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.

IvoryFlame 808

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?