On Mon, 2010-02-01 at 08:27 -0700, Douglas Barbour wrote:
> that abstraction makes sense to me, Chris. I have two very
> large b/w photos by a Canadian, Jane Hinton, from a series called
> 'Structures
(I changed the thread title since we have strayed.)
There does seem little written on the formal aesthetics and poetics of
B&W art photography. Given the minor status in art history this could be
expected.
So it seems worthwhile starting a list of what B&W does. Other ideas, of
course, most welcome.
1. First, nostalgia is not a component of B&W art photography, but
rather nostalgia is part of the flood of cliché media images in which we
live. There are some B&W prints designed to hung on a wall in your house
in the local furniture store of old and rusted no longer used farming
implements with rustic wooden frames; nostalgic boring clichés.
2. B&W needs to break through or escape from this saturation of cliché
images. Absolute deviation is one way, like a lever that can open enough
space for art photography to begin.
3. The space created is essentially a haptic space which is dynamic and
always changing. So we cannot say B&W photography is a static and fixed
form. Haptic alone cannot escape cliché since television and advertising
images are grounded in haptic sensations. You crave to have that Rolex
haptic image on your wrist, to handle it, to feel it. You crave to feel
that brand of laundry washing powder on your skin.
4. This is a second aspect of absolute deviation in that it is without
relation. Clichés function as a saturation of relations. Every relation
becomes saturated by cliché images and to get some relief, you buy the
product, in hope of some fresh air. Absolute deviation escapes cliché by
way of being absolute. No purchase required.
5. Haptic sensation and space can be achieved through a variety
strategies. It is at the point that the differences between B&W and
colour emerge. For both, an oblique angle which refuses a horizon and
vanishing points can create a haptic feel.
At this point we come across a list of haptic strategies and a new list.
1. As already said, oblique point of views as above.
2. An illusion of clutter, such as the clutter in my still lifes. In the
history of still life painting clutter is one strategy; the mess left
after the feast. While this works with B&W, simply working with colour
instead of B&W film seems to fail.
3. This failing of colour to form a haptic sensation in the way B&W can
occurs by way of rhythm. For colour there needs to be a rhythm of
colours and if this fails then the colours need a different arrangement.
B&W works in a different way and as such forms a rhythm which belongs to
the B&W media.
4. Black and white, rather then reducing colour to relations of grey as
if grey represents a colour, instead leaves or preserves colour as
absolute. So B&W does not work with colour as relations of grey, if it
did another cliché arises from which escape is foreclosed. You will
never escape.
5. Colour then must work with its own relations and not borrow from
relations of black and white media. In western art this is the colourist
slabs of colour, eg, Cezanne.
6. B&W works by way of abstraction where abstraction is imagination and
can only ever be imagination. While using one's imagination seems one of
those outlawed things us post-modern era artists should not do, it is
essential to the B&W art photograph. An imagination of the viewer as
much as of the artist. It is through imagination that both viewer and
artist comes to the image and through this is also the pleasure one
feels in an image.
... and now I run out of ideas.... more later perhaps, Chris Jones.
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