I've been photographing reflections again recently, something I return to occasionally as a photographic exercise, or more accurately an exercise in seeing. Jean-Claude Lemagny's essay "Is Photography a Plastic Art" from the book "Poetics of Space, A Critical Photographic Anthology" is a favorite of mine and particularly insightful when thinking about photographing reflections.
Lemagny defines the plastic arts as those that "involve the manipulation of substance that yeilds to the pressuer of our finges... direct contact with a substance that takes into account it's inherent resistance." In other words, any creative effort that reproduces 3-dimentional forms in 2-dimentions through the manipulation of material: sculpture, pottery, painting and all of the arts involving drawing and sketching. While photography does not involve substance directly, says Lemagny, "it is, in any case, a visual art that depends on reflected light and has the fundamental problem of translating a 3-dimentional reality into a 2-dimentional surface. It even shares with sculpture... it's opposite... the same problem of expressing three dimensions in a two-dimensional medium."
He goes on to discuss theater and film, which many suppose to be photography's siblings. Not so, says Lemagny. Although all three involve issues of space, theater and film are arts of movement and narrative. "Photography is bound up with a specific place and instant in an absolute fashion. The incorrect way to look at a photograph is to imagine it is telling a story. Any and every wrong use of photography comes from this misunderstanding... movies and the theater, which have time at their disposal, work with meaning. Photography does neither. If the theater is deprived of movement and speech, it freezes into sculpture... which only photography can convey. Without movement and sound, movies immediately become photography and cease to have any meaning."
This is dramatically and paradoxically demonstrated in the closing scene of Kieslowski's Decalogue One. The film's conclusion shows the frozen frame of a television broadcast which is filled with meaning precisely because it has no movement and sound. As the image slowly begins moving frame by frame and fades to black it proves Lemagny's point perfectly: it is filled with all of the meaning and emotion weight of the story that has just concluded.
Lemagny concludes, "we thus grasp the obvious symmetry in which photography and sculpture coexist in the panorama of plastic arts. At each extreme, there is the exact same basic given – modeling... on one side there is modeling by hand, and on the other modeling by light.
Not that anything is wrong with images on monitors. In a way it is the closest approximation of the experience of looking at transparencies projected on a screen. The nostalgia of that aside — the sound of the projector fan, the dropping of slides, the smell of the projector bulb heating up and the gritty feel of the screen — the combination of slide and projector was probably the ideal way to view a photograph.
He goes on to discuss theater and film, which many suppose to be photography's siblings. Not so, says Lemagny. Although all three involve issues of space, theater and film are arts of movement and narrative. "Photography is bound up with a specific place and instant in an absolute fashion. The incorrect way to look at a photograph is to imagine it is telling a story. Any and every wrong use of photography comes from this misunderstanding... movies and the theater, which have time at their disposal, work with meaning. Photography does neither. If the theater is deprived of movement and speech, it freezes into sculpture... which only photography can convey. Without movement and sound, movies immediately become photography and cease to have any meaning."
This is dramatically and paradoxically demonstrated in the closing scene of Kieslowski's Decalogue One. The film's conclusion shows the frozen frame of a television broadcast which is filled with meaning precisely because it has no movement and sound. As the image slowly begins moving frame by frame and fades to black it proves Lemagny's point perfectly: it is filled with all of the meaning and emotion weight of the story that has just concluded.Photography's fundamental challenges are completely apparent when photographing reflections: translating space, volume and form into 2-dimentions. A reflection is rendered into 2-dimentions by the surface upon which it is viewed. The reflective substrate also presents a barrier which separates the reflection from the space and volume behind it, which also become a visible part of the reflected image. This space and volume forms an armature providing dark areas which support the reflected image. All of this, the space being reflected and that which supports it, are compressed into a 2-dimentional image.
The substantialities of black, negative space confirm Lemagny's contention about shadows and their role in photography: "shadow is passive; it is negation. In photography... things are the other way around. What is first, what is material, what provides structure... is shadow. Shadow functions by receptiveness, its openness, or its resistance to light. The shining of light, its movement, only stand out because of the profound substantialness of shadow. Photography is the art of making a concrete substance out of the nothingness of shadow."
Lemagny concludes, "we thus grasp the obvious symmetry in which photography and sculpture coexist in the panorama of plastic arts. At each extreme, there is the exact same basic given – modeling... on one side there is modeling by hand, and on the other modeling by light.
This is a very important point, especially in the digital photographic age. Our relationship with photographs seem to have changed. Increasingly, photographs are not about prints and reproduction on surfaces, they are images we see on a computer monitor. A monitor is a surface but the image is not a physical part of it: it is an impermanent transmission of light by a device that is turned on and off, introducing an element of time that is not connected in any way to the image itself. Photographs on monitors also seem more closely connected to the image's subject matter, whereas a photograph on a surface is by nature a step further removed.
Not that anything is wrong with images on monitors. In a way it is the closest approximation of the experience of looking at transparencies projected on a screen. The nostalgia of that aside — the sound of the projector fan, the dropping of slides, the smell of the projector bulb heating up and the gritty feel of the screen — the combination of slide and projector was probably the ideal way to view a photograph.
