mardi 14 décembre 2004

Sequences... without consequences Nothing is new... or at least very little is original! What we are trying to do as well as seeing in today's photography is largely repeated and perhaps enhanced from what has been done and been seen before. We put our own interpretation on a statement using a camera and film and we hope the result will stimulate the visual and mental senses of the photographer... and possibly, hopefully even, of another viewer. If we do this we largely succeed in the exercise. Therefore the whole process of photographic involvement and self-improvement (I assume the desire for self-improvement occupies a corner in every photographer's mind) becomes a sort of sequence. If every negative I've exposed were placed end to end in chronological order they would make up a sequence... a recorded visual impression of time, of things that I have witnessed, places I've been to and events I've been involved in. This lengthy "sequence" for want of a better word, presented to a casual viewer would be too arbitrary a statement because of its sheer volume... so I simply compress the mass of information down to a more visually and mentally acceptable level... one short sequence of images which perhaps illustrates what I'm trying to say more clearly than one exposure or too many exposures could. Critics of the photographic sequence (and there are many) say, "Why do you have to make a statement with a series of images when one photograph, skilfully taken, can tell a whole story?" My answer is simply that while I admire the "decisive moment" school of photography for which Henri Cartier-Bresson was most highly regarded it's very difficult to accomplish and is not my preferred style. I regard myself as a designer using a camera rather than as a photographer. I try to extend my ideas and involvement in the things I see... not just record factual events which I view as a passive spectator. For example, a plan on a drawing board is often meaningless without relative elevation views and isometric projections. So I sometimes try to go beyond a moment in time by adding to that moment the previous moment... or the following moment, or many moments from before and after. In this way I build up a pattern of images which have greater potential of becoming a more complete photograph or message. I don't actually design a pattern of images to photograph as an animation illustrator or strip-cartoonist would (even if I do include two "strips" here) because most of my sequences happen by chance. However, chance opportunities are just that... and those that are caught, or even those which are missed for that matter, can be reactivated or manipulated... remember, almost nothing is original. Using sequences a photographer can modify a scene by adding a second or more images to manipulate the message sent to the viewer. Once, or example, when I made a single image of washing hanging on a line it suggested just that... an ordinary day, no movement, nothing happening in fact. But when I added more pictures of the same washing line taken in rapid succession and printed then together as a sequence (click on my November 29th weblog to see the images) it presented a picture full of activity! A totally different atmosphere and message was created by stepping outside the constraints of a traditional image made with a single exposure. Ideas can be extended in a way that is not practically possible in reality... although we may be able to imagine them happening. This is a real plus point when shooting a sequence. I started to laugh to myself one day whilst washing my old Morris Minor. The dirty car was being transformed into a shiny object using soap and water... and the transformation was so startling that I imagined myself washing the car away! Such an unlikely event is of course impossible in reality but quite possible to create with a camera... so I went through the whole car washing process again, exposing an entire roll of film using the self-timer release with myself in and out of the field of view. All my sequences which involve a person usually include me because I'm much easier to direct and control than an uninvolved stand-in. So in the third frame of the "car washing" sequence I made an intentional double-exposure... one with the car in position, the other with the car pushed completely out of the established angle of view. I should note that although the Nikon F2 I used gives close to exact (some say perfect) registration when double-exposing it's necessary to use a rock-solid tripod with this technique as any mis-registration of a foreground or background element will dispel the illusion. P.S. As a side note... I've also owned, used extensively and always found the Pentax LX camera even better for perfect frame registration as well as when rewinding through the entire roll to double-expose on the same frame hours or days later... the LX was specifically, possibly uniquely, designed for rewound double-exposures. As I said earlier, I basically started shooting a sequence with the exposure of my first negative... and my material store is being added to constantly. When searching for pictures to make up a sequence you can go backwards into your store because sequences can have more than one direction... they don't have to be progressive in a forward direction or time. The sequence offers so much scope for interpretation that there seems to be no end to its possibilities... from Muybridge's use of multiple-camera apparatus for recording human and animal motion to the Victorian "Zoetrope" and "flicker" books... from cine cameras to comic strips... from the use of "freeze-frame" images in feature films to our own efforts at camera club audio-visual shows. Two dated but still memorable examples of very professional sequential work to my mind are the split and multiple frame techniques used in the "Grand Prix" film titles by Saul Bass and Andy Warhol's eight hour epic of the Empire State building's lights being switched on and off. When you think about it sequences are going on around you all the time. You are part of one, or many, yourself... which is rather interesting... or possibly scary! 7:26:40 PM    comment []