If you need me I’ll be in the garden

I am lucky enough to live in paradise, or as close to it as I’m ever likely to find in this lifetime. I am the caretaker of an acre of woodland, lovingly and painstakingly landscaped by yours truly and stuffed to the gills with a magnificent collection of trees, shrubs and rare woodland spring bulbs.

When we first viewed the house ten years ago, as soon as we came up the drive we knew we had to mortgage our very souls if necessary in order to live here (and in fact that is exactly what was required, judging by the size of our mortgage!) I didn’t give a toss about the house (which was a total wreck) but one glimpse of the dappled sunlight shining through the trees into the mossy glade and I was in love.

I’ve never been very good at yummy-mummy interior home design (it confuses me) but on the other hand I can mentally landscape a garden simply by closing my eyes and imagining it. I guess my garden is my canvas. Instead of picture frames I have planted low clipped box hedges which provide a structure which houses hundreds of shrubs, peonies, hydrangeas and roses, all carefully placed for maximum impact, and these are in turn surrounded by a carpet of colour coordinated tulips, wood anemones and rare bulbs with beautiful and obscure Latin names. Any photograph of the garden is meaningless. As any gardener knows you have to actually visit a garden in person, to look at the detail and soak up the atmosphere. You can’t learn its soul unless you are physically there.

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Three years ago my health deteriorated to such an extent that I had to give up my beloved garden and take to the sofa. Thinking about my garden when I couldn’t actually play in it made me feel sick with frustration, so instead I turned to writing about photography as a distraction and of course you’re reading the results of that distraction right now.

Things have now come full circle. My garden continues to inspire me – much of the arty-farty posts I write about are based on how I view the Art of Gardening. I simply change the language of how I feel about horticultural art to apply to nude photography. Both nudes and gardens are natural art-forms, so IMO they’re not actually very different at all.

As you folks know, I recently lost the ability to write and type for a while. Although the ability to type has come back to some extent, my brain is still short-circuiting itself in places so writing the way I used to (and as well as I used to) remains a lofty aspiration rather than a practical reality. I simply can’t process thought in the same way, and my hands won’t do what they’re told! So once again it looks like I’m being prevented from doing what I love.

To borrow a phrase I’ve used before, when Life craps on you, there’s only one thing you can do. You adapt and figure out a new way of doing things despite your set-backs. I might not be able to write or garden as often or as well as I used to but frankly this isn’t the end of either of my consuming passions.

I am looking out of the window as I write this and my summer garden is in full bloom. My roses and lilies are dripping with lush colours and brilliant red poppies are exploding everywhere. I might not tend to it like I used to, but my original creation is still there. It grows and continues to self create, both despite me and because of me.

If my garden art adapts then so must I.

And so must we all. The censorship legislation, 2257, the recession, our health, all these things which threaten our photography and our world – they are not the end. Our need to create will always be there waiting for us. Art is like that. It can’t be denied for very long because if we’re honest with ourselves, we can’t possibly live without it.

Adapt and move on. It’s what the best gardeners/photographers/writers/artists/creatives do.

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Painting v. Photography

Because I visit a lot (and I really do mean a LOT) of art exhibitions in my spare time, I often end up chatting to artists about photography. Most of them (usually painters) look down on photographers, and nude photographers in particular, not merely because they think nude photography is all about nekkid-chick-worship but also because they think snapping a nude photo is easy-peasy. To them, photography is not “art.” It’s a short-cut, a cheat, and the resulting image doesn’t “come alive” in the same way that a painting does. To them, any photographic skill involved is only about selection and manipulation, whereas painting is the art of creation from nothing to a totality.

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Hmm…well let’s look at this argument a little closer shall we?

I will admit that photography is a short-cut of sorts, when compared to a painting. It’s faster, for one thing, and when a photographer shoots a nude model, the transition from three dimensional form to a two dimensional surface has already been made for him. Unlike painting, a photographic artist does not have to wrestle with the twin beasts of perspective and foreshortening because he has a mechanical device which does it for him. However that mechanical method has limits. Without skill in the craft of photography, the resulting image will end up as nothing more than a dull surface of homogenised coloured dots: empty and banal.

The painters I was talking to did not understand the concept of photographic skill.

“It’s not just a case of “click the shutter and you’re done,” I told them. “Creating an outstanding photographic piece demands thought, calculation, experience, control and above all, instinct.”

“Maybe,” conceded the painters, “but photographs still lack the emotional depth and artistic personality that a painting gives you.”

So how does the photographer regain that three dimensional depth, that artistic intensity, excitement and LIFE that comes from painting a live subject? How can he create an image which reflects his own artistic vision, which reflects what he was feeling and visualising at the time he captured the image? How can he reflect his personality, passion and subjectivity in an image in the same way as a painter does?

The answer must lie with the skilled photographer’s composition and manipulation of light. To give a photograph similar levels of emotional intensity as a painting, the image creator has to view himself not as someone who is capturing a moment in time, not merely recording what is already there. No, the photographic artist SEES (and my “sees” I mean “understands and perceives”) much more than that. He has to go beyond using the camera as a mechanical tool. He has to learn to paint in light.

Anyone can learn to use a camera. Quite honestly, it’s not that hard to learn form and composition either. Indeed it’s perfectly possible to become a pretty competent photographer after studying and practising taking photographs for a few years. However learning how to use a camera is merely the means by which a photograph is constructed; whereas (like an artist) the skilled photographer uses the light information that the brain receives from the eye and turns it into something much more.

Light is the first thing we see when we open our eyes. It is our primary means of establishing a relationship with the world. In the same way that an artist has to learn how light works before he can paint a picture, the photographer has to learn how light can be used to manipulate how his subject appears, in order to realise the vision in his head.

IMO, photography and art share more similarities than my snobby painters would care to admit. Both are art, even though the tools may be different. Although one type of artist uses a paintbrush and the other uses a mechanical device, the tools are secondary and to some extent irrelevant. It is the finished image which matters first and foremost, and the emotion reflected therein. The camera is merely a tool which is at the service of a photographer’s sight. The pinnacle in technique for both painter and photographer is when that tool becomes secondary to the sight. The tool is thus merely a means to an end. Like a painter, the skilled photographer is unaware of the camera because he is so absorbed in visualising and creating the end image. So when his hands move unconsciously to take the picture, it means his eyes, his brain and his mind are free.

Is the resulting image “true art?” Well, yes, IMO it can be. A photograph doesn’t have to be merely a recording of something which is already there. However, it does have to accurately reflect the artist’s creative vision. It has to be a truthful kind of beauty.

The very highest point attainable in photographic art is when the unaided photographer, occupying the same ambience as the subject he is studying, has the skill to push beyond the mechanical language of the camera and use the additional tools at his disposal (light, space, composition, form) to portray a final image which has meaning to both artist and viewer. Only then will the photograph move from two dimensional to something more, because he has made the image come truly alive inside the viewer’s mind.

And it is at that point where photography stops and art begins.

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Photographs are of Iveta

The Culture of Blame

Do you remember the good ol’ days? The days where we enjoyed our lives because we were entrusted to make decisions for ourselves? Not all that long ago, the proles were in the box seat – we understood everything that was going on within our jobs and our societies, communication was the key and everyone had a part to play. Because everyone listened to each other, our communities were stronger, more powerful and they GREW because everyone listened to each other.

So what happened? Well the jury is still out on that one. Who was responsible for the collapse in society? Who caused the recession? Where did we all go wrong? Who was to blame?

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And therein lies the problem. BLAME. Our modern society is increasingly feeling the need to identify specific culprits and hang them out to dry. People are scared to think and act for themselves in case they unwittingly break some law, some rule, and get sent to jail.

During the last fifteen-to-twenty years there has been a definite shift from collective responsibility towards cultural responsibility. Twenty (or so) years ago there used to be more of a culture of collective responsibility. People within a community stood together. Nowadays it’s every man for himself – instead of growing together, communicating, living according to our individual consciences, the tendency is now to see individuals as heroes or villains of the hour. Where rules are broken, the situation invariably results in witch-hunts, with the authorities and/or the media desperately searching for someone to blame. But IMO the problem is not who is to blame, but the fact that our governments chose to perpetuate this culture of culpability and liability in the first place.

There is a new trend in our western societies towards increased regulation. We are not allowed to make decisions for ourselves as individuals. Instead our governments think for us. As the population of the planet balloons, our authorities seek to keep control the only way they can – by inventing ever more laws to keep control. In densely populated countries such as the U.K. we are particularly susceptible to exponentially increasing amounts of legislation. The burden of the people to comply with ever-increasing numbers of new RULES is immense. America and the rest of the world are rapidly following suit. 2257 was just a smaller symptom of a bigger disease. Behold the rise of the nanny state! As individuals, we are no longer trusted to choose how to live our lives, do our jobs, what to feed our children or how we spend our leisure time. Instead our governments are choosing for us.

The society we grew up with has changed beyond all recognition. The desire to govern effectively is seen to be achievable only by legislating for all eventualities. As a result we have an audit-based society where the authorities are forever checking that we have complied with their rules. So our governments are spending more and more of our hard earned money (which should be used to fund economic growth, healthcare and education) on creating compliance organisations whose function is to check and certify individuals and companies comply with all the new rules. Governments are creating more process, more systems, more legislation and ever more red tape.

The world is moving away from trusting individuals to think and judge for themselves. Increasingly the ability to make decisions is being stripped from us, and with it, our power over our own lives.

Things will never be the same again, but it is my belief and hope that eventually we will reach a tipping point, a point where our governments will decide not to see the worst in its citizens and instead have the courage to trust us again. One day our rulers will realise that the best way to govern is to cut legislation and restore the principles of individual responsibility and freedom.

It is only then that we, as a society, will grow strong again.

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Images are of Ifat

Worshipping False Idols

I was chatting to the local vicar recently (she’s loud, round and totally nuts – you’d like her) and she was waxing lyrical about meeting the Archbishop of Canterbury who had graced this remote little English marsh with a visit. The vicar confessed to having a totally inappropriate and passionate crush on His Grace for years, so meeting her icon was her dream come true.

"So how did it feel?" I asked her? She replied that actually she was astounded as to how utterly normal he was. Underneath the glamour and pomp of the English Anglican High Church, when she finally met him she discovered that he was surprisingly a very humble man, ordinary in every way and as flawed as everyone else.

She’s right of course. Rich and I have come across a fair few “celebs” over the years, as no doubt you all have too. The “icons” we have met are hot-stuff in their fields: mainly finance, law and nutrition, I’m afraid, so you probably won’t know them anyway. A few were numpties because their egos had run away with them (reality t.v. stars and Gordon Brown being obvious examples – Rich met him at a local business pow-wow years ago and confirmed that he really is as much a total prat in person as he is on t.v.) but the majority were just regular people, as normal and screwed up as you or I. Most were mildly embarrassed by their infamy and saw it as a sort of necessary evil, and pretty much all of them disliked sycophancy and preferred normal conversations on an equal footing. They shunned the general public where possible because they felt that they were always expected to be something that they were not.

So when I come across a model who is hungry for fame and celebrity, or when I talk to the teenage girls at my teenage son’s school who are completely and utterly obsessed with the celebrity culture, I always sigh in silent sympathy for these “icons” they worship.

I’m not a big fan of icon’s, I’m afraid. A “celeb” pumped up to icon-status is nothing more than a false idol who has been created and harassed by a fame-obsessed modern media which is itself hungry for money and notoriety. If you talk to many of these “stars” yourself, without all the fawning and hero worship, then you’ll find that there is nothing particularly magical or glamorous about them. They are just regular people who have a job to do and who make mistakes like the rest of us. They are also very often lonely people who guard their private lives as zealously as the Beefeaters guard the Crown Jewels. Much of their precious free time is spent hiding from the outside world, although in actual fact they’d probably like nothing better than a cuppa and a chat, just as long as you treat them like real people.

If you don’t believe me then you should try emailing or tweeting your icon one day. You’d be surprised at how often they reply. And if you ever get to meet them in person, please don’t fawn and slobber (unless it’s Uncle Gordy – he likes it.) Talk to them as normally as you would if you were talking to me. Then you might possibly catch a glimpse of the real person under the public persona and you’ll realise that like the media, we too have a responsibility not to put these poor people on a pedestal.

We have a duty to these celebs (whether actors, scientists, models, politicians or archbishops) to remember our humanity and respect them as the ordinary human beings they are, instead of expecting them to be something which exists only in our imagination.

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Image is of local church. Not a nude - sorry. Can't put archbishops, vicars and nekkid laydeez in the same post. I do have a conscience, you know...

Photographing A Thought

Whilst on my extended bloggie break, I found myself preoccupied with a question: Is it possible to photograph a thought?

I researched the matter in depth but came up with precious few answers. Thought-Photography is nigh-impossible, although many have tried. In 1933 a physicist called Nikola Tesla announced “a tremendous new power which was about to be unleashed.” He declared that he would soon be able to photograph thought, which he believed would bring about a total social revolution. He was convinced that “a definite image formed in thought, must by reflex action, produce a corresponding image on the retina,” which he believed he could read by use of an artificial retina which would receive and record the image of the object seen, and then photograph it. Needless to say, his experiment was a spectacular failure and Tesla died several years later, his ambitions unfulfilled.

By happenstance (or our weird sisterly psychic connection), a month or so after I read about Dr Tesla, our very own Dr L asked her bloggie readers to interpret her expression in a gorgeous portrait photograph of her by Andre Roussel. Because art (and portraiture in particular) is forever subjective, most of the commenters were unable to interpret her thought correctly (in fact, she was impatiently thinking about her overdue lunch.)

Unbearable Lightness by Andre Roussel, Montreal

Having discussed Thought-Photography with Rich at some length, he reckons that the problem is that in order to tell what someone is thinking, you have to first interpret their expression. This is not a straightforward process because people’s expressions are ambiguous. Study after study shows that a person’s perception of an expression is based upon what the viewer has seen moments BEFOREHAND. There are only a certain number of human expressions and as humans have evolved, expressions have always been interpreted in the context of the actions that precede it. They don’t in themselves have an intrinsic meaning when abstracted from events. So expressions don’t necessarily convey a thought, they just express emotion.

To understand a thought, it must be preceded by an event. A filmmaker has an advantage here because he can create a series of events which may be very subtle but which allow the viewer to correctly gauge an expression and thus the thought behind it. On the other hand, artists and photographers have to resort to props, or what Rich calls “tricks”, to transmit the context of the model’s expression and thus convey the thought to the viewer. In order to be successful, these tricks have to be very obvious. Subtlety doesn’t work.

In the case of a pure art nude portrait photograph, where there are rarely any props, I would therefore argue that it is nigh impossible to photograph a single thought and accurately convey it to viewers. As Dr L’s excellent photograph demonstrates, expressions are misleading (even basic ones like hunger) and viewers will naturally project their own feelings, interpretations and biases into a single picture. The model is thinking what we subconsciously want her to think, but we don’t really know the truth behind “the look.”

Perhaps this is the very reason why portraits remain so alluring, because they have that element of mystery. It’s the classic Mona Lisa question – what was she thinking? (Iksodas does this style very well.) The problem is that with art nude portraiture, we will never really know, and I must admit that this conundrum frustrates me. I WANT to know! Which is precisely the point of the photograph, I guess. The element of mystery is the hook which reels the viewer in.

I have no profound insights into Thought Photography to offer you, other than I wish I knew a sure-fire method of accurately capturing thought in a single frame. Perhaps this is beyond the capability of the camera as a tool. Maybe the apparatus is too limited, or perhaps the whole portraiture process is too easily influenced by viewer subjectivity to ever reliably convey real thought.

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Ivory Flame by Rich

One last (rather peculiar) nugget that I want to leave you with today is the story of the only proven occurrence of Thought Photography.

In 1973, Lawrence Fried, the then President of the American Society of Media Photographers, photographed Uri Geller in a controlled experiment which aimed to prove that Thought Photography was possible (although not in the same way that I am referring to above.)

In the presence of two assistants and a New York Reporter who acted as witnesses, Fried put a lens cap over his lens and covered it with double layered duct-tape to make it entirely light-tight. Geller then held the camera in front of his face with the lens facing him and then repeatedly pressed the shutter. The resulting film was then immediately developed (still in the presence of witnesses.) The resulting photographs were slightly out of focus but the images clearly showed Geller himself, taken at the exact spot where the photograph had been conducted.

So…the moral of the story is that Thought Photography IS possible. The model just needs to be psychic. Or a genius. Or crazy. Or all three.

Feel free to try this experiment at home with your highly psychic models. Do let me know how you get on, won’t you?