These were taken with my Pentax K1000, whose light meter does not work. The evidence above leaves not doubt of that. One of the first things I learned in graduate school was to question fiercely the notion of correct reading, which is not the same as accurate reading. The former carries slightly moral implications. The idea of correct reading builds upon the existence of an incorrect reading, inevitably tied to views associated with cultural, political, social, and ideological predetermined tendencies. This is a much broader and murkier terrain simply because such tendencies remain inconstant, deeply partial, if not outright prejudicial. The impressions of right or wrong, correct or incorrect never reflect the facts, truths, merits, issues, and desires represented in the text in an unmediated fashion. They are effects, and as such they are mired with the preconceptions that exist in the reader prior to the encounter with the text. They are subject to interpretive practices that cannot be easily divorced from emotions and caprices that accentuate or undermine parts of the text unduly at their own discretion. The second part to the credo of questioning the idea of correct reading was that faulty, incorrect, and erred reading can sometimes render insights that may indeed be helpful, productive, and even rewarding. I thought that was just an exquisite idea. Productivity that comes from error. How wonderful is that? Beware, erred is not quite the same as chancy; that is, we are not speaking of the possibility that by chance one uncovers an unexpected insight or interpretation. Now, what is analogous to both cases is that each is equally contingent.
I am not quite sure if the same can be said of photographic technology or mechanicity. A meter that cannot read or reads incorrectly will on most occasions yield unfortunate results.
You pose an interesting question here. From a photography perspective consider that what is captured on film or a CCD is not the "true" image but an approximation based on the underlying chemical interaction with light (for film) or a transducer (CCD) along with the transformation produced by the lenses. Hence what is true or correct is a subjective endeavor based on the goal of the photographer. You can say the same things about a filter where the purpose of the filter is to distort an image in some way. Here the correct functioning of the filter is to produce an incorrect representation of the world.
ReplyDeleteCan we say the same thing about a light meter? Considering that it is a device that measures, we know that it is fundamentally imprecise. I don't mean this from a Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle perspective but from a more pragmatic perspective. Any measuring device is limited by its sensors and transducers so the value produced is again an approximation. While this approximation may be acceptable, because it is an approximation we must think about it in terms of a margin of error. Electronic components have notoriously high margin of error. The tolerance of commercial (i.e. not military) is 5-10%, meaning that every transistor, resistor, capacitor is slightly different and has slightly different performance characteristics. Hence correctness is not an absolute property but something that is fuzzy. So your poor light meter just happens to be less accurate than it was before but was never correct.
I don't know a lot about literature, but I find that the concept of a "correct" reading is akin to the Supreme Court interpreting the Constitution. Can there really be such a thing as a correct reading or will you always be condemned to view the reading through a subjective lens?
Dear Brian,
DeleteThank you so much for taking the time to write such a thoughtful, compelling response. It was such a surprise to receive, after a long while of silence, an email alert to a comment on my blog!
As I re-read your comment, I first I wonder what "true image" means, and I find it telling that in order to question the empiricity of correctness we still need to presuppose the possibility of a true image. As you seem to suggest, I wonder if there are only approximations, and by a Humean-sort-of-process, we arrive at the always unstable proposition that things and people actually bear an actual true image. I like the idea that the filter's purpose of being is to recreate an erred vision of something that stubbornly holds onto, or so we believe, an ideal of truth or "correct appearance."
But does the photographed object have an image, true, correct or otherwise, before its (filmic) representation? I find the idea that an object's correct use must constitutively end in the incorrect rendering of something else, as a productive way to think about presence and essence, and their perennial enmity in western philosophy. I would like to say that the ontology of that photographed image does not depend on or owe anything to the object's presence.
I am not trying to be an ultra-relativist or obnoxious postmodernist suggesting that indeed there is nothing outside representation, or as Derrida put it: there is only text. Of course not. There is the actual object, but what is its image? I like the idea of thinking the image as always only approximations, which, rather than invoking subjective categories of right, wrong, correct or incorrect, demand that we think in terms of distance/s always regulated by time and space. Concerning truth, distance desperately needs to be rescued from vulgar moralization or sentimentality. More distance is not necessarily inferior to more proximity, as proximity is not more capable of truth than distance. The idea of distance is productive for it points to the performance of use that occurs between the various elements at play. And in such processes of use, there is little relevance or illumination in pitting essence against image or form.
Fuzzy or not, the category of correctness seems to exist less to protect the possibility of the true image than to legitimate the use of the filer/meter. Then, we must wonder why it is that we've come to need to legitimate the practice of use with such reductive categories.
Photography shows how in image-making or (filmic) representation, there are no correct or faithful renderings, as you note. Only approximations that result from the reciprocal use of different elements. Just as the filter's use comes to be what it is (being the correct form of itself by performing incorrectness), I wonder whether the form (image) of something comes into being precisely by performing the failure of that something's being. in other words, the image we get constitutes at once what the object is and is not. Then, there is no correctness or incorrectness, but the actualization of distance, gaps that visualize that something's image is only because it failed to be something else. Only potential lies in that distance.
Lots of argumentative leaps here. But I hope that it makes some sense. What do you think?
Again, many thanks for your rad comment!
Being a man of science, the only things I consider to be absolute and impervious to interpretation are the laws of physics. There are of course limits to this view as well, but for the scale that we deal with in pictures it is a reasonable simplification. This is not to say that living things cannot misinterpret these laws, but rather the laws do not change based on the incorrect interpretation. We could say the same thing about the underlying subject of a picture insomuch that the subject does not change (materially) by the action of capturing its image.
ReplyDeleteI do think you have to be careful with what you mean by "having an image". Objects in the world have properties, which can be measured. Are you referring to an image as being the specific property of an object's ability to absorb/reflect radiation, electromagnetic or otherwise?
These sorts of questions lead me what photography is to me, which boils down to two things: communication and manipulation. It is a medium that communicates a mood, an emotion, an idea, an aspect of the world that cannot easily be communicated using words. As photographers we have a modest toolkit with which to manipulate images to communicate preciesely what we want to communicate. There is a perverse assumption we make when we take pictures that others will interpret the image that we create and communication will happen how we want. What separates mediocre artists from great artists is their ability to control this process through their work.
When I asked about a certain object having an image, I was attempting to distinguish image from appearance, which can be roughly described as the object's surface qualities/properties that readily engage the subject's senses. To me the image includes a level or artifice or making (poiesis) that appearance does not. Image is mimetic in that it perpetuates the content-form problematic, which remains central to the arts in general and western thought. As an aesthetic construct, is the image pure form, or does it have a content? It is true that the configuration of an image remains subject to physical laws to some degree, but it also involves a great deal that falls outside the physical world. To me, the existence and actual presence of images are not subservient to reality. The duty of the image, after all, is not to produce exclusively resemblance. In some ways, the particular image of an apple is foremost an example of an image rather than the mimetic appearance of the apple. In other words, the image of the apple presupposes a system of codes that treat that particular object as an apple, which means that in some ways (broad strokes here) the image of the apple pre-exists the object of the apple itself.
ReplyDeleteThe medium that allows me to think thusly about the image is photography. I don't see photography primarily as an artistic or communicative medium that mediates between objects and subjects (producers or consumers). Photography seems to have an ontology, so photos do not merely record or represent an anterior reality. They are not merely expressions that say or fail to say what the photographer intended for them. Instead, they are objects at once autonomous and not. In their autonomy they bear no debt to anyone or anything. As a result little does it matter what the photographer intended or not. Thus they demand that our epistemological engagement with reality or the real be a different one. But in their dual ontology of difference, they are also medium, so as such they point to things outside themselves. They are paradigmatic in that sense.
I am far less anthropomorphic when it comes to aesthetic expressions. I don't think that photography captures things that escape linguistic grasp. I think that the difference between the two media lies in that photography engages materiality and matter in ways language simply does not.
I think that my understanding of what makes an artist great or mediocre remains very skeptical of the artist's ability to master process and the role such ability plays in attaining either mediocrity or greatness.