Carucci

I'd like to direct you to the website of Elinor Carucci, a woman I once studied photography with:

At the time, she had recently finished 'Closer' (the body of work linked to above). I found it (and her) so entrancing. The work is quiet, intimate, and mysterious. You feel as if you live in her dark house full of dark haired family. 'Diary of a Dancer' I thought disappointing - too conceptual and messy where the previous work was concise. Her new stuff, though, looks very good to me, a natural extension of her best.

My favorite is the picture of her body after the c section. Powerful, full. She worked as a belly dancer, which makes this picture somehow more meaningful to me. Giving birth reshapes your body, and that seems more *something* in a woman who depended on having it the way it was.

I had forgotten, but she was actually pregnant with her twins when she was teaching us, and taking a five hour train every week on her commute. The doctor told her she needed to rest more, so she would lie down on the floor of class and hold discussion from there.

Old Photos

I miss 35 mm so, so much. And yes, I could shoot in film if I wanted, but it's a real pain to get it developed and to print it. The cost is especially prohibitive. Grr.

I think what I love about film cameras are 1 - the click of the shutter 2 - the way pictures look like what I was looking at. No, they don't look *exactly* like what I was looking at, obviously there are constraints (in color reproduction especially), constructions when you print (how dark is it, how white, should I lighten that corner?), but for the most part the chemical process of molecules absorbing reflected protons gets you something very like the picture in your head.

And furthermore, it's easy to understand exactly what is happening at each step of the process (light bounces off object, light hits photo-absorbing film, chemicals slough off the parts of the film where photons were absorbed, light passes through variably dense film and hits photo absorbing paper, chemicals darken paper accordingly). My understanding of a digital camera is something like the following - I own a magic box with an evil demon inside, light goes in and the demon puts a picture out that looks kinda like the light that goes in.

Anyway, the point of all this is that I recently scanned a number of old photos, some in color some in black and white. The quality is terrible, but at least they are, in a way, safe from cats and flooding. Here are a few of my favorites -

Under a banyon tree.
Family in an Adirondack river.
Rain in Harvard Square.
A game of solitaire in a cabin.
Little birds!
Little green things.

It Matters if it's Black and White

Lately I've been trying to write a paper about black and white photography and the workings of the human eye, but its not quite coming together right so I thought I'd try the idea out here.

So, the back of the eye is covered in light-detecting cells called rods and cones. Rods are responsible for 'black and white' vision (cones sense colors.)

If you stare at a completely black surface long enough, your rods, which initially send the signal 'this is black' to your brain, will adjust and instead send the signal 'this is middle grey'. The same thing happens with a white surface - your eyes acclimate until the brain treats it like middle grey. This might seem strange, but it's a very useful phenomenon. It's actually the same thing that happens when your eyes adjust to a dark room, or a bright day. If you adjust to the amount of light coming in, you're better able to compare the things around you to each other, no matter how dark or light it is.

There is a way, though, to prevent the eye from treating either a black surface or a white surface as middle grey. If you place black and white side by side, your rods don't adjust. And, in fact, they send stronger 'this is black' and 'this is white' signals than they would without the juxtaposition. There is also a good reason for this - the brain is finely tuned to parse edges. It works hard to make edges salient so that you can tell where one object ends and another begins. As a result, your perceived contrast between a dark surface and a light surface is not just a function of how different the two surfaces naturally are, it involves your brain upping the perceived difference so that you can really pick it out.

(Incidentally, you also do this with color. A red surface and a green surface side by side will look redder and greener than they would individually. Ditto blue and yellow.)

How does this apply to black and white photography? Mmm, so, in intro photo classes, the teacher will make it abundantly, completely clear that when printing your photo you should always make sure that the brightest part of the picture is completely white, and the darkest part is as black as it can go - 'Get your blackest black and your whitest white.' This rule is so ubiquitous that when a professional photographer fails to do so, the choice usually makes a statement in itself. Photos without a high contrast don't quite...draw the eye. They don't look very snappy, they don't give you that excited-beautiful picture look.

Low contrast compared to...

High contrast -

My idea is that these phenomena are related - the reason black and white photographs look best with a high contrast is that black and white in juxtaposition look blacker and whiter than they do on their own. But there are a few problems: 1) even photographs printed in middle gray are 'fixed' by the brain so the edges look more salient 2) this idea doesn't explain why high-contrast photos are more appealing, just why they look so durn contrast-y.

Thoughts? Anyone?

Misposed

Sometimes when you're about, photographing, something happens and suddenly you just see a picture coming together and it's perfect, and you whip out the camera and snap it! And afterwards you feel this amazing rush, like, I can't believe that just happened! I can't believe the world lined up in that way and allowed me to make this image that is too right to be real.

Here is an example of mine, from a summer afternoon when my little sister was coming back from the garden with her take:

It isn't an amazing art photograph or anything, but there was something about the light, the insane green, the budding fruit and the girl, it all just felt right. And when I saw the photo, I wasn't disappointed.

But sometimes these moments of ecstasy go wrong. You feel that glory, and then the actual photograph is just...not. And if you're a young (or just stupidly in love) photographer photographing the object of your affection, the chances it will go wrong seem...higher than usual.

The problem with photographing someone you're in love with is that you *always* think they look great. And there's something so fascinating about their face and isn't their hair so beautiful, and look at their lovely hands la la la la la. The inspiration is there in the same way, but it comes from something else. Unfortunately for everyone else who isn't in love with your boyfriend or girlfriend they're just flattering photos of moderately attractive people.