic, and gestural relationship to life.
As Arthur Zajonc reminded us in our week two reading, sight and insight depend on each other for vision, perception, and meaningful Seeing. Otherwise, we are seeing through a glass darkly.
This week we will be exploring the role of sight and insight when viewing our own and others' photographs.
Michelle Dunn Marsh, in her primer Reading Photographs, a small book workbook inspired by the work of Minor White and Walter Chappell, had this to say when considering how we look at photographs:
Vision is active, Without necessarily being aware of it, we are always perceiving relationships between what we see in the world, and ourselves. We often experience photographs not as we read words–through the parts of our brain that interpret abstraction–but as we see. This means we are subconsciously completing what is in front of us visually through mental associations with it.
As we explored in week two, these subjective ways of seeing are informed by how we perceive ourselves, the unique experiences each of us carries, as well as the cultural experiences that make up our worldview.
Marsh suggests that before viewing photographs, it is helpful to make a list of five words/phrases that describe yourself. Since questions of identity are so trapping and complicated, and feelings of identity can shift and change moment by moment (if we are lucky), I find it more useful to explore the following:
List five words that describe yourself and/or your deeply held values.
List five words or phrases that describe your current (or very recent) lived/embodied experience. These observations might require a bit more introspection. Maybe you are feeling tired, or excited. Maybe you are pondering some important questions, or just read a book that has your imagination all stirred up. Or perhaps you have been cleaning out your studio, or just recently moved and things feel scattered.
The goal here is to center ourselves in our own experience by noticing how past and present inform our viewpoint. This is our chance to bring sight and insight into conscious awareness.
Next, Marsh suggests a time three-part process, that she calls “Experience, Facts, and Feelings.
Before knowing anything at all about the photographer's intentions, choose a photograph and explore this three-part process below.
3. Experiences: with a timer set for two minutes do the following:
Record your experience. This is a totally open exploration. All thoughts, feelings, sensations, questions, observations, and responses are welcome.
4. Facts: with a timer set for two minutes do the following:
Record the facts about the photograph. Focus entirely on what you can see. Examples are the shape of the objects, their color, what is contained within the frame, how the photograph is presented, etc. If you are guessing, it is not a fact.
5. Feelings (subjective response): with a timer set for two minutes do the following:
Express your feelings, this works best using I statements. Note any confusion you feel, any sensations that arise, pose questions, note any connections you might make between this image and other creative works you have seen. Here we aren’t describing the photograph itself, but the feelings we have when engaging with the photograph. Example: Not :” that girl looks lost”, but “I feel lost when I look at this girl
6. Now, circle back to the photographer. Familiarize yourself with the photographer by reading their biography and any information you might find about the project, exhibition, or story from which this photograph emerged. If the photograph stands alone, it is totally okay.
Who are they?
Where are they from?
Where was the photograph made?
When was the photograph made?
Why was this photograph made?
What was going on in the world when the photograph was made?
Was this photograph part of a larger body of work?
Note any other points of relevance that might inform their relationship to the photograph.
Note any technical information about the image, including scale and materials if provided.
7. Ponder the following questions:
Did information about the photographer impact your reading of the photograph?
Is it helpful to explore the life and intentions of the photographer?
Is it important to consider these things when looking at photographs?
Or should the photograph stand on its own?
8. Now, revisit any questions you posed, experiences you had, or feelings you conjured, in the “experience, fact, feelings” review and ponder any or all of the following questions:
Did the information you learned about the photographer change your experiences or feeling about the photograph?
Did it expand or contract the sense of meaning?
Did it weaken or strengthen your feelings about the image?
Does knowing more strengthen or diminish your experience or feelings about the photograph?
Finally, let’s revisit Goethe’s recommendations for how to enter into a contemplative relationship with phenomenology.
cultivating sensual and emotional awareness to experience phenomena as fully as possible.
observing with patience and rigor
deepening a sense of wonder
noticing and attending to connections between phenomena by using intuition to both combine and go beyond the previous observation. .
Marsh’s exercise and Goethe’s contemplative practice share some things in common. Step one “experience” is akin to Geothe’s cultivating sensual awareness. Step two “facts” can be likened to “observing with patience and vigor”, and “feelings” offers us a path to “deepening a sense of wonder”. In many ways, the whole process needs to be wrapped in wonder. Through a sense of wonder, we open the door for both the facts and the sensual and emotional connection to arise fresh and whole.
I find that Goethe’s final instruction takes us one step further. By employing Goethe’s two intertwining practices; seeing and beholding, and being one with the subject we begin to really notice and attend to the connections between phenomena and enter into an open space that includes both knowing and not-knowing.
Goethe understood that images were more than the sum of their parts. He believed that art had a life beyond both the viewers' subjective experience or the conscious intent of the maker. For him, the subject itself (and the milieu or landscape of the photography) had its own reality, and in that way could offer something more. By noticing and attending to the connections between the observable and nameable reality and the deeper emotional (or even spiritual reality) of the subject, the viewer was invited to be moved, touched, and most importantly changed in the interaction.
The process is very circular. In some ways, it is as simple as bringing our first-person “experiences” full circle. We start where we are. By trusting our experiences, opening up to wonder, and being open to change, we go through a deepening process. Curiosity breaks us out of the limitations imposed by habit, and then returns us right back to our embodied experience, but changed. If we are lucky, that cycle will be repeated often.
David Abrams, while not speaking of art or image-making, offered this observation that arose for him while noticing the power of perception. For him, it was akin to touch.
The senses are complementary powers evolved in complex interdependence with one another. Each sense is a unique modality of this body’s existence, yet in the activity of perception, these divergent modalities intercommunicate and overlap. It is thus that a raven soaring in the distance is not, for me, a mere visual image; as I follow it with my eyes, I inevitably feel the stretch and flex of its wings with my own muscles, and its sudden swoop toward the nearby trees is a visceral as well as a visual experience for me. The raven’s loud, guttural cry, as it swerves overhead, is not circumscribed within a strictly audible field – it echoes through the visible, immediately animating the visible landscape with the reckless style or mood proper to that jet black shape. My various senses, diverging as they do from a single, coherent body, coherently converge, as well, in the perceived thing, just as the separate perspectives of my two eyes converge upon the raven and convene there into a single focus. My senses connect up with each other in the things I perceive, or rather each perceived thing gathers my senses together in a coherent manner and it is this that enables me to experience the thing itself as a center of forces, as another nexus of experience, as a holy Other.
This week I would like you to practice the “reading photographs” exercises above (#1-8). And if you feel especially adventurous, incorporate some of Goethe’s philosophy and suggestions and ponder the following questions:
Does imagining the subject of the photographs as having a voice change anything?
Can you imagine the photograph as having a meaning beyond that of the photographer or the viewer?
Does going deeper change anything at all about how the photographs move in you?
Please try this with at least one photograph in preparation for next week’s practice group. We will be using an abridged version of this practice when sharing photographs next time. Please be prepared to share your weekly practice, and select at least one photograph that we can use for this exercise with the group.
