ooooooo what a cute baby. I will comment with something pithy and whatever later...this moment is about my immediate emotional response to what I am seeing. I am frustrated trying to see what I do not know how to see yet so here goes...
chocolate face and arms outreached the baby is beautiful and looking to the photographer for interaction. the baby interacts with the camera incidentally it is really me (the viewer) who is engaged by such a blatant exhibition of trust and freedom
This first image is like a banana peel. One second I'm sitting in my chair, the next second the the weight of this bustling, hazy world of stuff comes at me in full force. Pressing and poking me from every angle.
A chocolaty mouth charges towards me. I fall backwards, I don't hit carpet... I hit wet grass. All the weight of an earthy park hits me. Itchy grass, sticky fingers. Bright light tears through. But this gaze...I don't feel human. I think I just turned into a dog.
Woah naked woman. Contained in a thick gray rectangle. I'm not dislocated, she's dislocated. She doesn't take place in the past to me. To me, this picture was never taken somewhere, it just exists in my now. I look away, to my bed. But she's still staring at me.
I don't see her, but I feel her eyes and skin still staring at me. She's not human, she's flat. No organs, pure personality flattened onto my plane of sight. What do I say...Hello?
I did not know life could go this way. Pure innocence and unadulterated joy at eating chocolate. I do not know how he is eating this chocolate concoction. He should have more on his nose if he’s fully eating with his face. But he doesn’t which means he’s eating the chocolate in a purely mouthy-sensation-way. He’s in the zone of eating something normally forbidden, and he is taking advantage of it fully. This picture is for his papa. Felix is walking trustingly towards the camera, reaching out for it, wanting to play with it. He is in mid-sentence, telling his papa he wants see it.
First impression: passport photo. A white background with a head and shoulder shot. She appears nude, like she doesn’t want any barriers between her and the viewer. She is nude not only by the absence of her clothes but also by the eye-bags in the picture. She is not trying to cover it up with make-up. Her hair is not perfect. She’s not done up. This is contrary to how it is today, with girls putting on their best for the picture. This picture is very matter of fact, in your face. There is a stillness about this picture. She almost fades into the background like a ghost. But her eyes are very much alive.
The toddler is capturing his most complimentary facebook photo. His arm is outstretched- it is he that is the photographer.
Ok, that aside, the viewer is faced with two photographs that place him or her in ostensibly similar positions. The viewer stands right in the face of two people who stare him or her straight in the eye. The woman allows the onlooker complete comfort in that gaze. She gives a gaze of undersanding, calmly content with the face to face interaction.
The scene with the boy is clearly less calm. He seems to engage the viewer making him or her much more conscious of their being in the scene. Rather than standing still like the woman, he seems to be coming at you. A chocolaty encounter seems almost unavoidable. And yet the viewer is not there but completely removed from any interaction. The boy stands there with that perpetually engaging gaze, ready to bring any and everybody into it. And yet he is completely unaware of the viewer's presence.
Both are candid portraits of youth. The woman stares with a frank gaze, the baby frankly engages the camera. The baby one made me sort of anxious. No idea why. Maybe because it reminded me of a time that is long gone when I was able to walk around with chocolate all over my face and not care. Long gone are the days.
The lady one is refreshing, if not because she isn't "object" for the camera but also not afraid to look the camera in its "eye" and engage with the audience.
A candid camera-phone photograph sits on top of a more deliberate portrait like a heavy head on a strong neck. Without the neck, the head is just a square; without the square, the neck is just a rectangle.
The carefree child wears a chocolate Vandyke beard; the woman wears the concerned look of a mother, yet the relationship between the two is uncertain. The reality is that the woman's expression is fairly neutral; there is nothing inherent in her look that can be traced back to the child. Thus, these images are testament to the rhetoric of arrangement. Only by virtue of the fact that these images are arranged one on top of the other does the woman's look appear to be concerned.
How could these images speak to one another? The child's face is covered in chocolate, he wears a long sleeved shirt, his hair is unkempt (maybe even wet), and he stands in a green park with trees and grass and a picnic table. The woman appears to be naked, her hair is tied back, her face is completely clean (without even makeup), and she is surrounded by white nothingness. The most conspicuous similarity between the child and the woman is the fact that each is looking right into the camera -- each is making eye contact with you, the viewer. As the viewer, you complete the visual circuit between you and the two images. They see you seeing them. They see one another through your seeing both of them. This is how they communicate. This is how they speak to one another.
He is hungry, he is eating the world and making a mess. He grabs outside the frame, wanting more. His eyes are chocolate and light, they see and are seen, the objects of his desire reflect and play back. He is growing before our very eyes, seeing and touching and eating the world, no need to separate eyes from mouth, there is chocolate in both. No frame can suspend his urge to become.
She is a lab creature, a fraction of life removed, placed in a vacuum. The color has been sucked out, leaving sterile surroundings and blushless face. All distractions and details are stripped away: this is a human being under control. This picture was no spontaneous event; it was set up as a meticulous experiment. But her eyes shatter the microscope. They break the glass panel between scientist and subject and demand a forbidden and unwelcome intimacy.
one moment was a figure casting bright light in many different ways, as it went with other lights, while "in dark." another moment, if memory recalls correctly, was another figure casting dull light, directly, while "in light." then there was 8:48 am and 7 comments now there's something that looks like the woman who was sitting next to me not 45 minutes ago and something else which i assume is a picture of someone who probably was sitting near me and there's something "leave your comment" REDkREDaREDtREDeREDzREDcREDzREDgRED goes to WORD VERIFICATION katezcg G speterssson **************** BROWN ORANGE WHITE "PUBLISH YOUR COMMENT damn i didn't enter the letters right GREEN helowslw GREEN "command C+V"
This week's blog assignment begs the question as to where the image begins and ends. The image I see before me is two people, in clearly different scenarios but ultimately doing the same thing: looking right at the viewer.
The lively little boy at the top of the image reaches out and looks inquisitively at the viewer; he has life behind his eyes. The bottom part of the image is also looking at the viewer, but lacks the same captivating quality as the person above her...they're both putting the viewer in a very strange position of choosing which of the two to give more attention. I cannot look at them both at the same time, but they can both look at me at the same time. They're both interrogating and engaging the viewer in very different ways, and yet they depend on one another to be seen in a particular way. An image of a child with chocolate on his face only captivates for so long, but a child with chocolate on his face placed on top of a tired, porcelain woman who also stares right into the viewer poses an argument, asks a question, proves a point, "presses onto" the seer in a much different way.
They can't see each other, they aren't looking at each other, they might not even know they've been coupled together in an image but they riff off each other, and in this way, they're intimately related
The child in the first image is reaching for something outside of the frame. He is saying something, perhaps even reaching for me which makes me feel like I should be squatting or kneeling in order to be at his eye level. This is a bit disorienting because I am sitting in a chair at my desk looking at this image.
I feel naked looking at the lady in the second image. I wonder where her top is. One one hand I feel like I should turn away and give her some privacy. But on the other hand, her face permanently lingers in front of me, staring at me straight in the eyes. Her slight smile makes me feel even more uncomfortable. It's as if she's daring me to look at her.
Okay, so I decided that since I have already grasped the whole "A picture is not a representation of something else, it IS a picture" idea, I will just analyze these photos from the perspective of the camera. That is to say, I am going to pretend that the image depicted is all I can see and that I am standing right where the camera is in front of the little kid and the woman.
With that said, this little boy is cute since he is young and naive. He is looking at me like I know something he doesn't, like he doesn't even realize there is chocolate on his face. Judging from his expression, I feel like I am smiling, and definitely mid conversation with him. These last two thoughts are from reading him, but apply to the person behind the camera.
Now regarding the woman in the second photo. I get very little from reading her face. Her expression sort of reflects the fact that I am looking through a camera at her, and that she is in a good mood. This tells me a few things about the situation and about myself, as the person holding the camera. That is, she is here voluntarily, she wants her picture taken, and I am holding a camera.
In both pictures, I imagine these people are thinking many other things. Due to that complication, my interpretations are clouded and unreliable for their objective truth. However, since I am assuming that the world as I sense it(in the place of the camera) IS the actual world, it does not matter what they actually think. It only matters what I sense, and that becomes my reality, the only reality as I know it.
in one, I'm looking at a world, a way of going in which chocolate face and touseled hair are irrelevent, just another state of being, where curiosity grips. That gaze pierces me with curiosity. What am I to this child? What is the world to this child? The blurred backround suggests a world in which there is so much to discover, find, engage with.
it is beautiful
The other gaze seems to already know what I am, and in a sense, have me pegged from the start. The curiosity is replaced by more of a reassured gaze. almost slightly smirking.
The child in this photograph is experiencing all the curiosity that comes along with youth. Questioning the camera and looking longingly into its lens, the child is exploring the unknown. The child is not looking at the viewer but at the technological mysteries of the camera lens. With chocolate on his face the child stands in stark contrast to the woman in the second picture. Without the inhibitions that come with age, the child is comfortable in his messy state, no fear of judgment and no lingering insecurities.
The woman is also staring at the lens. But to the woman, the lens is staring back. The camera, to her, seems to judge the image it photographs, subsequently, making her uncomfortable in her own skin. Yet she is bearing all, no makeup and no fancy hair do. The woman, in this sense is powerful. She understands the human capacity of this technological object to judge those it photographs, yet she never ceases to engage it, staring at it just as it stares at her.
The two pictures are presented together, yet when I click on each they separate. They also suddenly have titles: "Felix_chocolateface" and "dijkstra_girl_naked." These titles become part of the picture I'm viewing, but they only appear when I look at the pictures individually. Returning to the main blog, the two photos simply join the others already on the page and again become separate entities in a group. They don't necessarily have anything to do with each other, unless I want them to. Both the boy and the woman acknowledge the camera in their gazes at it: the boy with a strange wonder in his eyes, the woman with a hint of a smile amidst an appearance of boredom. They're both looking straight into the lense, yet when the photo is developed, they seem to look at the viewer. In the initial taking of the photo, however, they probably didn't expect to "see" multiple viewers staring back at them.
A little boy with half of a forehead, a partial chest and arms is staring right into me. I look below him and see a young, beautiful bust of a woman. Her stare meets mine. I feel them both looking at me at the same time and my sight is doubled. I meet their four eyes with my two, the math doesn’t add up, but it doesn’t have to.
What I find immediately striking about this week's assignment is the contrast between the two photos. The messiness and disorganized appearance of the top image in relation to the minimalism of the bottom photo; the lack of background commotion and the cleanliness of the white backdrop. The eyes of the people penetrate the viewer in different ways. In the top image the bright-eyed excitement of the child generates a sense of newness and curiosity, ignorant to what he stares at and naive due to this lack of experience. The eyes below appear more tired, aged through years of experience; you or whatever the female stares at is neither exciting, new or novel. The images perform the manner in which they want the viewer to see. The top with the vigorous freshness of an initial visual encounter; the bottom clear, vision focused and closed off through experience and mental schema. The two images offer different ways of perceiving similar stimuli, linked by their coexistence in the world and on the blog, yet different in nature of visual affect. These images show you how to see them, demand that you to see them in this way.
(In reference to the 'top' picture.) The first thing that happens to me is that my eyes move from the face to the really bright greenish light. I found it funny because I would look at the face and then instantly shift my gaze to the brightness, but I had to see the face first. That described light jumps at me like it is going to take over the entire frame. The light is not consistent either. For me, that shape of light has so many variations of green, white, grey, sky blue, etc., (I think it is one fantastic representation of marbling) and my sight/self drowns in it.
just following the eye lines from me to the image and the image back at me, i am outnumbered. the number isn't the problem but of simultaneous discordant seeings. by having one image hang over the other it throws me off balance; one seems to comment on how i see the other.
The austere photo has beautiful lines. The neck line, the line that parts here hair, the line of her closed lips, the sloped line of her shoulder all in gentle opposition to the line showing the imperfection in the photo the crease detracting from but adding to her beauty at the same time because her lines are natural and the creased line mechanical.
The photo of the child is beautiful as well, which is why I suppose the two are together... but in such a different way. There are squiggles not lines. the blanket to the left is askew with items on/off and the inbetween state. The mouth distorted by some confection too good to eat neatly, the sun a splotch on the landscape the tables, benches, and various apparatus to the right misshapen but there is no mar upon the photo with all its imperfections. I like that the child is reaching for the camera...another incident of stepping out of the boundaries of the frame.
It doesn’t have to be two different images. Both can be just an image. Heck, my whole screen is an image. However, that kid really pulls me in. It gives such a strong invitation to become an image with him. It extends itself to be locked to his eyes despites all the distractions. It engages so strongly it reassures that we all the same stuff. The lady on the other hand, despites its simplicity and purity, it repels and rejects. I don’t know why. Can’t become an part of an image.
I see myself seeing this person. Let me clarify, I see (my) the photographer's reflection in the eyes of this person, and for a moment, I am the subject of the image's gaze. I know this because I see my reflection in the mirror of the subject's eyes, but this mirror has two faces, and its all a matter of perspective. Whose perspective though? The image's perspective of its viewer? The photographer's creation of a scene? The scene's creation of itself? The nature of this image, as digital facsimile, remembers a time when this scene was a sense.
“I see you looking at me/ I can tell by your eyes that you’re feeling me…” Terrible song, but pulled out of context, these lines seem to apply to the task at hand.
The effect that these images have on me, the viewer, is almost the same—if no different from—looking at someone in real life. But, oh wait, the images ARE reality. There IS a boy and a woman looking right at me. This is probably why I am getting the odd feeling of being seen, as I stare back into their eyes to meet their gaze. Or why I am experiencing some sort of affect. I am not merely seeing images of two people; I am seeing two people. I am seeing reality; I am seeing the world. And the world is looking right back at me.
They see me; looking down on her, looking up at him, yet simultaneously staring at them both, eye to eye, face to face. Where am I? Indoor with her? Outdoor with him? How could I be in both spaces at once? I look up and feel sticky viscosity touching skin. I look down and touch by the very act of my seeing. Yet both remain untouched, unmarked. Different ways of going naked: hers by the visibility of her skin; his in the lack thereof, disclosing his encounter with chocolate and how. Nakedness is inflected onto me; perhaps I too am naked.
Thinking of our class on tuesday and Coffeen's comment about whether or not to respond to the pictures separately implying they are not two separate pictures, maybe even eight, or one...
When I see these images I see them just as I see anything else on the page. I don't see them as anything special, or distinguished from any other image on the blog. The fact that they have been placed on a blog for my viewing does in some way imply their difference to the color of the website or the words on the left describing the class.
I am trying to avoid commenting on anything in particular about the images because I can't really think of anything to say about any particular thing I see in them without giving them some sort of narrative. They are both staring directly at me which instinctively gave me a unnerving feeling. It is almost as if I don't want to look too hard or too long because they will see something in me just as personally as I see them. Almost like I want to hide myself from them because I feel so close in proximity. It's unnerving to look too close, but intriguing at the same time.
These two images are reflections of one another. They demonstrate the ability images have to situate the world as things. The gaze is able to palpate its audience. They are no longer ‘pictures’ of people but are another aspect of “stuff” that makes up the world. The gaze draws you in just as much as if they were physically in front you; which when you “see” them, they are. There is no difference between the image and the actual person. They are one and the same and the gaze is able to bring that notion into fruition. I can see the world in these images and in doing so, I see my self and my self being seen.
What? What! You both are making me feel so obligated to this. Stop. Stop looking at me please for Christ sake, look at each other or something, please. You don't understand I'm sensitive to this eye contact stuff, you know? I guess it's a city-dwelling defense mechanism or something. Like the way they say animals in wild know not to go to the watering hole at certain times, avoidance, the best defense is a good defense. Fine you two.
You're filthy honestly you disgust me. You're like a bobbling drudge of responsibility. And I can say that with a clean conscience because you're not mine. If you where, you know "mine" I'd think you where so cute and I'd say things like, "there's my little man, oh yes he is, oh yes he is." my voice would become progressively more annoying as I do this "my little handsome man, the little handsome man!" What the hell have you been eating? Generally the idea is to put the food in the mouth you know?
We are of the sensible, and before we forgot about that life was totally awesome. Back when chocolate belonged on our faces, we knew we were of the sensible. Nobody needed to tell us that we were the chocolate and the chocolate was us, because that shit was smeared all over our faces, and that was the way the chocolate went, the way we went with chocolate. Now, I’m nervous when I see a kid bursting toward me with chocolate all over his face. He might get it on me, where it doesn’t belong. I’m happy for him, but I’m well dressed and well laundered. Which is to say I am naked and barren; I hide in my assumed sterility, withdrawn from the world and although I’m clean, I can barely smile. What happened?
Both baby and woman stare at me intently, yet I can only stare at one. This view, this camera, this image, is placing me in a position where I should place equal attention on both images, to meet both stares, but I cannot (physically and otherwise). Because I cannot meet the gaze of both baby and woman, I am forced to choose sides--to look at the infant or the lady? The image thus produces an inevitable and inescapable and uncomfortable position for me to be placed...and so I stare in the middle, hoping that they don't notice that I'm actually not looking at either of them.
I fell, and he's picking me up. She smirks at me and makes me feel silly, yet I'm not convinced it’s the only thing she is doing to me. The images are placed interestingly, I wonder: why him above her? What would this look like with her in his place? Would this image read differently?
He is so embraceable, so trusting. As I look into his eyes, I can see what Pontey means about language and the things it describes when I see more chocolate in his eyes than on his face. With the extended arm out towards me, I feel a sort of tug or pulling on my shirt. I want to move in and give him all the attention he desires like the chocolate on his face. Maybe it’s not me at all he sees; it may be I am the chocolate!
But there she is, standing still, thinking I’m ridiculous. I am forced to stop and be still with her. She IS what calm looks like. The colors are all so light and smooth. Her skin glows in low tones. This image is maybe a powder statue?
Then again, I look back at this chocolate monster with his chocolate eyes begging for attention. I can’t tell which image has more control over me. He wants me to come to him and she wants me to stay still.
The more I look at these pictures, the most uncomfortable I feel. Both of the people in the pictures are looking directly at me as I look at them, but they never change their expression. Meanwhile, the longer I look at them, the most details I notice. I notice that the chocolate around the child's mouth is almost shaped like a moustache, and I think that it is cute. I notice that the woman has bags beneath her eyes, and then I notice that she seems to be unclothed. This makes me feel slightly uncomfortable. My emotions change as I look at the images, but the faces looking back at me never change. It makes me feel as though the faces in the images are not faces or people, they are just images of faces. This then implies that it is not the faces that are making me uncomfortable, or the people in the images. The people whose pictures these are don't even know I exist, must less care if I'm comfortable or not when I look at them. It is only an image that is affecting my emotions with its collection of colors and shapes... if that makes any sense...
The child in the top image shows an interest in whatever is capturing his image, (most likely a camera phone given the quality.) The viewer feels engaged because the image seems to care about the viewer. This is incongruous because the emotion captured was between the child and the camera and the reaction to it is because of a viewer and the image. These two interact but on a level beyond the emotional connection of the viewer and the child. This is a similar reaction as to the lower image. The young woman has no fascination with the camera and seems bored her image does not cause the viewer to connect in the same way as a result.
The image creates a totem pole effect for the respective heads of their subjects. Stacked upon one another, both heads gaze at the observer. Each head has a radically different thoughts and expressions, especially the chocalate covered chief. Thus the image challenges us to be affected in two different ways simultaneously if we consider the image as a whole rather than pairing of two seperate entities. The two faces convey information which plays back on the observers face moments later.
I see people and places. More specifically, people inflecting places and places inflecting people. Crisp, new moments are made as people and places (images and images) collude and collide; an infinitely complex interplay of nuances. The inflected images marble into an intimate embrace; a fortuitous meeting of perfect complements. Now what do I actually mean… Images abound around a young boy and the young boy bounds around images until they begin to merge with one another (chocolate on face), he wears his world. A naked wall frames a naked woman producing inflections of subtlety over severity, allowing woman and wall to remain distinct. Each interplay infinitely inventive.
If there is no ideal vantage point, just the event of me viewing these viewings- framed by the computer screen, ‘window’, and the frame of the blog itself, as well as the fluorescently lit room I am writing this in and the linoleum hallway that stretches behind the monitor- what we have here is a configuration of apposition in which we are now completely involved and thrown into. When my comment finally emerges my image will also be inscribed in this ‘collective image reckoning’ as evidence of my being here but it was already inscribed the second I started looking at these images. It is the elements in apposition that create meaning or at least the dynamic interaction between parts, each one intertwining in the other in this allatonceness as some psychedellic academics or Buddhists might say.
That said, I see these alien figures, these anonymously affecting images and try to make sense of them but it is overwhelming. Since the allatonceness is, well happening all at once and we certainly can’t talk about EVERYTHING that is happening, let us focus on these two ‘pictures’.
These two specimens feel quite different so when they both look at you it is disconcerting. At first glance the boy-image is breaking out of the passive world of being captured. He is uncontained and messy. He is a chocolate tornado in perpetual motion. Almost feral, he draws you into his whirling existence of chocolate and incomprehensible light and noises. The second specimen is a true specimen it seems, naked, invisibly pinned to a blank enclosure. The over all sterility of the photo is scientific she is removed from all dirt. She looks at me and I look at her and the circuit created makes me slightly uncomfortable because she is so angelically sterile. The austere background and purity of her complexion situates her in stark contrast to the chocolate covered little monster.
Their gazes pull me in different ways at the same time. They both look directly at the entity that views them with uncompromising gazes. The child uses brute force and animalism to draw you in and the young woman uses a sedated and subtle emptiness, a gaunt and fragile promise or appeal. The image is subtle and rather beautiful the more I look at it. She is smooth and pure and she makes me feel like a brute or some kind of contaminating agent that ravishes her with my eyes. But I feel overwhelmed I am starting to see her as the boy with the chocolate on my face.
(aloud) “Awe damn. I’m sorry. I didn’t know you wanted some of the chocolate cake/pudding/bar. I would’ve shared if I’d known. Maybe next time we come to the park if you’re really nice to me and you let me know in time you can eat some of it with me.”
[break]
(to self) “I will not acknowledge that I am amused by your banality. I will fight my urge to smile because you are banal and should not be rewarded. But you’re trying too hard for me to really dislike you. This smirk will have to do for both of us.”
These images are charged with the gaze of their subjects, totally inflected by these particular ways of seeing the scene, the event at hand.
I look at the first image and see the child's thriving curiosity, his eager consumption of the world. His giant shining eyes and his chocolate mustache seem ready to take in everything, and his body as a whole anchors everything in the image. The scene of a picnic, normally one for gathering many, is empty but for him, and so his exuberance is free to consume the entire image. The whole scene--in particular, the blanket, the table, his arm--tilts and converges at his hungry face. Even the odd golden-green glow seems not to compete with his all-consuming gaze but to be lit up by his seeing as I am.
In the image below it becomes tempting to juxtapose, to pair the two as opposites, to say the woman is consumed by the scene. After all, her shoulders and neck appear conspicuously devoid of depth and definition, almost blending into the bleak background. But this focuses attention to her clearly defined face, in fact only augmenting the effect of her level gaze. Indeed, her assured eyes seem to do the leveling here. Staring straight in the center of this austere scene, surely this calm, frank manner of seeing smothers the world, evens its edges, and not the other way around.
Childhood to adulthood. Color to bareness. Clothes to nakedness. Crayon pictorial and the captured shot of activity vis-à-vis the controlled shoot of the self upon a blank slate of whitish walls. Think of white light; the refraction of all other colors; the world has been equalized, dulled, inverted. Destruction of the outer for the accentuation of the inner. The containment of the self in extracting from the sensual, the playground, the stimuli: all now absorbed, diffused, and neutralized. Dichotomies of the pure and the sensual. A biblical visual of binaries. The background is not pure white though. It is slightly grayish. The world never has become absolutely transparent for me at least. These whitish plaster walls in front of me have yet to dissolve, the chairs neutralize, the ground unfolds, and I have yet to enter such a room of pure light that objects protruded seemingly out of thin air or have observed a world where light overtook objects and I existed in some chute of invisible absolute space without color. If color exists in material, then this spiritual inkling towards a pure landscape would be a world of immaterial. Color is the world. The material is the playground, whether it be the park or human flesh. It can be the sensual, the world of chocolate lips, curly messy hair, curiosity, sprawled blankets, grass, insects, water jugs, becomes shaded, experienced, crossed off in pseudo-objectivity. Or I can reflect inwardly, make the external world become stale, stable, and dim its coloration with internal reflections. I can engage in a romp of sticky chocolate informality, the ravishing delicious mouth savoring cocoa or I can fast, starve, and try to neutralize the sensual in a romanticized quest for the eyes, where the only cloth and coloration worth delving is the pale elastic skin that stretches out and covers the soul like saran wrap once did over brownies. Is this shift in focus internal, external, intertwinement? Does too much creation, too much stimuli, negate the array, blend the spectrum, and make the background stripped, degaussed, made minimalist as a revolt of sensory overload. Or do we do this in search of some new elixir. Is this a narrative perpetuated in me via influence? Does knowing the science of white light not let me feel the scene as I could have? Can I ever relearn to see childlike with an ever increasing database of my imagination? Can I make my eyes not foremost zoom into eyes? The curve of training is now reverted. The death of science, of atoms, particles, of the unseen. There is so much to see. But still, as much as I look around to the background, I'm naturally, or perhaps unnaturally, evoked again and again to the human affectations, but the longer I stray, the more the blanket has a soul, the light in the trees have an emotive quality, the lapis lazuli water jug flirts, and I see that all the sensitive impressions that I had projected were being projected from the retinas of the two figures in the photo portraits are also in the outer world. And just as I can’t connect with a human without existing with other humans, I had the uncanny epiphany that I can’t connect at all without world and world is connection.
Both images make ambiguous the situation of the viewer with respect to the subject of the image. The perspective of the child, innocently indulging in a chocolate treat, is unclear. Is he examining the camera, as an object? Does he view himself in the lens of the camera (contemplating how he himself is being perceived and recorded by the object)? Is he starting into the eyes of the viewer? The second image presents an altogether different scene. The woman in the photograph is concerned with her self-image, that is, she positions herself with the photograph in mind. In other words, she appears to be posing, and thus views herself through the camera lens (which is arguably different from the child, who is investigating the object itself.)
Lighting, much like the chocolate stained flesh in the above image, suggests chaos, un-domestication by normative human behaviors. The take is there, the indulgence. Everything, eat it. Eat everything. Is it eatable? Who cares? The lighting suggest that there exist a feast and no manners are welcome, no yuppies, no house rules.
Conversely, a below image is lit quite differently. The lighting is domesticated, trained and well-behaved. The lighting suggests manners should be used, the bourgeoisie have the floor and everyone is to act accordingly. The woman is silenced, as she should be – no one, according to the rules, should talk. Can you hear that? Nothing. Silence. Under the fixture of an electronic spotlight a well trained smile emerges, boring is a success, predictability is achieved.
The lighting teases apart these two images. The lighting is loud and uncontrollable on one hand and posture and well-comported on another.
Windbreaker days and apple juice, chocolate spread over faces, tired from climbing around, this boy sees with open, untinged eyes- holding the camera and the viewer in his hand and becoming the Event that destroys the audience. At once I am the child, dropping out of my skin and knowing Play, Wonder, Mess, and Mistake.
A plastered face with dead eyes, page folded over in magazine speaks bare nudity and sterile satisfaction. Clothing and language drop off simultaneously, and "Hello" floats through her dark eye circles, as I hear her nakedness and feel the blueness of her gaze.
Two modes of the photograph: The first - a child's hunger for attention. The child orients the photograph through physical force. Point your camera Here! At Me! Are you looking?? I am the center of attention, I am the most important thing in your world. The second - studies in facial composition and profile. The woman is an object of aesthetic and/or scientific interest. I make no demands on the observer. In my natural state, and stripped of cultural ties/markers, I am shown in the light of my humanity. We are equals.
The experience of seeing is so different when I move slightly to the left or right of the image's gaze than when I am directly in it. Both the image and I move in relationship to each other and affect each other. If I move out of its gaze, out of eye-contact, I feel sort of like an outside observer of an event (which is an event in itself). I change the image in the way I look at it, and the image changes me in the way I feel. But when the image pulls me into its gaze, I feel like I am in the event that I was just observing. The image changes me in the way I look at it, and I change the image in the way it feels.
Eye-contact is so weird. You can almost feel the electricity.
Let's focus on the background. Backgrounds situate the subject of an image within a context, providing a basis for which the viewer can form a narrative for what is captured within the frame. The juxtaposition of these two images brings into focus the powerful role that backgrounds play. Because the woman foregrounds a bleak, uniformly white background bereft of another human presence, as viewers we associate the vibe of the background with the subject. She appears isolated. Likewise, the campsite background implies the presence of others (though not pictured), a fact which the baby's curious facial expression reflects. These two images shed light on a prominent tendency to lend the background authority in structuring our perception of the subject.
It is an event notable for highlighting the difference between "screens" that we respond to. As one image, there is a tension--between the top part of the image in which a face is coming at me, cloyingly sweet, explicitly demanding an engagement by reaching out. The bottom part is different, in the same vein, also prompting an engagement with one barely cocked brow, a vague amusement on her face, certainly withdrawn relative to the other. Its an event to manifest an idea--to me it is says something about how a person is jaded as they age.
Each week, we will consider an image. This image may come from anywhere—from a painting, the news, an art photograph, a picture of my child.
Your job is to read this image. You need write only four lines; you may write more. Inflect the image. Give it a spin. Make us see what we may not be seeing. Take up the image, do something with it, then give it back to us—in words.
The goal is multifold. It is to learn to reckon a diversity of images. It is to learn the art of the riff, the spin, the take. And, in the end, I hope we have created an exquisite symphony, a chorus of voices, each distinct, each singing an image in its own register.
ATTENDANCE IS REQUIRED. You may miss 3 classes during the semester. For each class missed after that, your grade will be lowered a full grade—from an A to a B.
EVERY weekend, I will post an image on this blog. By Thursday's class, you must write a response to that image as a comment on this blog. -You will have to create a Google account. -Please use your name in your identity so I know who you are when you post your comment. If you already have a Google identity but it does not reflect your name, please create a new one. -Your comment can be brief; in fact, it should be—anywhere from 3-10 lines. Try to make it pithy, astute, sharp. -These are not optional: each one you miss will translate into the loss of a full grade for your class participation grade.
There will be three papers scattered through the semester; they will be @ two pages long. These are not optional. If you fail to do one, you will fail the class.
Grading -Class participation: 30% -Paper 1: 20% -Paper 2: 20% -Paper 3: 30% -I WILL NOT GRANT INCOMPLETES.
ooooooo what a cute baby. I will comment with something pithy and whatever later...this moment is about my immediate emotional response to what I am seeing. I am frustrated trying to see what I do not know how to see yet so here goes...
ReplyDeletechocolate face and arms outreached the baby is beautiful and looking to the photographer for interaction. the baby interacts with the camera incidentally it is really me (the viewer) who is engaged by such a blatant exhibition of trust and freedom
This first image is like a banana peel. One second I'm sitting in my chair, the next second the the weight of this bustling, hazy world of stuff comes at me in full force. Pressing and poking me from every angle.
ReplyDeleteA chocolaty mouth charges towards me. I fall backwards, I don't hit carpet... I hit wet grass. All the weight of an earthy park hits me. Itchy grass, sticky fingers. Bright light tears through. But this gaze...I don't feel human. I think I just turned into a dog.
Woah naked woman. Contained in a thick gray rectangle. I'm not dislocated, she's dislocated. She doesn't take place in the past to me. To me, this picture was never taken somewhere, it just exists in my now. I look away, to my bed. But she's still staring at me.
I don't see her, but I feel her eyes and skin still staring at me. She's not human, she's flat. No organs, pure personality flattened onto my plane of sight. What do I say...Hello?
I did not know life could go this way. Pure innocence and unadulterated joy at eating chocolate. I do not know how he is eating this chocolate concoction. He should have more on his nose if he’s fully eating with his face. But he doesn’t which means he’s eating the chocolate in a purely mouthy-sensation-way. He’s in the zone of eating something normally forbidden, and he is taking advantage of it fully. This picture is for his papa. Felix is walking trustingly towards the camera, reaching out for it, wanting to play with it. He is in mid-sentence, telling his papa he wants see it.
ReplyDeleteFirst impression: passport photo. A white background with a head and shoulder shot. She appears nude, like she doesn’t want any barriers between her and the viewer. She is nude not only by the absence of her clothes but also by the eye-bags in the picture. She is not trying to cover it up with make-up. Her hair is not perfect. She’s not done up. This is contrary to how it is today, with girls putting on their best for the picture. This picture is very matter of fact, in your face. There is a stillness about this picture. She almost fades into the background like a ghost. But her eyes are very much alive.
The toddler is capturing his most complimentary facebook photo. His arm is outstretched- it is he that is the photographer.
ReplyDeleteOk, that aside, the viewer is faced with two photographs that place him or her in ostensibly similar positions. The viewer stands right in the face of two people who stare him or her straight in the eye. The woman allows the onlooker complete comfort in that gaze. She gives a gaze of undersanding, calmly content with the face to face interaction.
The scene with the boy is clearly less calm. He seems to engage the viewer making him or her much more conscious of their being in the scene. Rather than standing still like the woman, he seems to be coming at you. A chocolaty encounter seems almost unavoidable. And yet the viewer is not there but completely removed from any interaction. The boy stands there with that perpetually engaging gaze, ready to bring any and everybody into it. And yet he is completely unaware of the viewer's presence.
Both are candid portraits of youth. The woman stares with a frank gaze, the baby frankly engages the camera. The baby one made me sort of anxious. No idea why. Maybe because it reminded me of a time that is long gone when I was able to walk around with chocolate all over my face and not care. Long gone are the days.
ReplyDeleteThe lady one is refreshing, if not because she isn't "object" for the camera but also not afraid to look the camera in its "eye" and engage with the audience.
A candid camera-phone photograph sits on top of a more deliberate portrait like a heavy head on a strong neck. Without the neck, the head is just a square; without the square, the neck is just a rectangle.
ReplyDeleteThe carefree child wears a chocolate Vandyke beard; the woman wears the concerned look of a mother, yet the relationship between the two is uncertain. The reality is that the woman's expression is fairly neutral; there is nothing inherent in her look that can be traced back to the child. Thus, these images are testament to the rhetoric of arrangement. Only by virtue of the fact that these images are arranged one on top of the other does the woman's look appear to be concerned.
How could these images speak to one another? The child's face is covered in chocolate, he wears a long sleeved shirt, his hair is unkempt (maybe even wet), and he stands in a green park with trees and grass and a picnic table. The woman appears to be naked, her hair is tied back, her face is completely clean (without even makeup), and she is surrounded by white nothingness. The most conspicuous similarity between the child and the woman is the fact that each is looking right into the camera -- each is making eye contact with you, the viewer. As the viewer, you complete the visual circuit between you and the two images. They see you seeing them. They see one another through your seeing both of them. This is how they communicate. This is how they speak to one another.
He is hungry, he is eating the world and making a mess. He grabs outside the frame, wanting more. His eyes are chocolate and light, they see and are seen, the objects of his desire reflect and play back. He is growing before our very eyes, seeing and touching and eating the world, no need to separate eyes from mouth, there is chocolate in both. No frame can suspend his urge to become.
ReplyDeleteShe is a lab creature, a fraction of life removed, placed in a vacuum. The color has been sucked out, leaving sterile surroundings and blushless face. All distractions and details are stripped away: this is a human being under control. This picture was no spontaneous event; it was set up as a meticulous experiment. But her eyes shatter the microscope. They break the glass panel between scientist and subject and demand a forbidden and unwelcome intimacy.
one moment was a figure casting bright light in many different ways, as it went with other lights, while "in dark." another moment, if memory recalls correctly, was another figure casting dull light, directly, while "in light." then there was 8:48 am and 7 comments now there's something that looks like the woman who was sitting next to me not 45 minutes ago and something else which i assume is a picture of someone who probably was sitting near me and there's something "leave your comment" REDkREDaREDtREDeREDzREDcREDzREDgRED goes to
ReplyDeleteWORD VERIFICATION katezcg G
speterssson
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BROWN ORANGE WHITE "PUBLISH YOUR COMMENT
damn i didn't enter the letters right
GREEN helowslw GREEN "command C+V"
This week's blog assignment begs the question as to where the image begins and ends. The image I see before me is two people, in clearly different scenarios but ultimately doing the same thing: looking right at the viewer.
ReplyDeleteThe lively little boy at the top of the image reaches out and looks inquisitively at the viewer; he has life behind his eyes. The bottom part of the image is also looking at the viewer, but lacks the same captivating quality as the person above her...they're both putting the viewer in a very strange position of choosing which of the two to give more attention. I cannot look at them both at the same time, but they can both look at me at the same time. They're both interrogating and engaging the viewer in very different ways, and yet they depend on one another to be seen in a particular way. An image of a child with chocolate on his face only captivates for so long, but a child with chocolate on his face placed on top of a tired, porcelain woman who also stares right into the viewer poses an argument, asks a question, proves a point, "presses onto" the seer in a much different way.
They can't see each other, they aren't looking at each other, they might not even know they've been coupled together in an image but they riff off each other, and in this way, they're intimately related
The child in the first image is reaching for something outside of the frame. He is saying something, perhaps even reaching for me which makes me feel like I should be squatting or kneeling in order to be at his eye level. This is a bit disorienting because I am sitting in a chair at my desk looking at this image.
ReplyDeleteI feel naked looking at the lady in the second image. I wonder where her top is. One one hand I feel like I should turn away and give her some privacy. But on the other hand, her face permanently lingers in front of me, staring at me straight in the eyes. Her slight smile makes me feel even more uncomfortable. It's as if she's daring me to look at her.
Okay, so I decided that since I have already grasped the whole "A picture is not a representation of something else, it IS a picture" idea, I will just analyze these photos from the perspective of the camera. That is to say, I am going to pretend that the image depicted is all I can see and that I am standing right where the camera is in front of the little kid and the woman.
ReplyDeleteWith that said, this little boy is cute since he is young and naive. He is looking at me like I know something he doesn't, like he doesn't even realize there is chocolate on his face. Judging from his expression, I feel like I am smiling, and definitely mid conversation with him. These last two thoughts are from reading him, but apply to the person behind the camera.
Now regarding the woman in the second photo. I get very little from reading her face. Her expression sort of reflects the fact that I am looking through a camera at her, and that she is in a good mood. This tells me a few things about the situation and about myself, as the person holding the camera. That is, she is here voluntarily, she wants her picture taken, and I am holding a camera.
In both pictures, I imagine these people are thinking many other things. Due to that complication, my interpretations are clouded and unreliable for their objective truth. However, since I am assuming that the world as I sense it(in the place of the camera) IS the actual world, it does not matter what they actually think. It only matters what I sense, and that becomes my reality, the only reality as I know it.
both look, but with two very different gazes.
ReplyDeletein one, I'm looking at a world, a way of going in which chocolate face and touseled hair are irrelevent, just another state of being, where curiosity grips. That gaze pierces me with curiosity. What am I to this child? What is the world to this child? The blurred backround suggests a world in which there is so much to discover, find, engage with.
it is beautiful
The other gaze seems to already know what I am, and in a sense, have me pegged from the start. The curiosity is replaced by more of a reassured gaze. almost slightly smirking.
it is beautiful
The child in this photograph is experiencing all the curiosity that comes along with youth. Questioning the camera and looking longingly into its lens, the child is exploring the unknown. The child is not looking at the viewer but at the technological mysteries of the camera lens. With chocolate on his face the child stands in stark contrast to the woman in the second picture. Without the inhibitions that come with age, the child is comfortable in his messy state, no fear of judgment and no lingering insecurities.
ReplyDeleteThe woman is also staring at the lens. But to the woman, the lens is staring back. The camera, to her, seems to judge the image it photographs, subsequently, making her uncomfortable in her own skin. Yet she is bearing all, no makeup and no fancy hair do. The woman, in this sense is powerful. She understands the human capacity of this technological object to judge those it photographs, yet she never ceases to engage it, staring at it just as it stares at her.
The two pictures are presented together, yet when I click on each they separate. They also suddenly have titles: "Felix_chocolateface" and "dijkstra_girl_naked." These titles become part of the picture I'm viewing, but they only appear when I look at the pictures individually. Returning to the main blog, the two photos simply join the others already on the page and again become separate entities in a group. They don't necessarily have anything to do with each other, unless I want them to.
ReplyDeleteBoth the boy and the woman acknowledge the camera in their gazes at it: the boy with a strange wonder in his eyes, the woman with a hint of a smile amidst an appearance of boredom. They're both looking straight into the lense, yet when the photo is developed, they seem to look at the viewer. In the initial taking of the photo, however, they probably didn't expect to "see" multiple viewers staring back at them.
A little boy with half of a forehead, a partial chest and arms is staring right into me. I look below him and see a young, beautiful bust of a woman. Her stare meets mine. I feel them both looking at me at the same time and my sight is doubled. I meet their four eyes with my two, the math doesn’t add up, but it doesn’t have to.
ReplyDeleteWhat I find immediately striking about this week's assignment is the contrast between the two photos. The messiness and disorganized appearance of the top image in relation to the minimalism of the bottom photo; the lack of background commotion and the cleanliness of the white backdrop. The eyes of the people penetrate the viewer in different ways. In the top image the bright-eyed excitement of the child generates a sense of newness and curiosity, ignorant to what he stares at and naive due to this lack of experience. The eyes below appear more tired, aged through years of experience; you or whatever the female stares at is neither exciting, new or novel. The images perform the manner in which they want the viewer to see. The top with the vigorous freshness of an initial visual encounter; the bottom clear, vision focused and closed off through experience and mental schema. The two images offer different ways of perceiving similar stimuli, linked by their coexistence in the world and on the blog, yet different in nature of visual affect. These images show you how to see them, demand that you to see them in this way.
ReplyDelete(In reference to the 'top' picture.) The first thing that happens to me is that my eyes move from the face to the really bright greenish light. I found it funny because I would look at the face and then instantly shift my gaze to the brightness, but I had to see the face first. That described light jumps at me like it is going to take over the entire frame. The light is not consistent either. For me, that shape of light has so many variations of green, white, grey, sky blue, etc., (I think it is one fantastic representation of marbling) and my sight/self drowns in it.
ReplyDeletejust following the eye lines from me to the image and the image back at me, i am outnumbered. the number isn't the problem but of simultaneous discordant seeings. by having one image hang over the other it throws me off balance; one seems to comment on how i see the other.
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ReplyDeleteThe austere photo has beautiful lines. The neck line, the line that parts here hair, the line of her closed lips, the sloped line of her shoulder all in gentle opposition to the line showing the imperfection in the photo the crease detracting from but adding to her beauty at the same time because her lines are natural and the creased line mechanical.
ReplyDeleteThe photo of the child is beautiful as well, which is why I suppose the two are together... but in such a different way. There are squiggles not lines. the blanket to the left is askew with items on/off and the inbetween state. The mouth distorted by some confection too good to eat neatly, the sun a splotch on the landscape the tables, benches, and various apparatus to the right misshapen but there is no mar upon the photo with all its imperfections. I like that the child is reaching for the camera...another incident of stepping out of the boundaries of the frame.
It doesn’t have to be two different images. Both can be just an image. Heck, my whole screen is an image. However, that kid really pulls me in. It gives such a strong invitation to become an image with him. It extends itself to be locked to his eyes despites all the distractions. It engages so strongly it reassures that we all the same stuff. The lady on the other hand, despites its simplicity and purity, it repels and rejects. I don’t know why. Can’t become an part of an image.
ReplyDeleteI see myself seeing this person. Let me clarify, I see (my) the photographer's reflection in the eyes of this person, and for a moment, I am the subject of the image's gaze. I know this because I see my reflection in the mirror of the subject's eyes, but this mirror has two faces, and its all a matter of perspective. Whose perspective though? The image's perspective of its viewer? The photographer's creation of a scene? The scene's creation of itself?
ReplyDeleteThe nature of this image, as digital facsimile, remembers a time when this scene was a sense.
“I see you looking at me/ I can tell by your eyes that you’re feeling me…” Terrible song, but pulled out of context, these lines seem to apply to the task at hand.
ReplyDeleteThe effect that these images have on me, the viewer, is almost the same—if no different from—looking at someone in real life. But, oh wait, the images ARE reality. There IS a boy and a woman looking right at me. This is probably why I am getting the odd feeling of being seen, as I stare back into their eyes to meet their gaze. Or why I am experiencing some sort of affect. I am not merely seeing images of two people; I am seeing two people. I am seeing reality; I am seeing the world. And the world is looking right back at me.
They see me; looking down on her, looking up at him, yet simultaneously staring at them both, eye to eye, face to face.
ReplyDeleteWhere am I? Indoor with her? Outdoor with him? How could I be in both spaces at once?
I look up and feel sticky viscosity touching skin. I look down and touch by the very act of my seeing. Yet both remain untouched, unmarked.
Different ways of going naked: hers by the visibility of her skin; his in the lack thereof, disclosing his encounter with chocolate and how. Nakedness is inflected onto me; perhaps I too am naked.
Thinking of our class on tuesday and Coffeen's comment about whether or not to respond to the pictures separately implying they are not two separate pictures, maybe even eight, or one...
ReplyDeleteWhen I see these images I see them just as I see anything else on the page. I don't see them as anything special, or distinguished from any other image on the blog. The fact that they have been placed on a blog for my viewing does in some way imply their difference to the color of the website or the words on the left describing the class.
I am trying to avoid commenting on anything in particular about the images because I can't really think of anything to say about any particular thing I see in them without giving them some sort of narrative. They are both staring directly at me which instinctively gave me a unnerving feeling. It is almost as if I don't want to look too hard or too long because they will see something in me just as personally as I see them. Almost like I want to hide myself from them because I feel so close in proximity. It's unnerving to look too close, but intriguing at the same time.
These two images are reflections of one another. They demonstrate the ability images have to situate the world as things. The gaze is able to palpate its audience. They are no longer ‘pictures’ of people but are another aspect of “stuff” that makes up the world. The gaze draws you in just as much as if they were physically in front you; which when you “see” them, they are. There is no difference between the image and the actual person. They are one and the same and the gaze is able to bring that notion into fruition. I can see the world in these images and in doing so, I see my self and my self being seen.
ReplyDeleteWhat? What! You both are making me feel so obligated to this. Stop. Stop looking at me please for Christ sake, look at each other or something, please. You don't understand I'm sensitive to this eye contact stuff, you know? I guess it's a city-dwelling defense mechanism or something. Like the way they say animals in wild know not to go to the watering hole at certain times, avoidance, the best defense is a good defense. Fine you two.
ReplyDeleteYou're filthy honestly you disgust me. You're like a bobbling drudge of responsibility. And I can say that with a clean conscience because you're not mine. If you where, you know "mine" I'd think you where so cute and I'd say things like, "there's my little man, oh yes he is, oh yes he is." my voice would become progressively more annoying as I do this "my little handsome man, the little handsome man!" What the hell have you been eating? Generally the idea is to put the food in the mouth you know?
We are of the sensible, and before we forgot about that life was totally awesome. Back when chocolate belonged on our faces, we knew we were of the sensible. Nobody needed to tell us that we were the chocolate and the chocolate was us, because that shit was smeared all over our faces, and that was the way the chocolate went, the way we went with chocolate. Now, I’m nervous when I see a kid bursting toward me with chocolate all over his face. He might get it on me, where it doesn’t belong. I’m happy for him, but I’m well dressed and well laundered. Which is to say I am naked and barren; I hide in my assumed sterility, withdrawn from the world and although I’m clean, I can barely smile. What happened?
ReplyDeleteBoth baby and woman stare at me intently, yet I can only stare at one. This view, this camera, this image, is placing me in a position where I should place equal attention on both images, to meet both stares, but I cannot (physically and otherwise). Because I cannot meet the gaze of both baby and woman, I am forced to choose sides--to look at the infant or the lady? The image thus produces an inevitable and inescapable and uncomfortable position for me to be placed...and so I stare in the middle, hoping that they don't notice that I'm actually not looking at either of them.
ReplyDeleteI fell, and he's picking me up. She smirks at me and makes me feel silly, yet I'm not convinced it’s the only thing she is doing to me. The images are placed interestingly, I wonder: why him above her? What would this look like with her in his place? Would this image read differently?
ReplyDeleteHe is so embraceable, so trusting. As I look into his eyes, I can see what Pontey means about language and the things it describes when I see more chocolate in his eyes than on his face. With the extended arm out towards me, I feel a sort of tug or pulling on my shirt. I want to move in and give him all the attention he desires like the chocolate on his face. Maybe it’s not me at all he sees; it may be I am the chocolate!
But there she is, standing still, thinking I’m ridiculous. I am forced to stop and be still with her. She IS what calm looks like. The colors are all so light and smooth. Her skin glows in low tones. This image is maybe a powder statue?
Then again, I look back at this chocolate monster with his chocolate eyes begging for attention. I can’t tell which image has more control over me. He wants me to come to him and she wants me to stay still.
The more I look at these pictures, the most uncomfortable I feel. Both of the people in the pictures are looking directly at me as I look at them, but they never change their expression. Meanwhile, the longer I look at them, the most details I notice. I notice that the chocolate around the child's mouth is almost shaped like a moustache, and I think that it is cute. I notice that the woman has bags beneath her eyes, and then I notice that she seems to be unclothed. This makes me feel slightly uncomfortable. My emotions change as I look at the images, but the faces looking back at me never change. It makes me feel as though the faces in the images are not faces or people, they are just images of faces. This then implies that it is not the faces that are making me uncomfortable, or the people in the images. The people whose pictures these are don't even know I exist, must less care if I'm comfortable or not when I look at them. It is only an image that is affecting my emotions with its collection of colors and shapes... if that makes any sense...
ReplyDeleteThe child in the top image shows an interest in whatever is capturing his image, (most likely a camera phone given the quality.) The viewer feels engaged because the image seems to care about the viewer. This is incongruous because the emotion captured was between the child and the camera and the reaction to it is because of a viewer and the image. These two interact but on a level beyond the emotional connection of the viewer and the child. This is a similar reaction as to the lower image. The young woman has no fascination with the camera and seems bored her image does not cause the viewer to connect in the same way as a result.
ReplyDeleteThe image creates a totem pole effect for the respective heads of their subjects. Stacked upon one another, both heads gaze at the observer. Each head has a radically different thoughts and expressions, especially the chocalate covered chief. Thus the image challenges us to be affected in two different ways simultaneously if we consider the image as a whole rather than pairing of two seperate entities. The two faces convey information which plays back on the observers face moments later.
ReplyDeleteI see people and places. More specifically, people inflecting places and places inflecting people. Crisp, new moments are made as people and places (images and images) collude and collide; an infinitely complex interplay of nuances. The inflected images marble into an intimate embrace; a fortuitous meeting of perfect complements. Now what do I actually mean… Images abound around a young boy and the young boy bounds around images until they begin to merge with one another (chocolate on face), he wears his world. A naked wall frames a naked woman producing inflections of subtlety over severity, allowing woman and wall to remain distinct. Each interplay infinitely inventive.
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ReplyDeleteIf there is no ideal vantage point, just the event of me viewing these viewings- framed by the computer screen, ‘window’, and the frame of the blog itself, as well as the fluorescently lit room I am writing this in and the linoleum hallway that stretches behind the monitor- what we have here is a configuration of apposition in which we are now completely involved and thrown into. When my comment finally emerges my image will also be inscribed in this ‘collective image reckoning’ as evidence of my being here but it was already inscribed the second I started looking at these images. It is the elements in apposition that create meaning or at least the dynamic interaction between parts, each one intertwining in the other in this allatonceness as some psychedellic academics or Buddhists might say.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I see these alien figures, these anonymously affecting images and try to make sense of them but it is overwhelming. Since the allatonceness is, well happening all at once and we certainly can’t talk about EVERYTHING that is happening, let us focus on these two ‘pictures’.
These two specimens feel quite different so when they both look at you it is disconcerting. At first glance the boy-image is breaking out of the passive world of being captured. He is uncontained and messy. He is a chocolate tornado in perpetual motion. Almost feral, he draws you into his whirling existence of chocolate and incomprehensible light and noises. The second specimen is a true specimen it seems, naked, invisibly pinned to a blank enclosure. The over all sterility of the photo is scientific she is removed from all dirt. She looks at me and I look at her and the circuit created makes me slightly uncomfortable because she is so angelically sterile. The austere background and purity of her complexion situates her in stark contrast to the chocolate covered little monster.
Their gazes pull me in different ways at the same time. They both look directly at the entity that views them with uncompromising gazes. The child uses brute force and animalism to draw you in and the young woman uses a sedated and subtle emptiness, a gaunt and fragile promise or appeal. The image is subtle and rather beautiful the more I look at it. She is smooth and pure and she makes me feel like a brute or some kind of contaminating agent that ravishes her with my eyes. But I feel overwhelmed I am starting to see her as the boy with the chocolate on my face.
-z alcerro
(aloud) “Awe damn. I’m sorry. I didn’t know you wanted some of the chocolate cake/pudding/bar. I would’ve shared if I’d known. Maybe next time we come to the park if you’re really nice to me and you let me know in time you can eat some of it with me.”
ReplyDelete[break]
(to self) “I will not acknowledge that I am amused by your banality. I will fight my urge to smile because you are banal and should not be rewarded. But you’re trying too hard for me to really dislike you. This smirk will have to do for both of us.”
These images are charged with the gaze of their subjects, totally inflected by these particular ways of seeing the scene, the event at hand.
ReplyDeleteI look at the first image and see the child's thriving curiosity, his eager consumption of the world. His giant shining eyes and his chocolate mustache seem ready to take in everything, and his body as a whole anchors everything in the image. The scene of a picnic, normally one for gathering many, is empty but for him, and so his exuberance is free to consume the entire image. The whole scene--in particular, the blanket, the table, his arm--tilts and converges at his hungry face. Even the odd golden-green glow seems not to compete with his all-consuming gaze but to be lit up by his seeing as I am.
In the image below it becomes tempting to juxtapose, to pair the two as opposites, to say the woman is consumed by the scene. After all, her shoulders and neck appear conspicuously devoid of depth and definition, almost blending into the bleak background. But this focuses attention to her clearly defined face, in fact only augmenting the effect of her level gaze. Indeed, her assured eyes seem to do the leveling here. Staring straight in the center of this austere scene, surely this calm, frank manner of seeing smothers the world, evens its edges, and not the other way around.
Childhood to adulthood. Color to bareness. Clothes to nakedness.
ReplyDeleteCrayon pictorial and the captured shot of activity vis-à-vis the controlled shoot of the self upon a blank slate of whitish walls.
Think of white light; the refraction of all other colors; the world has been equalized, dulled, inverted. Destruction of the outer for the accentuation of the inner. The containment of the self in extracting from the sensual, the playground, the stimuli: all now absorbed, diffused, and neutralized.
Dichotomies of the pure and the sensual.
A biblical visual of binaries.
The background is not pure white though. It is slightly grayish.
The world never has become absolutely transparent for me at least. These whitish plaster walls in front of me have yet to dissolve, the chairs neutralize, the ground unfolds, and I have yet to enter such a room of pure light that objects protruded seemingly out of thin air or have observed a world where light overtook objects and I existed in some chute of invisible absolute space without color. If color exists in material, then this spiritual inkling towards a pure landscape would be a world of immaterial. Color is the world. The material is the playground, whether it be the park or human flesh.
It can be the sensual, the world of chocolate lips, curly messy hair, curiosity, sprawled blankets, grass, insects, water jugs, becomes shaded, experienced, crossed off in pseudo-objectivity. Or I can reflect inwardly, make the external world become stale, stable, and dim its coloration with internal reflections. I can engage in a romp of sticky chocolate informality, the ravishing delicious mouth savoring cocoa or I can fast, starve, and try to neutralize the sensual in a romanticized quest for the eyes, where the only cloth and coloration worth delving is the pale elastic skin that stretches out and covers the soul like saran wrap once did over brownies.
Is this shift in focus internal, external, intertwinement?
Does too much creation, too much stimuli, negate the array, blend the spectrum, and make the background stripped, degaussed, made minimalist as a revolt of sensory overload.
Or do we do this in search of some new elixir. Is this a narrative perpetuated in me via influence? Does knowing the science of white light not let me feel the scene as I could have? Can I ever relearn to see childlike with an ever increasing database of my imagination? Can I make my eyes not foremost zoom into eyes? The curve of training is now reverted. The death of science, of atoms, particles, of the unseen. There is so much to see.
But still, as much as I look around to the background, I'm naturally, or perhaps unnaturally, evoked again and again to the human affectations, but the longer I stray, the more the blanket has a soul, the light in the trees have an emotive quality, the lapis lazuli water jug flirts, and I see that all the sensitive impressions that I had projected were being projected from the retinas of the two figures in the photo portraits are also in the outer world. And just as I can’t connect with a human without existing with other humans, I had the uncanny epiphany that I can’t connect at all without world and world is connection.
Both images make ambiguous the situation of the viewer with respect to the subject of the image. The perspective of the child, innocently indulging in a chocolate treat, is unclear. Is he examining the camera, as an object? Does he view himself in the lens of the camera (contemplating how he himself is being perceived and recorded by the object)? Is he starting into the eyes of the viewer? The second image presents an altogether different scene. The woman in the photograph is concerned with her self-image, that is, she positions herself with the photograph in mind. In other words, she appears to be posing, and thus views herself through the camera lens (which is arguably different from the child, who is investigating the object itself.)
ReplyDeleteLighting, much like the chocolate stained flesh in the above image, suggests chaos, un-domestication by normative human behaviors. The take is there, the indulgence. Everything, eat it. Eat everything. Is it eatable? Who cares? The lighting suggest that there exist a feast and no manners are welcome, no yuppies, no house rules.
ReplyDeleteConversely, a below image is lit quite differently. The lighting is domesticated, trained and well-behaved. The lighting suggests manners should be used, the bourgeoisie have the floor and everyone is to act accordingly. The woman is silenced, as she should be – no one, according to the rules, should talk. Can you hear that? Nothing. Silence. Under the fixture of an electronic spotlight a well trained smile emerges, boring is a success, predictability is achieved.
The lighting teases apart these two images. The lighting is loud and uncontrollable on one hand and posture and well-comported on another.
Windbreaker days and apple juice, chocolate spread over faces, tired from climbing around, this boy sees with open, untinged eyes- holding the camera and the viewer in his hand and becoming the Event that destroys the audience. At once I am the child, dropping out of my skin and knowing Play, Wonder, Mess, and Mistake.
ReplyDeleteA plastered face with dead eyes, page folded over in magazine speaks bare nudity and sterile satisfaction. Clothing and language drop off simultaneously, and "Hello" floats through her dark eye circles, as I hear her nakedness and feel the blueness of her gaze.
Two modes of the photograph:
ReplyDeleteThe first - a child's hunger for attention. The child orients the photograph through physical force. Point your camera Here! At Me! Are you looking?? I am the center of attention, I am the most important thing in your world.
The second - studies in facial composition and profile. The woman is an object of aesthetic and/or scientific interest. I make no demands on the observer. In my natural state, and stripped of cultural ties/markers, I am shown in the light of my humanity. We are equals.
The experience of seeing is so different when I move slightly to the left or right of the image's gaze than when I am directly in it. Both the image and I move in relationship to each other and affect each other. If I move out of its gaze, out of eye-contact, I feel sort of like an outside observer of an event (which is an event in itself). I change the image in the way I look at it, and the image changes me in the way I feel. But when the image pulls me into its gaze, I feel like I am in the event that I was just observing. The image changes me in the way I look at it, and I change the image in the way it feels.
ReplyDeleteEye-contact is so weird. You can almost feel the electricity.
Let's focus on the background. Backgrounds situate the subject of an image within a context, providing a basis for which the viewer can form a narrative for what is captured within the frame. The juxtaposition of these two images brings into focus the powerful role that backgrounds play. Because the woman foregrounds a bleak, uniformly white background bereft of another human presence, as viewers we associate the vibe of the background with the subject. She appears isolated. Likewise, the campsite background implies the presence of others (though not pictured), a fact which the baby's curious facial expression reflects. These two images shed light on a prominent tendency to lend the background authority in structuring our perception of the subject.
ReplyDeleteIt is an event notable for highlighting the difference between "screens" that we respond to. As one image, there is a tension--between the top part of the image in which a face is coming at me, cloyingly sweet, explicitly demanding an engagement by reaching out. The bottom part is different, in the same vein, also prompting an engagement with one barely cocked brow, a vague amusement on her face, certainly withdrawn relative to the other. Its an event to manifest an idea--to me it is says something about how a person is jaded as they age.
ReplyDelete