unsure shot
Interesting one this. Since last year I've been agonising about how to express a question to do with point of view in film and photography particularly. Though it is also applicable to painting and drawing, and to the way we see things around us every day. Partly there were films that started me thinking - especially re-watching Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, and partly it was thinking about how the scripts I've been writing might be realised visually. Chris Marker's San Soleil, and the Polish brothers' Northfork possibly began to clarify things. But up until this week I still couldn't formulate a coherent approach. Even thinking about the work of Chris Doyle, where framing, and breaking up the traditional format is important, or Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation, where depth and distance are used more than horizontal relationships across the screen didn't help very much. The difficulty was in approaching the issue as one of framing, as you'll see.
This week (Tuesday May 24 in fact) I bought myself a digital camera with movie mode. I've long wanted a camera to capture bits of Manchester on my travels around the city, and I'd also like to start shooting and editing my own short installation-type videos. So since then I've been experimenting with the camera, and managed to learn much more than I ever did with my Hi-8 - my fault, I was lazy with it, and never gave much thought to what I was actually putting in the viewfinder. The first thing I realised was that what's interesting isn't just what you frame (or the way you frame it), it can also be what's blocked, both within the frame and by extension by the frame itself.
But of course that wasn't the whole story. It was only when I started trying to shoot a piece in my flat on Wednesday that I realised I'd been approaching things in entirely the wrong way. Obviously, given this history, it wasn't even the images that first tipped me off about my mistake. No, it was trying to come up with words for the images. No matter how brutally I edited them, how mundane I tried to make the text, and how much I made them subordinate to the visuals, the overall effect was pretentious in a bad way. Pretentious in that cautious, self-regarding way that sucks all life and adventure out of work - I know it because I'm really fucking prone to it.
So, I started again, attempting to recreate the same shots, only this time without the pompous verbals. The result was static, portentous, boring and pointless. I still believed the basic shots were fine, but it was clear that something left them lifeless. It looked like I might have to clear my head and ignore the film for a while. Then Thursday morning as I was heading to work to have my intelligence and will sucked out through my nose I realised what had eluded me.
What worked best about the moving images for me were their 'organic' elements. The slight movements caused by holding the camera with nothing to steady it, whether they be shake, undulations to match my breathing, or the movement caused by walking with the camera. And the more deliberate movements, when I tried to pass the camera's eye over what interested me visually. What worked less well were the times when the camera was still, or nearly still. Clearly there can be value in holding some shots for an extremely long time, but I had not much more than seven minutes available, and lots that I wanted to show. It didn't leave me long enough to expand any the shots for an interesting length of time, or at least not without seriously deforming the film and drawing attention away from the rest.
It also occurred to me that there was a danger, familiar from a lot of 'arthouse' and 'intelligent' film-making, as well as from photography, of creating dead images. When the image is too carefully composed, when the image has been conceived of purely as a balanced, finished frame, it somehow fails to lift off the page or screen. Essentially it seems that while the same image would work as a painting or drawing, a 'manual' image as it were, as a photographic image it fails. The reason would appear to be that in 'manual' images the 'identity' of the work is in the lines and colours, the marks made by the artist, the choices made about how to represent the subject. In photographic images there can of course be manipulation, but the 'identity' of the work rests more in the subject itself. And because the artist leaves fewer obvious marks, the entire field of the image becomes the subject, the composition, though always important, is made even more prominent. It is the most obvious choice, other than subject, that the artist has made. So the more self-sufficient the composition, the less engagement the viewer has, except to pick out detail within the frame. In other words there's a tendency for 'manual' work to be more of a dialogue between artist and subject, a conversation that the viewer can become engaged in. The work is incomplete as it were, whereas the photographic image is more of a definitive, final statement. You can see this in the work of acclaimed photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Sebastiao Salgado. Their supporters would claim the work shows a humane ethic at work, but for me, much as I admire some of their pictures, they seem dogmatic and closed.
From here I reasoned that if over-composed, static framing tends to kill photographic images, especially those that are minimally tampered with, then less composed, more dynamic framing brings the image to life. Hence in still photography some blurred, out of focus, tilted angle, or otherwise unstable or technically incompetent shots have more interest than many carefully structured pictures. But of course, we can't put the blame solely on composition or over-application of skill. It would be ridiculous for me to suggest that uncomposed, random photos or sections of film are necessarily going to be better. A good number will be just bad, incoherent, pointless and ugly. What I do believe is that the skill of a photographer or filmmaker as a visual artist lies in setting up that dialogue between themselves and the subject, and between the work and it's viewers that I mentioned earlier. That dialogue, given that the image itself has less of an 'identity', in part must come from a different approach to framing and composition.
It is known that our brains find naturalistic art less satisfactory than art which exaggerates features, which might look real but deviates from nature. Photographic reproduction, if you know how to read 2-dimensional images, is for the most part blandly naturalistic. What we need to find, to 'rescue' photography from arid, unmoving technicality, are ways of exaggerating and deviating. This could be through lighting, different colour casts, digital or manual manipulation of the image, images unrecognisable as the subject, or any number of techniques for the same purpose. What interests me, and what I started to try and do, was adopt two techniques that I think are related. The first, and one known to visual artists for centuries, is to break up the frame. To create a frame or frames within the frame itself, whether an identical or similar shape, or completely different. The other, less easy to explain, is to suggest a world beyond the frame, to make the image in some way insufficient. To make the image interesting in itself, but also clearly subordinate or related to something just outside the frame. In a sense the dialogue the artist sets up must rely more on what isn't shown than on what is. This is easier with a moving image than a static one. An image that moves, in the sense of tracking for instance, especially a handheld image, can focus on a subject while still showing other things peripherally or fleetingly. The still image has to imply much more, for instance by obscuring parts of things with other objects in the frame or by the frame itself.
So finally, having determined what I think works in photography and film, I can formulate the question I was struggling with before I got my camera. It's this, why is it so surprising, refreshing and satisfying when a photo or piece of film genuinely makes us question what's beyond the frame, or wonder what another angle or reversed view might look like? It's because these are questions that we ask ourselves in everyday life when we concentrate on what we see. It's because we're used to images that attempt to be definitive and self-sufficient. And it's because the artist has bothered to set up a dialogue within the frame, and isn't just using the frame as a vehicle for something they've already finished. The image isn't simply a descripition of parts of a debate better articulated by other means, it is the debate, even if you don't know how to put it in words. It's an attempt to find something, figure something out.
As a contentious aside I'd like to say that I think this is why photography is badly suited for landscapes. Photographed landscapes are boring, because landscapes are difficult to compose in interesting ways. They rely on the 'identity' of the image more strongly than any other kind of picture.
This week (Tuesday May 24 in fact) I bought myself a digital camera with movie mode. I've long wanted a camera to capture bits of Manchester on my travels around the city, and I'd also like to start shooting and editing my own short installation-type videos. So since then I've been experimenting with the camera, and managed to learn much more than I ever did with my Hi-8 - my fault, I was lazy with it, and never gave much thought to what I was actually putting in the viewfinder. The first thing I realised was that what's interesting isn't just what you frame (or the way you frame it), it can also be what's blocked, both within the frame and by extension by the frame itself.
But of course that wasn't the whole story. It was only when I started trying to shoot a piece in my flat on Wednesday that I realised I'd been approaching things in entirely the wrong way. Obviously, given this history, it wasn't even the images that first tipped me off about my mistake. No, it was trying to come up with words for the images. No matter how brutally I edited them, how mundane I tried to make the text, and how much I made them subordinate to the visuals, the overall effect was pretentious in a bad way. Pretentious in that cautious, self-regarding way that sucks all life and adventure out of work - I know it because I'm really fucking prone to it.
So, I started again, attempting to recreate the same shots, only this time without the pompous verbals. The result was static, portentous, boring and pointless. I still believed the basic shots were fine, but it was clear that something left them lifeless. It looked like I might have to clear my head and ignore the film for a while. Then Thursday morning as I was heading to work to have my intelligence and will sucked out through my nose I realised what had eluded me.
What worked best about the moving images for me were their 'organic' elements. The slight movements caused by holding the camera with nothing to steady it, whether they be shake, undulations to match my breathing, or the movement caused by walking with the camera. And the more deliberate movements, when I tried to pass the camera's eye over what interested me visually. What worked less well were the times when the camera was still, or nearly still. Clearly there can be value in holding some shots for an extremely long time, but I had not much more than seven minutes available, and lots that I wanted to show. It didn't leave me long enough to expand any the shots for an interesting length of time, or at least not without seriously deforming the film and drawing attention away from the rest.
It also occurred to me that there was a danger, familiar from a lot of 'arthouse' and 'intelligent' film-making, as well as from photography, of creating dead images. When the image is too carefully composed, when the image has been conceived of purely as a balanced, finished frame, it somehow fails to lift off the page or screen. Essentially it seems that while the same image would work as a painting or drawing, a 'manual' image as it were, as a photographic image it fails. The reason would appear to be that in 'manual' images the 'identity' of the work is in the lines and colours, the marks made by the artist, the choices made about how to represent the subject. In photographic images there can of course be manipulation, but the 'identity' of the work rests more in the subject itself. And because the artist leaves fewer obvious marks, the entire field of the image becomes the subject, the composition, though always important, is made even more prominent. It is the most obvious choice, other than subject, that the artist has made. So the more self-sufficient the composition, the less engagement the viewer has, except to pick out detail within the frame. In other words there's a tendency for 'manual' work to be more of a dialogue between artist and subject, a conversation that the viewer can become engaged in. The work is incomplete as it were, whereas the photographic image is more of a definitive, final statement. You can see this in the work of acclaimed photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Sebastiao Salgado. Their supporters would claim the work shows a humane ethic at work, but for me, much as I admire some of their pictures, they seem dogmatic and closed.
From here I reasoned that if over-composed, static framing tends to kill photographic images, especially those that are minimally tampered with, then less composed, more dynamic framing brings the image to life. Hence in still photography some blurred, out of focus, tilted angle, or otherwise unstable or technically incompetent shots have more interest than many carefully structured pictures. But of course, we can't put the blame solely on composition or over-application of skill. It would be ridiculous for me to suggest that uncomposed, random photos or sections of film are necessarily going to be better. A good number will be just bad, incoherent, pointless and ugly. What I do believe is that the skill of a photographer or filmmaker as a visual artist lies in setting up that dialogue between themselves and the subject, and between the work and it's viewers that I mentioned earlier. That dialogue, given that the image itself has less of an 'identity', in part must come from a different approach to framing and composition.
It is known that our brains find naturalistic art less satisfactory than art which exaggerates features, which might look real but deviates from nature. Photographic reproduction, if you know how to read 2-dimensional images, is for the most part blandly naturalistic. What we need to find, to 'rescue' photography from arid, unmoving technicality, are ways of exaggerating and deviating. This could be through lighting, different colour casts, digital or manual manipulation of the image, images unrecognisable as the subject, or any number of techniques for the same purpose. What interests me, and what I started to try and do, was adopt two techniques that I think are related. The first, and one known to visual artists for centuries, is to break up the frame. To create a frame or frames within the frame itself, whether an identical or similar shape, or completely different. The other, less easy to explain, is to suggest a world beyond the frame, to make the image in some way insufficient. To make the image interesting in itself, but also clearly subordinate or related to something just outside the frame. In a sense the dialogue the artist sets up must rely more on what isn't shown than on what is. This is easier with a moving image than a static one. An image that moves, in the sense of tracking for instance, especially a handheld image, can focus on a subject while still showing other things peripherally or fleetingly. The still image has to imply much more, for instance by obscuring parts of things with other objects in the frame or by the frame itself.
So finally, having determined what I think works in photography and film, I can formulate the question I was struggling with before I got my camera. It's this, why is it so surprising, refreshing and satisfying when a photo or piece of film genuinely makes us question what's beyond the frame, or wonder what another angle or reversed view might look like? It's because these are questions that we ask ourselves in everyday life when we concentrate on what we see. It's because we're used to images that attempt to be definitive and self-sufficient. And it's because the artist has bothered to set up a dialogue within the frame, and isn't just using the frame as a vehicle for something they've already finished. The image isn't simply a descripition of parts of a debate better articulated by other means, it is the debate, even if you don't know how to put it in words. It's an attempt to find something, figure something out.
As a contentious aside I'd like to say that I think this is why photography is badly suited for landscapes. Photographed landscapes are boring, because landscapes are difficult to compose in interesting ways. They rely on the 'identity' of the image more strongly than any other kind of picture.
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