Sixteen Jaqueline Kennedy Onassises, many more thoughts. These images are so saturated with meaning that it is difficult to separate them from history, so I'm not going to try. Melancholic after the assasination and elated before, Jackie's emotions have been captured, time has been halted. Confined to small compartments and spread out, shuffled like a deck of cards. Perhaps worth considering is the difference between the two distinct periods. While Kennedy is alive, his presence is played out in her demeanour. The aura that she gives off "glows" in the two pre-assasination pictures (the center, bottom two). The remaining six images introduce a polar set of emotions. Grief seems to reverberate from the pixels that make them up, this marbling of sense is just doleful. This perspective is obviously not one shared by the assasinator, or some other social deviant, who would probably associate opposite readings to these images.
...or rather, a blob of blobs? A blob of one woman and blobs of sixteen women all at once pressing upon each other, the one shaping the other. No repeats, each blob is uniquely it's own.
It's a way of ways woman goes. The many ways collectively form a way woman goes. No one piece overrides another, no part is inferior to the assembled "whole."
It is a blob complex. Complex of woman. A complexion of woman. As I try to make sense of this woman, I complicate her, and she complicates me.
So wait, what is Woman? My beliefs of its meaning are slipping through my fingers as we two women exchange glances through my screen. You could cut the tension, this blobby plane of perception, with a knife.
what the hell is this? why are they so blue? there are so many of them I feel nauseous. they are nauseous too, smiling through their pain like I do. we are women together here. she is laughing because she knew it all along. she is sad because she is lying to me and herself about the perfect state of womanhood she foists upon society in the name of a non existent age gone by. we are women in a world of women who laugh and cry.
You must not separate yourself from the historical connection to this re-presentation of an era gone by, she holds you and reminds you. I feel nauseous and she is sad.
Images of images—our selves as images, proliferated ad nauseum, ad infinitum, infinitely reproducable by the technology that we are—seeing, recording, playing back but now have other technologies, the camera which can proliferate faster and eagerly.
The real is sent astray. Or, rather, the real is folded over and over, unfold over and over, an origami being. More images do not reveal more; there is no final revelation—just an always already becoming image of the world.
Emotion. Slightly different degrees of joy and grief. There is Jackie grinning, and Jackie smiling. There is Jackie bowled over in shock / grief, and Jackie sad. Also, if one looked closely, then one would see that no two images are exactly alike. Each image, has a slight variation, maybe a different tint, areas where some spots are faded while others are more pronounced. Although the emotions are played on the same screen of Jackie O’s face, no two expressions, of grief for example, are exactly alike. Just like no two images, here, are alike.
blink. she's still there, or she's there again. blink. okay so i'm not dreaming, or i'm still dreaming. here she is in front of the sky, in front of the sun, in my room. blink. blink. blink. it's her still, different but the same, an impossible rebirth. her shadows are her portraits are my memory. nature's stuff humbly fades for the mystical grace in her eyebrows' arch.
This is one image. It is sixteen images. It is 100 images. It is not an image, but part of an image that includes itself, this blog, my computer screen, my bedroom, the view from my window, myself. It becomes my image as it is enveloped in all the my-ness that circumscribes me. I don't even know this woman; and yet, she is part of the image of my life -- part of my seeing.
It is sameness and difference and something in between. Sepia, black & white, shades of blue; image and mirror-image; small and big. Do these images trace back to one real person? Sure. Are they necessarily images of the same person? Maybe not. What we know about this image doesn't have to be what we know about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis because it doesn't have to be about anything. It is proliferation and limitation. It is arbitrary and reasoned. Why sixteen and not 100?
I see sixteen distinct rectangular components, separated by color and density. Within each is a pattern which strongly resembles a female face. Many of the female faces look alike, but here and there I see variations in clarity, orientation, facial expression etc. I wonder whether they are ALL the same person. If so, sometimes this woman appears with a man and sometimes she appears with another. I wonder what her relationships are with them.
The pairs of images remind me of a card matching game.
The distinct pattern reminds me of paned windows or the regular arrangement of hexagons in a bee hive.
I wonder what sort of bees would build rectangles instead of hexagons and store multicolored portrayals of human females inside.
Silhouette-etched complexions produced and reproduced in multiple frames operating simultaneously in the same space; each moment revived and tainted with a new color, a new way of looking. Enmeshed with the old and marbled in the new are the smiles and frowns, estranged and bound, instant moment to moment clips shuffled and replayed. A color contrasting puzzle, nuzzling in one another through a multiplicity of different moments captured and recaptured on a single display.
This image is 16 smaller images reacting with each other to form a larger image. The linear framing of images tells a history. Each of their own framings tells a history. Grouping the framings differently produces different effects. Each image is of the same woman, but each of these images is of a very different woman, even the images in which she may seem like she is the same. This is one showing of how it is possible for a single thing, through one smaller series of moments, to be creating a story much more fluorescent than the communicated history of the more-immediately-framed series of moments.
The viewer is seen ‘more’ by the image than the viewer sees the image. Or the viewer is being looked at by more images than the viewer is looking at. Whether the viewer sees one big Onassis, or sixteen individual ones, or two halves does not really matter because the one big Onassis, or her halves, or the individual sixteen, each of those will be seeing the viewer see. The viewer’s slight shift in eye contact/direction, subtle changes within/on the viewer’s lips, the rise and fall of the viewer’s chest by drawing and releasing breath, and lots of other stuff will provide new events for each of the Onassis’s-- for the sixteen individuals, the weird augmented one, the ones that are blue, and all others not mentioned. The best way to put it is that the viewer is probably more interesting to the image (because the image can throw the viewer in so many different places at once, yet that are separate) than the image is interesting to the viewer.
A proliferation of images, each revealing their own reality, yet none revealing reality as a totality. The digital image is constantly reproducible, and is yet never a clone of that which it reproduces. Jackie O. smiling, Jackie O. contemplating, Jackie O. in her multiple forms, never revealing one clear inherent portrait of her, yet always revealing her reality in the moment of each individual image. Which one is the real Jackie O.? Which one reveals reality? None of them are real, yet all of them express reality in its present existence. They are not part of a math equation in which they all add up to a singular answer. They are each their own equations, adding up to nothing, never forming a whole, yet describing Jackie O. as a whole in the very instant they were taken.
This photo is a mechanistic interpretation of the infinite ways the world can go; in this instance it happens to be the infinite ways Jacqueline Kennedy Onassises can go. The image is never just the image; it is already all of its possibilities. It is a life of mutability and constant image production in the studio that we call world.
This seeing mustn’t be confused with our (human) seeing; it is clearly the camera’s seeing, yet we are seeing it as if we were the camera. The blues, whites and yellows of the mechanical lens has now become the eye’s lens and we are seeing these images at the same time, not one filter at a time like the camera. We have become machine but a modified version and our seeing has been reorganized through the seeing of the camera’s seeing.
Every time I see something like this I think of Kaja's class I toook my freshman year. the proliferation of images and art in the age of mechanical reproduction. I know this is just another associative process we are trying to avoid but I think the main ideas hold some warrant to the main themes of the class. In opposition to Benjamin, Coffeen stated in class that we weren't getting farther away from the real with the reproduction of images but closer to it. That made me really excited about every future image I will see. After reading about the aura and it's reinvention through reproduction I thought of it in the negative aspect.
Now I'll try not to use I.
The image presents 16 ways of going to the viewer. Each reproduced image provides an even stronger base with many frames within frames and many ways of going to see. The image isn't moving farther from an original in its reproduction, its moving closer to one, providing an original event for the viewer to look upon.
The original photos' purpose was documentation of past events. Now they are combined and transformed to create a new event. This event is immortalized by the internet. We can experience it whenever we choose. It seems that the Jackies can be separated into individual pieces, but in this new piece, this new event, they're arrangement IS the piece.
Sixteen images of one woman come together to form a complete image of her. Many of the shots capture different angles and expressions of her face, and in a sense forms a complete image of her. Yet, the whole image also offers sixteen different distinct perspectives of this one lady (images of her smiling versus a solemn picture of her). To add to these layers of uncertainty, blue and a tinge of yellow randomly color some of the images.
Jackie, Jackie, Jackie. Jackie relative to Jackie, relative to Jackie. Distinguished, wind-swept, focused, amused. Distinguished, amused, naive, wind-swept. Wind-swept, detached, naive, puzzled. Detached, happy, puzzled, focused. This image reads like four stories—left to right, down, left, right, each line relating a different affect, a different conclusion. The composition conveys two distinct and contradictory senses of her: a multitude of candid images each give an impression of availability, that her life is an open book, and at the same time, the color and the Xerox-effect reinforce a sense of removal and detachment. The tile-pattern and the color (again) take it one level further—from a paparazzi snapshot to a work of art.
I actually do not know who the woman in the picture is, so I'm a bit worried I might be missing something important. On the other hand, my unfamiliarity with the person within the image might help me see the image for itself without the connotations that would be linked to the person as a symbol.
Although there are images repeated within the large image, none of the smaller images are exactly the same. Despite coming from the same original picture, there are more scratches on some copies or a slightly different shade of blue on others. This helps to emphasize that the image is an image and not the representation of the person. There is no better image of the person or a worse one because it is more filtered. The filters help remind the viewer that they are looking at an image and not a representation of a person. The compilation of sixteen small images into one large image also helps to emphasize the same point. The large image is an image of many images, which have already been filtered from another image to make them more blue or to remove the details. Images of images of images? Recollections of simple arithmetic remind us that two negative make a positive. A representation of a representation reminds the view that the representation is no longer a representation but an image itself. I suppose it drives the point home that an image is reality.
This image is the classification and intertwining of one woman in the circumstantial. Each image, each face, is unique, cut off from one another by the thin black boarders. Each face is seemingly the dictator of its own space, operating and existing independently of one another. But despite these thin black lines, the faces are not completely segregated. They are part of the same image, intimately intertwined by not only their proximity, but by the repetition of the same face. The faces attempt to operate independently of each other, but there is an inevitable spill over as the personality of the women, of the image, as they move from their individual spaces into a common realm through their simultaneous uptake by the viewer.
There is no center to this image. You cannot look at one fixed spot and take in the entire image at once. It moves you. It forces your gaze to shift and change. This image is not merely a multiplicity of images, it is a multiplicity of interactions with the viewer as well.
What is this seeing? This vision is of another time. The camera has recorded a space and a face that will never be exactly as it is projected here. The next moment Jackie went on being mortal but her image, this jackie we see, is forever in that one moment or in this case multiple moments that will only and always exist here.
Here are sixteen different shots, none of which are the same. A few are disguised as repeats, but the slight variations that are apparent from one shot from another is just a glimpse of how reality is proliferated with every new production. Images are always creating, and it never gets old. Reality is always changing, or being added to, through an infinite number of permutations.
One image, sixteen Jackie Kennedys. Through the seeing the seeing in camera and seeing through multiples of filters Jackie Kenney’s life is relived sixteen different times. The images has not been altered, only the eyes and the lenses of the beholder. I see what they saw and what their camera saw and what their filters or photo shop saw. I see the seeing the seeing of the seeing. Plus relived sixteen times. So 3X16=48? I’m seeing 48 different seeing? Or I’m just going crazy? Yes indeed I am crazy if I calculate the images. I’ll just let it be and submit to the fact this seeing if infinite.
The low quality of the photos reveals an overwhelming will to image. Black space perfectly choreographed with white space suddenly constitutes the first lady, and a second lady, and a third lady, and so on. They are not copies of one another but each individual black and white dance that necessarily demands their own specific viewing or event. That is to say that knowing one isolated piece of this photo would not inform you to the greater concept, because there is no concept here there is only an event.
In what appears to be the phenomenological Jackie: Jackie from all sides; the phenomenological front of Jackie’s face: Jackie’s face from all sides, Jackie’s face in its wholeness, in its perceptual totality, is really a lie. This image is so playful, and so mean. The viewer is forced to admit that what we take knowing to be is a rich composites of images; Jackie is a rich composite of images that become the same image that is our Jackie. If we speak to Jackie, we intend the composite of Jackie-images that is itself an image; we do not speak to the singular perspective that eclipses the other possible perspectives as she speaks, and turns, and smiles, and blinks. This image does the composing; this image is the composite, but only because the image is repeatable, is infinite repeatability. This image invites a conversation because it takes up our intending of the composite; this, it appears, is the real Jackie, just in pixels: a smooth, yet deceptive transition from analog to digital and nobody should notice. But the repeatability of the image is of the mutability of the image, and this intended composite that the viewer gives over to the image by means of a trusting, dis-appropriating, off-loading of intentionality is corrupted. 16 images of Jackie that form the composite whole of a post-analog Jackie are actually only seven. The repeated seven are reframed, “misprinted,” reversed; this conversation takes place during an earthquake or a natural disaster. If this were a first date I wouldn’t call her again, I’d probably change my number.
Square pegs and round holes. Seventeen obvious frames, each framing one or sixteen Os. O alone, O with a killer, O happy, O sad, O perplexed. 8 different Os, 2 occurring once, 4 occurring twice, 2 occurring three times, collectively appearing and reappearing and over-appearing in almost the way that a persistent but unattached seeing continues to encounter and re-encounter. But this image’s 17th frame goes meta, exposes an O-ness, and a giant permeating O. Can a seeing do that in its encounter?
The multiplicity of the images, different in their shadings and details, illustrates the absence, that is, the impossibility of a "real" image of Jackie O. Jackie, as do other people and objects, exists in multiplicity, as an assemblage of an infinite number of always unique images. The real has been subverted.
The images are arranged in a way that suggests order however some of the images such as Jackie in he iconic suit from JFKs assassination contradict this. Additionally she is shown in tan blue and black and white, traditional business colors. This contrasts the Camelot image of the JFK administration, where color and culture were brought to the white house.
This is a portrait of Jackie, not as she is but how she can go. The image jams the natural reflex to find what or who Jackie is, as each of the units offers the viewer a unique and nuanced experience. The viewer experiences many moments of the way Jackie has gone. Jackie becomes a series of happenstance meetings with the viewer, where at times I am looking at her and other times my gaze is met. The image shows individuals improvising and inventing themselves in each moment/event.
The image overwhelms the viewer as it proliferates itself. At first glance, the diversity and number of images within seem to grow in front of the viewer's eyes. It takes a moment or two before one realizes that they are of one woman, that each image is repeated imperfectly.
And yet isn't the first impression the more correct, the more productive? The image, this image of images (of images), seems to have a will to expand and proliferate. These images are not made of one woman; rather, this woman is made of images, this woman is image. Where is this woman, Jackie O.? I don't see her--she must be outside the frame, and even then if I were to see her it would not be to get to the origin of these images but to the continued proliferation of them. Similarly, these images do not repeat imperfectly, for that would be to suppose an original standard, a form (in the Platonic sense), from which one will always drift from no matter how vehemently perfection is sought.
Thus at another glance, this multitude of images does indeed seem to grow before the viewer's eyes. Before the idea of an original form, an original self, emerges that form has already multiplied. And after reconsideration, the viewer sees this expansion not as an illusion of momentary overwhelming but as the reality of active proliferation. Look closely and the images do indeed seem to actively seek complexity and growth; as they move from the center the repetitions seem to spread and differ from each other more, gesturing toward the very real proliferation of images outside of the frame in everyday seeing.
This image: a rectangle of rectangles. Within each rectangle another image exists, a new person, a new microcosm. Shadows deny light and distinguish clear boundaries between the exposed and the hidden. Provoking interest in the possibilities of discovering the hidden – one may look to the next rectangle: only to discover that there is no familiarity, no same image, but rather a new life, a totally different person. Posture, angle, light, colour – moving, playing, performing – the intertwining of rectangles create a macrocosmic rectangle, a rectangle of rectangles: This image.
Know her. But who's knows her? Not anonymity. People know her. I know her. Subject to object. And I assume, I know, many know her. In iconoclasm. Sensual iconoclasm. Lustful iconoclasm. I know her dimples. I’m intimate with her fashions. Her nape tears on my shoulder. Artificiality is sensual, and not only psychologically, because the picture is material. I know Jackie physically. And this Jackie is mine. The one on the computer. The one combined of colors. Reconstructed and kept intact relatively well. The culturally relevant Jackie. The symbol Jackie. The tweaked Jackies, inverted, made negative and tinted with hues. The face as a word, the many faces as a multitude of words. The pixel as a piece of grain in chalk. As a new piece of lead. Away for platonic reductionism. This Jackie as I see her is a specific Jackie. Not a general one. Not the one known to the American history scholar. To the average westerner. Not sure the delirious crack head I met last night in downtown Oakland or the baby on Telegraph this morning know her. The mass media know her. The touch her in fact. They must if consciousness is everywhere. She was electrically manhandled all the way to my computer. Via the media, but not exclusive to it. A groping assembly line of wires distributing digital data. These Jackie’s are in time. Ontological time. Internet time. This Jackie is pixels. Pixels come to me and make Jackie. This Jackie is mine.
What's interesting about this is not the picture of the girl. What makes this beautiful is not that it refers back to a real girl. Nor that it refers back to a girl. Nor that it refers.
This is not an image OF 16 Jackie Onassises.
This is beautiful because the reference becomes being. Jackie becomes paint.
The image is a checkerboard of faces- three identical black and whites scattered amongst a sea of smiling blues. The sepia toned images contrast immediately and jump out of the tapestry, despite the fact that these specific images do not confront the viewer directly. They are nonchalantly turning away, as if to say- I am seen, you see me, but I choose not to look. But still we cannot help but SEE her!
The image as a whole materializes as a bunch of digital flickers- appearing and disappearing before the eye, constantly itching to switch spots with one another and become an interchangeable and unpredictable mesh of "Jackie." Infinitely capable of rearrangement, but in this moment it is ordered possibilities.
We are presented with 16 Jackie Kennedy Onassises. Each lacks detail, lacks fine lines, yet the viewer still feels as if he knows much about her. She surrounds, and is surrounded at once by herself, a spectator among spectators, just as the viewer is. She(s) doesn't look at the camera. Yet can we say this is 16 Jackie Kennedy Onassises? Each is different, its own hue, its own exposure...I guess we'll find out.
Jackie in Three Colors. First Lady Kennedy, Widow, and Onassis. What light do you bring to the image? Color filters an emotional response over the canvas of Jaqueline. Ah! Trend-Setter, Fashion Icon. Glamour of Youth and Power. No? Passenger in the presidential motorcade, the assassination, caught on 8mm in Dallas, Nov. 22, 1963. or.. Wife in Mourning, Mother in Grief. Left America for the Safety and Arms of the Greek. Public Life and its dramatic public re-telling.
As images of Jackie O. proliferate in a seemingly haphazard arrangement, each particular image evokes a different sense. When attempting to focus on a particular image of Jackie O. and fixate on its particular sense, the viewer repeatedly finds that the peripheral images of Jackie O. actively impinge on the isolation of this event. Instead of operating as an assemblage of images, the image inevitably demands a holistic viewing.
The eye wanders frantically, in a panic, from frame to frame trying to reconcile the lack of pattern to the particular placements of the faces of Jackie.
But then it calms down, takes a breath and basks in some relief that the borders of the image need not imply an ending. This image is Jackie forever.
an iterable image. a structural unit of perception divorced from its origin yet nevertheless self-same: jakie-o, a unit of the grammar of images. repeated, differed, commodified, consumed.
16 different views of a woman make up a picasso like single image of her. Each picture is separate, framed all its own, and yet they are all unified in the larger frame. Different colors, shading, orientation, etc. give each individual image, even the ones coming from the same negative, a different feel. Each image is infinitely reproducible and yet each is distinct.
Unlike some of the other images we've seen so far, this is of a known person, a celebrity no less. Yet here she is stripped of her identity in a sense. This is not a collage of her life displayed at a funeral proceeding. She is not a real person, only a familiar face, many familiar faces. A face that can be infinitely muted and reproduced is thus de-personified. Where does the real woman lie? This is not her nor evidence of her.
16 different views of a woman make up a picasso like single image of her. Each picture is separate, framed all its own, and yet they are all unified in the larger frame. Different colors, shading, orientation, etc. give each individual image, even the ones coming from the same negative, a different feel. Each image is infinitely reproducible and yet each is distinct.
Unlike some of the other images we've seen so far, this is of a known person, a celebrity no less. Yet here she is stripped of her identity in a sense. This is not a collage of her life displayed at a funeral proceeding. She is not a real person, only a familiar face, many familiar faces. A face that can be infinitely muted and reproduced is thus de-personified. Where does the real woman lie? This is not her nor evidence of her.
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.
Sixteen Jaqueline Kennedy Onassises, many more thoughts.
ReplyDeleteThese images are so saturated with meaning that it is difficult to separate them from history, so I'm not going to try.
Melancholic after the assasination and elated before, Jackie's emotions have been captured, time has been halted. Confined to small compartments and spread out, shuffled like a deck of cards.
Perhaps worth considering is the difference between the two distinct periods. While Kennedy is alive, his presence is played out in her demeanour. The aura that she gives off "glows" in the two pre-assasination pictures (the center, bottom two).
The remaining six images introduce a polar set of emotions. Grief seems to reverberate from the pixels that make them up, this marbling of sense is just doleful.
This perspective is obviously not one shared by the assasinator, or some other social deviant, who would probably associate opposite readings to these images.
Ah. Portrait of A Blob.
ReplyDelete...or rather, a blob of blobs? A blob of one woman and blobs of sixteen women all at once pressing upon each other, the one shaping the other. No repeats, each blob is uniquely it's own.
It's a way of ways woman goes. The many ways collectively form a way woman goes. No one piece overrides another, no part is inferior to the assembled "whole."
It is a blob complex. Complex of woman. A complexion of woman. As I try to make sense of this woman, I complicate her, and she complicates me.
So wait, what is Woman? My beliefs of its meaning are slipping through my fingers as we two women exchange glances through my screen. You could cut the tension, this blobby plane of perception, with a knife.
...women can be so complicated.
what the hell is this? why are they so blue? there are so many of them I feel nauseous. they are nauseous too, smiling through their pain like I do. we are women together here. she is laughing because she knew it all along. she is sad because she is lying to me and herself about the perfect state of womanhood she foists upon society in the name of a non existent age gone by. we are women in a world of women who laugh and cry.
ReplyDeleteYou must not separate yourself from the historical connection to this re-presentation of an era gone by, she holds you and reminds you. I feel nauseous and she is sad.
Images of images—our selves as images, proliferated ad nauseum, ad infinitum, infinitely reproducable by the technology that we are—seeing, recording, playing back but now have other technologies, the camera which can proliferate faster and eagerly.
ReplyDeleteThe real is sent astray. Or, rather, the real is folded over and over, unfold over and over, an origami being. More images do not reveal more; there is no final revelation—just an always already becoming image of the world.
Emotion. Slightly different degrees of joy and grief. There is Jackie grinning, and Jackie smiling. There is Jackie bowled over in shock / grief, and Jackie sad. Also, if one looked closely, then one would see that no two images are exactly alike. Each image, has a slight variation, maybe a different tint, areas where some spots are faded while others are more pronounced. Although the emotions are played on the same screen of Jackie O’s face, no two expressions, of grief for example, are exactly alike. Just like no two images, here, are alike.
ReplyDeleteblink. she's still there, or she's there again.
ReplyDeleteblink. okay so i'm not dreaming, or i'm still dreaming.
here she is in front of the sky, in front of the sun, in my room. blink. blink. blink.
it's her still, different but the same, an impossible rebirth.
her shadows are her portraits are my memory. nature's stuff humbly fades for the mystical grace in her eyebrows' arch.
This is one image. It is sixteen images. It is 100 images. It is not an image, but part of an image that includes itself, this blog, my computer screen, my bedroom, the view from my window, myself. It becomes my image as it is enveloped in all the my-ness that circumscribes me. I don't even know this woman; and yet, she is part of the image of my life -- part of my seeing.
ReplyDeleteIt is sameness and difference and something in between. Sepia, black & white, shades of blue; image and mirror-image; small and big. Do these images trace back to one real person? Sure. Are they necessarily images of the same person? Maybe not. What we know about this image doesn't have to be what we know about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis because it doesn't have to be about anything. It is proliferation and limitation. It is arbitrary and reasoned. Why sixteen and not 100?
I see sixteen distinct rectangular components, separated by color and density. Within each is a pattern which strongly resembles a female face. Many of the female faces look alike, but here and there I see variations in clarity, orientation, facial expression etc. I wonder whether they are ALL the same person. If so, sometimes this woman appears with a man and sometimes she appears with another. I wonder what her relationships are with them.
ReplyDeleteThe pairs of images remind me of a card matching game.
The distinct pattern reminds me of paned windows or the regular arrangement of hexagons in a bee hive.
I wonder what sort of bees would build rectangles instead of hexagons and store multicolored portrayals of human females inside.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteSilhouette-etched complexions produced and reproduced in multiple frames operating simultaneously in the same space; each moment revived and tainted with a new color, a new way of looking. Enmeshed with the old and marbled in the new are the smiles and frowns, estranged and bound, instant moment to moment clips shuffled and replayed. A color contrasting puzzle, nuzzling in one another through a multiplicity of different moments captured and recaptured on a single display.
ReplyDeleteThis image is 16 smaller images reacting with each other to form a larger image. The linear framing of images tells a history. Each of their own framings tells a history. Grouping the framings differently produces different effects. Each image is of the same woman, but each of these images is of a very different woman, even the images in which she may seem like she is the same. This is one showing of how it is possible for a single thing, through one smaller series of moments, to be creating a story much more fluorescent than the communicated history of the more-immediately-framed series of moments.
ReplyDeletesixteen or one?
ReplyDeleteI look at this and I see sixteen head-units, but really, they all look like one to me.
are there sixteen images of Jackie or one image of Jackie?
the dingy, used up quality of the prints plays to this, as if it's been reproduced so many times, this face.
repetitive and dried up.
The viewer is seen ‘more’ by the image than the viewer sees the image. Or the viewer is being looked at by more images than the viewer is looking at. Whether the viewer sees one big Onassis, or sixteen individual ones, or two halves does not really matter because the one big Onassis, or her halves, or the individual sixteen, each of those will be seeing the viewer see. The viewer’s slight shift in eye contact/direction, subtle changes within/on the viewer’s lips, the rise and fall of the viewer’s chest by drawing and releasing breath, and lots of other stuff will provide new events for each of the Onassis’s-- for the sixteen individuals, the weird augmented one, the ones that are blue, and all others not mentioned. The best way to put it is that the viewer is probably more interesting to the image (because the image can throw the viewer in so many different places at once, yet that are separate) than the image is interesting to the viewer.
ReplyDeleteA proliferation of images, each revealing their own reality, yet none revealing reality as a totality. The digital image is constantly reproducible, and is yet never a clone of that which it reproduces. Jackie O. smiling, Jackie O. contemplating, Jackie O. in her multiple forms, never revealing one clear inherent portrait of her, yet always revealing her reality in the moment of each individual image. Which one is the real Jackie O.? Which one reveals reality? None of them are real, yet all of them express reality in its present existence. They are not part of a math equation in which they all add up to a singular answer. They are each their own equations, adding up to nothing, never forming a whole, yet describing Jackie O. as a whole in the very instant they were taken.
ReplyDeleteThis photo is a mechanistic interpretation of the infinite ways the world can go; in this instance it happens to be the infinite ways Jacqueline Kennedy Onassises can go. The image is never just the image; it is already all of its possibilities. It is a life of mutability and constant image production in the studio that we call world.
ReplyDeleteThis seeing mustn’t be confused with our (human) seeing; it is clearly the camera’s seeing, yet we are seeing it as if we were the camera. The blues, whites and yellows of the mechanical lens has now become the eye’s lens and we are seeing these images at the same time, not one filter at a time like the camera. We have become machine but a modified version and our seeing has been reorganized through the seeing of the camera’s seeing.
Every time I see something like this I think of Kaja's class I toook my freshman year. the proliferation of images and art in the age of mechanical reproduction. I know this is just another associative process we are trying to avoid but I think the main ideas hold some warrant to the main themes of the class. In opposition to Benjamin, Coffeen stated in class that we weren't getting farther away from the real with the reproduction of images but closer to it. That made me really excited about every future image I will see. After reading about the aura and it's reinvention through reproduction I thought of it in the negative aspect.
ReplyDeleteNow I'll try not to use I.
The image presents 16 ways of going to the viewer. Each reproduced image provides an even stronger base with many frames within frames and many ways of going to see. The image isn't moving farther from an original in its reproduction, its moving closer to one, providing an original event for the viewer to look upon.
The original photos' purpose was documentation of past events. Now they are combined and transformed to create a new event. This event is immortalized by the internet. We can experience it whenever we choose.
ReplyDeleteIt seems that the Jackies can be separated into individual pieces, but in this new piece, this new event, they're arrangement IS the piece.
Sixteen images of one woman come together to form a complete image of her. Many of the shots capture different angles and expressions of her face, and in a sense forms a complete image of her. Yet, the whole image also offers sixteen different distinct perspectives of this one lady (images of her smiling versus a solemn picture of her). To add to these layers of uncertainty, blue and a tinge of yellow randomly color some of the images.
ReplyDeleteJackie, Jackie, Jackie. Jackie relative to Jackie, relative to Jackie. Distinguished, wind-swept, focused, amused. Distinguished, amused, naive, wind-swept. Wind-swept, detached, naive, puzzled. Detached, happy, puzzled, focused.
ReplyDeleteThis image reads like four stories—left to right, down, left, right, each line relating a different affect, a different conclusion. The composition conveys two distinct and contradictory senses of her: a multitude of candid images each give an impression of availability, that her life is an open book, and at the same time, the color and the Xerox-effect reinforce a sense of removal and detachment. The tile-pattern and the color (again) take it one level further—from a paparazzi snapshot to a work of art.
I actually do not know who the woman in the picture is, so I'm a bit worried I might be missing something important. On the other hand, my unfamiliarity with the person within the image might help me see the image for itself without the connotations that would be linked to the person as a symbol.
ReplyDeleteAlthough there are images repeated within the large image, none of the smaller images are exactly the same. Despite coming from the same original picture, there are more scratches on some copies or a slightly different shade of blue on others. This helps to emphasize that the image is an image and not the representation of the person. There is no better image of the person or a worse one because it is more filtered. The filters help remind the viewer that they are looking at an image and not a representation of a person. The compilation of sixteen small images into one large image also helps to emphasize the same point. The large image is an image of many images, which have already been filtered from another image to make them more blue or to remove the details. Images of images of images? Recollections of simple arithmetic remind us that two negative make a positive. A representation of a representation reminds the view that the representation is no longer a representation but an image itself. I suppose it drives the point home that an image is reality.
This image is the classification and intertwining of one woman in the circumstantial. Each image, each face, is unique, cut off from one another by the thin black boarders. Each face is seemingly the dictator of its own space, operating and existing independently of one another. But despite these thin black lines, the faces are not completely segregated. They are part of the same image, intimately intertwined by not only their proximity, but by the repetition of the same face. The faces attempt to operate independently of each other, but there is an inevitable spill over as the personality of the women, of the image, as they move from their individual spaces into a common realm through their simultaneous uptake by the viewer.
ReplyDeleteThere is no center to this image. You cannot look at one fixed spot and take in the entire image at once. It moves you. It forces your gaze to shift and change. This image is not merely a multiplicity of images, it is a multiplicity of interactions with the viewer as well.
ReplyDeleteWhat is this seeing? This vision is of another time. The camera has recorded a space and a face that will never be exactly as it is projected here. The next moment Jackie went on being mortal but her image, this jackie we see, is forever in that one moment or in this case multiple moments that will only and always exist here.
ReplyDeleteHere are sixteen different shots, none of which are the same. A few are disguised as repeats, but the slight variations that are apparent from one shot from another is just a glimpse of how reality is proliferated with every new production. Images are always creating, and it never gets old. Reality is always changing, or being added to, through an infinite number of permutations.
ReplyDeleteOne image, sixteen Jackie Kennedys. Through the seeing the seeing in camera and seeing through multiples of filters Jackie Kenney’s life is relived sixteen different times. The images has not been altered, only the eyes and the lenses of the beholder. I see what they saw and what their camera saw and what their filters or photo shop saw. I see the seeing the seeing of the seeing. Plus relived sixteen times. So 3X16=48? I’m seeing 48 different seeing? Or I’m just going crazy? Yes indeed I am crazy if I calculate the images. I’ll just let it be and submit to the fact this seeing if infinite.
ReplyDeleteThe low quality of the photos reveals an overwhelming will to image. Black space perfectly choreographed with white space suddenly constitutes the first lady, and a second lady, and a third lady, and so on. They are not copies of one another but each individual black and white dance that necessarily demands their own specific viewing or event. That is to say that knowing one isolated piece of this photo would not inform you to the greater concept, because there is no concept here there is only an event.
ReplyDeleteIn what appears to be the phenomenological Jackie: Jackie from all sides; the phenomenological front of Jackie’s face: Jackie’s face from all sides, Jackie’s face in its wholeness, in its perceptual totality, is really a lie. This image is so playful, and so mean. The viewer is forced to admit that what we take knowing to be is a rich composites of images; Jackie is a rich composite of images that become the same image that is our Jackie. If we speak to Jackie, we intend the composite of Jackie-images that is itself an image; we do not speak to the singular perspective that eclipses the other possible perspectives as she speaks, and turns, and smiles, and blinks. This image does the composing; this image is the composite, but only because the image is repeatable, is infinite repeatability. This image invites a conversation because it takes up our intending of the composite; this, it appears, is the real Jackie, just in pixels: a smooth, yet deceptive transition from analog to digital and nobody should notice. But the repeatability of the image is of the mutability of the image, and this intended composite that the viewer gives over to the image by means of a trusting, dis-appropriating, off-loading of intentionality is corrupted. 16 images of Jackie that form the composite whole of a post-analog Jackie are actually only seven. The repeated seven are reframed, “misprinted,” reversed; this conversation takes place during an earthquake or a natural disaster. If this were a first date I wouldn’t call her again, I’d probably change my number.
ReplyDeleteSquare pegs and round holes. Seventeen obvious frames, each framing one or sixteen Os. O alone, O with a killer, O happy, O sad, O perplexed. 8 different Os, 2 occurring once, 4 occurring twice, 2 occurring three times, collectively appearing and reappearing and over-appearing in almost the way that a persistent but unattached seeing continues to encounter and re-encounter. But this image’s 17th frame goes meta, exposes an O-ness, and a giant permeating O. Can a seeing do that in its encounter?
ReplyDeleteThe multiplicity of the images, different in their shadings and details, illustrates the absence, that is, the impossibility of a "real" image of Jackie O. Jackie, as do other people and objects, exists in multiplicity, as an assemblage of an infinite number of always unique images. The real has been subverted.
ReplyDeleteThe images are arranged in a way that suggests order however some of the images such as Jackie in he iconic suit from JFKs assassination contradict this. Additionally she is shown in tan blue and black and white, traditional business colors. This contrasts the Camelot image of the JFK administration, where color and culture were brought to the white house.
ReplyDeleteThis is a portrait of Jackie, not as she is but how she can go. The image jams the natural reflex to find what or who Jackie is, as each of the units offers the viewer a unique and nuanced experience. The viewer experiences many moments of the way Jackie has gone. Jackie becomes a series of happenstance meetings with the viewer, where at times I am looking at her and other times my gaze is met. The image shows individuals improvising and inventing themselves in each moment/event.
ReplyDeleteThe image overwhelms the viewer as it proliferates itself. At first glance, the diversity and number of images within seem to grow in front of the viewer's eyes. It takes a moment or two before one realizes that they are of one woman, that each image is repeated imperfectly.
ReplyDeleteAnd yet isn't the first impression the more correct, the more productive? The image, this image of images (of images), seems to have a will to expand and proliferate. These images are not made of one woman; rather, this woman is made of images, this woman is image. Where is this woman, Jackie O.? I don't see her--she must be outside the frame, and even then if I were to see her it would not be to get to the origin of these images but to the continued proliferation of them. Similarly, these images do not repeat imperfectly, for that would be to suppose an original standard, a form (in the Platonic sense), from which one will always drift from no matter how vehemently perfection is sought.
Thus at another glance, this multitude of images does indeed seem to grow before the viewer's eyes. Before the idea of an original form, an original self, emerges that form has already multiplied. And after reconsideration, the viewer sees this expansion not as an illusion of momentary overwhelming but as the reality of active proliferation. Look closely and the images do indeed seem to actively seek complexity and growth; as they move from the center the repetitions seem to spread and differ from each other more, gesturing toward the very real proliferation of images outside of the frame in everyday seeing.
This image: a rectangle of rectangles. Within each rectangle another image exists, a new person, a new microcosm. Shadows deny light and distinguish clear boundaries between the exposed and the hidden. Provoking interest in the possibilities of discovering the hidden – one may look to the next rectangle: only to discover that there is no familiarity, no same image, but rather a new life, a totally different person. Posture, angle, light, colour – moving, playing, performing – the intertwining of rectangles create a macrocosmic rectangle, a rectangle of rectangles: This image.
ReplyDeleteKnow her. But who's knows her? Not anonymity. People know her. I know her. Subject to object.
ReplyDeleteAnd I assume, I know, many know her. In iconoclasm. Sensual iconoclasm. Lustful iconoclasm. I know her dimples. I’m intimate with her fashions. Her nape tears on my shoulder.
Artificiality is sensual, and not only psychologically, because the picture is material. I know Jackie physically. And this Jackie is mine.
The one on the computer.
The one combined of colors. Reconstructed and kept intact relatively well.
The culturally relevant Jackie. The symbol Jackie. The tweaked Jackies, inverted, made negative and tinted with hues. The face as a word, the many faces as a multitude of words.
The pixel as a piece of grain in chalk. As a new piece of lead.
Away for platonic reductionism. This Jackie as I see her is a specific Jackie. Not a general one.
Not the one known to the American history scholar. To the average westerner. Not sure the delirious crack head I met last night in downtown Oakland or the baby on Telegraph this morning know her. The mass media know her. The touch her in fact. They must if consciousness is everywhere. She was electrically manhandled all the way to my computer. Via the media, but not exclusive to it. A groping assembly line of wires distributing digital data. These Jackie’s are in time. Ontological time. Internet time. This Jackie is pixels. Pixels come to me and make Jackie. This Jackie is mine.
What's interesting about this is not the picture of the girl. What makes this beautiful is not that it refers back to a real girl. Nor that it refers back to a girl. Nor that it refers.
ReplyDeleteThis is not an image OF 16 Jackie Onassises.
This is beautiful because the reference becomes being. Jackie becomes paint.
The image is a checkerboard of faces- three identical black and whites scattered amongst a sea of smiling blues. The sepia toned images contrast immediately and jump out of the tapestry, despite the fact that these specific images do not confront the viewer directly. They are nonchalantly turning away, as if to say- I am seen, you see me, but I choose not to look. But still we cannot help but SEE her!
ReplyDeleteThe image as a whole materializes as a bunch of digital flickers- appearing and disappearing before the eye, constantly itching to switch spots with one another and become an interchangeable and unpredictable mesh of "Jackie." Infinitely capable of rearrangement, but in this moment it is ordered possibilities.
We are presented with 16 Jackie Kennedy Onassises. Each lacks detail, lacks fine lines, yet the viewer still feels as if he knows much about her. She surrounds, and is surrounded at once by herself, a spectator among spectators, just as the viewer is. She(s) doesn't look at the camera. Yet can we say this is 16 Jackie Kennedy Onassises? Each is different, its own hue, its own exposure...I guess we'll find out.
ReplyDeleteJackie in Three Colors. First Lady Kennedy, Widow, and Onassis. What light do you bring to the image? Color filters an emotional response over the canvas of Jaqueline. Ah! Trend-Setter, Fashion Icon. Glamour of Youth and Power. No? Passenger in the presidential motorcade, the assassination, caught on 8mm in Dallas, Nov. 22, 1963. or.. Wife in Mourning, Mother in Grief. Left America for the Safety and Arms of the Greek. Public Life and its dramatic public re-telling.
ReplyDeleteAs images of Jackie O. proliferate in a seemingly haphazard arrangement, each particular image evokes a different sense. When attempting to focus on a particular image of Jackie O. and fixate on its particular sense, the viewer repeatedly finds that the peripheral images of Jackie O. actively impinge on the isolation of this event. Instead of operating as an assemblage of images, the image inevitably demands a holistic viewing.
ReplyDeleteThe eye wanders frantically, in a panic, from frame to frame trying to reconcile the lack of pattern to the particular placements of the faces of Jackie.
ReplyDeleteBut then it calms down, takes a breath and basks in some relief that the borders of the image need not imply an ending. This image is Jackie forever.
The next one will be better.
an iterable image. a structural unit of perception divorced from its origin yet nevertheless self-same: jakie-o, a unit of the grammar of images. repeated, differed, commodified, consumed.
ReplyDelete16 different views of a woman make up a picasso like single image of her. Each picture is separate, framed all its own, and yet they are all unified in the larger frame. Different colors, shading, orientation, etc. give each individual image, even the ones coming from the same negative, a different feel. Each image is infinitely reproducible and yet each is distinct.
ReplyDeleteUnlike some of the other images we've seen so far, this is of a known person, a celebrity no less. Yet here she is stripped of her identity in a sense. This is not a collage of her life displayed at a funeral proceeding. She is not a real person, only a familiar face, many familiar faces. A face that can be infinitely muted and reproduced is thus de-personified. Where does the real woman lie? This is not her nor evidence of her.
16 different views of a woman make up a picasso like single image of her. Each picture is separate, framed all its own, and yet they are all unified in the larger frame. Different colors, shading, orientation, etc. give each individual image, even the ones coming from the same negative, a different feel. Each image is infinitely reproducible and yet each is distinct.
ReplyDeleteUnlike some of the other images we've seen so far, this is of a known person, a celebrity no less. Yet here she is stripped of her identity in a sense. This is not a collage of her life displayed at a funeral proceeding. She is not a real person, only a familiar face, many familiar faces. A face that can be infinitely muted and reproduced is thus de-personified. Where does the real woman lie? This is not her nor evidence of her.