Equivalence: The Perennial Trend

[paulr]

<<We need to be careful about giving much weight to authorial intent.>>

I'm not all that worried. So much of this seems a word game to me. From my view (as an artist, not a philosopher or sociologist) you have "intent" (the meaning intended) and then you have all the other meanings that accrue to a work--all those meanings that are attached to a work.

It's much more than a word game. The idea that other meanings accrue in the work didn't really emerge until the 20th century. That's a long time, considering how many thousands of years people have been wrestling with these questions. It's is all an extension of the most basic question people bring to works, whether they're talking about stories, photographs, scripture, or even laws. One of the first is, where does the meaning come from? Answers include the author (of course), the structure of the work itself, culture (which includes the language used to create the work), and the readers' own acts of interpretation.

Of all of these, authorial intent is the most slippery. It's the thing we can never know, because even if the author is alive, or has made a statement, we don't know how credible their version is. To what degree do we even believe the creative process was conscious? If less than 100%, why do we trust the author's interpretation of it? How do we know they haven't just made up a story that they find satisfying, or that we will find satisfying? And if this is a story from a long time ago, don't we encounter the same problems looking back and trying to understand it that we encounter trying to understand the work directly?

Stieglitz's differing versions of the Equivalents? Not surprising in the least. He spent many years on this--made something well over 200 pictures. His version of what he was doing and why no doubt changed over that time, no doubt he was working out the ideas out loud in real-time, trying them out on people. An artist is both the creator of a work (with the intended meaning) and a viewer of the work (with the accrued meaning). It's a mess to figure out. Stielglitz is unusual in that he is really famous and that this process was recorded to a degree.

I agree. This is one of the better illustrations of why authorial intent is a red herring. You'll find equally reliable information in the Farmer's Almanac.

The meaning an author intends in a work and the meaning others place upon a work are not different points on the same spectrum. They are different things altogether.

I think the lesson is actually that they're not so different. Authorship implies authority ... that the person who made the thing has some special privileged position regarding its meaning. This is what all the 20th Century Death of the Author and intentional fallacy business has challenged. No one's saying that Stieglitz's opinion is worthless. And of course, it's valuable in terms of biographical interest. But in terms of understanding the work, his word is not necessarily more privileged than anyone else's ... a good thing, considering how completely incommensurable his versions have been.

If the ghost of Stieglitz pontificates to you on a cloud picture, feel free to channel the Dude from the Big Lebowsky, and tell him, "that's just like, you're opinion, man."

[paulr]

Paul, I'm not being dense on purpose, I swear, but this sentence is impenetrable to me.

... I would not find it "hard to make a cigar just a cigar." I would find a cigar and take a photo of it. Thus, I would have photographed a cigar as a cigar, full stop. What the world chooses to make of the resulting image has nothing whatsoever to do with me.

Exactly. It has nothing to do with you. But it has everything to do with the life of your image in the world. Your ideas about what the cigar is or isn't may change, and they may disappear completely when you're gone.

But the images may live on, and then the ways people interpret them will be determined by factors unrelated to you.

[pdmoylan]

I offer two more to this interesting thread. Both are abstracts, and offer either equivalence or metaphor to me which after this great discussion here, may be the same or different.

Jim,

I love this work. Exquisite.

One needs context to identify something beyond the image prima facae. It could be a collection of similar or disimilar images, perhaps as Austin has done with an oblique word or reference. Remembering years of undergraduate study of Art History, context for metaphor was created not by a single image, but by what the artist(s) imposed on the image, reduced from past history and experience, shifted as to color form shape and choice of what is included in the image - but more importantly, what the artist stated about the image to offer it a rightful place among hords of others. Manifestos were common during the last century to convey what was intellectually intended in image making. One can find among Marcel Duchamp, the Symbolists, Impressionist etc. enough verbal commentary distinguishing an individual's or group's work from others. Art critics became the engine for discernment by organizing image makers for more accessability, for those less informed. And to latently enhance careers, both their own and those who they showered with attention.


Photograpy, being inherently illustrative, and therefore in many minds a lesser art form, is not sufficiently facile to convey ideas. There is less of an ability to impute then in painting. Additionally, (and to which Ansel complained often) I suggest that color photography distracts from the finesse of the transfer of intent. B&W with the extreme control of the ultimate image, for which most here have given examples, peels away all but the form, shape and texture and perhaps amplifies a bit more what may have been behind the image. It is the simplicity of retention of information which provides a universal language for what photography can be as an art form. Metaphor potential, whatever it may be, I believe is lost with the use of color. What remains the standard for color is the "awe" response.

As another point of reference for this discussion, is it possible to convey "ideas" resorting only to nature images (without any immediate reference to human intervention). Is the outcome of such images only to convey beauty, or can a collection of isich mages become fuel for further thought about photographer intent?

PDM

[jcoldslabs]

By abstraction I don't mean abstract like a Jackson Pollock painting, but instead something removed from the source, an idea of a thing rather than the actual thing.

The crux for me is your notion that a black and white photograph is "an idea of a thing rather than the actual thing." Of course your door photograph is a visual representation of a door and not an actual door that one can open and walk through. (Ceci n'est pas une porte.) But the image clearly depicts a door and not an apple or a tree or a person. So I'm unclear how a depiction of a door is an idea of a door. To me an idea is something formed in the mind, not something formed by an object in space. Painters and sculptors and writers all have the luxury of their ideas beginning in the mind and flowing outward into the physical world, but for us as photographers that paradigm is inverted.

In the case of my recent color abstract, the subject (a glass vase) already existed and was sitting there on the table. I simply moved the camera around it until I found an arrangement on the ground glass that I liked.

This begs the question: can you photograph an idea? For my money Teun Hocks comes close, but his work is mixed media, not purely photographic.

Jonathan

[Maris Rusis]

...This begs the question: can you photograph an idea?...Jonathan

Yes, it is possible if the idea can be manifest in a physical shape; usually via the devices of simile, metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, and so on. Personally I entertain a lot of ideas that are crying out for appropriate photographic subjects (would that I could find them) to bring them into realisation.

One way of thinking about this is to imagine an idea as a mental picture, a template, that is projected upon the world through the eyes. When the template fits something "out there" the process can be culminated by fetching the camera and making a photograph. The photograph and the template are mutual equivalents.

Once the photograph is completed the critical viewer (should there be one) may care to run the process backwards and attempt to discover the mental template and gain an insight into the mind of the artist.

[D-tach]

I like this very much, D-tach.

Thanks Joe

[paulr]

The crux for me is your notion that a black and white photograph is "an idea of a thing rather than the actual thing."

It's interesting to me that this is modernists reacted against, in many cases. William Carlos Williams: "No ideas but in things"; Wallace Steven: "Not ideas about the thing but the thing itself"; William Bronk: "Ideas are always wrong."

And they're referring to a medium that's less concrete than photography.

Stieglitz was a champion of modernism, although many of his ideas, including some of his descriptions of equivalence, sounded thoroughly Romantic. And most of his photography, at least until he was in his fifties, looked pretty romantic to me.

You might say a lot of the modernists could be described like this. They rejected Romanticism vocally, but in their work did so incompletely, at best. For example, "Ideas are always wrong" is, if nothing else, an idea.

[Jim Cole]

Jim,

I love this work. Exquisite.


PDM

Thank you.

[Jim Cole]

This is a good topic.
Jim, I like that photo. You almost got the 10 & 2 time layout. You got a good mix of good photo qualities there.
The time, inflexible structure, wear, seem to be cracking the ledge as if a personal warning+allusion in a photo instead of words; that's the "what else it is" to me.

Thanks, JP. Setting up for this one definitely ran a bunch of metaphorical ideas through my head. I actually titled it, "Outside of Time".

Sorry for the delayed response.

[Jim Cole]

Initially I see a contemporary interior, a study in light and tone.

Then I see what looks like the bottom of a trap door in the ceiling.

It is a strange picture, and I can't guess what you were thinking, but there is a suggestion of
some something else going on, aside from just an upstairs hallway. Vaguely unsettling.

Similar thoughts to mine when I took the picture. Sorry for the delayed response. Curious that you commented that this was an upstairs hallway. How did you know that?