The future of photography

[paulr]

You guys were talking about scientific writing ... I think that and legal writing are interesting examples. In both fields, language often has to be worked and practically tortured to eliminate possibilities of misundersting. The ironic result is that often no one besides a specialist can understand it at all.

Even so there are abject failures, especially in law, which deals with ideas that are less concrete than the ones in science. We have distinct schools of constitutional interpretation, which are divided by the same hermeneutic principles that divide schools of scriptural interpretation and schools of literary interpretation. The differences of opinion concern the nature of meaning itself, and certainly the mutable nature of meaning in language.

The result is that two judges can have opposite interpretations of the same law, based entirely on their philosophical stances toward interpretation.

[Jay DeFehr]

Well, I think that’s a great stab! Maybe Paul will think so too. But I also think it’s natural for a professional engineer (such as yourself) to make claims about science that may border upon being, well, just a little extravagant. For while the language of science does try to be objective, it is itself an “abstraction” from experience – useful and far from unreal, but thin and bare and poorer (less than 1:1) than the world it analyzes.

You're very generous. I'm not an engineer, professional or otherwise, but I do tend to think in scientific terms. I understand it's one thing to express something, and another to explain it. When it comes to explanatory power, science is the only game in town, though far from perfect or infallible. In fact, it is in the recognition by science of its fallibility, and its insistence that all knowledge is provisional and subject to revision that it's beauty lies.

[Jay DeFehr]

Engineers, some of them are the biggest of the BS'rs just look at how screwed up our road system is in parts of this country and you'll understand, without a need for words.
I worked for three years on a survey crew & saw plenty.

"What have the Engineers ever done for us?"

With apologies to Monty Python.

[Heroique]

You're very generous. I'm not an engineer, professional or otherwise, but I do tend to think in scientific terms...

(Whoops, my apologies, I remembered you were an oilfield worker from an old thread, and I just thought that automatically meant “engineer.” I think the technical flavor of many of your posts added to this perception.)

[Jay DeFehr]

(Whoops, my apologies, I remembered you were an oilfield worker from an old thread, and I just thought that automatically meant “engineer.” I think the technical flavor of many of your posts added to this perception.)

No offense taken. Engineers aren't all bad.

[Heroique]

The differences of opinion concern the nature of meaning itself, and certainly the mutable nature of meaning in language.

I’m reminded of many great cultural accomplishments by those who were aware of these differences of opinion – and considered them vitally important, if we can trust their letters and journals – but always set these differences aside long enough to “get down to work.”

Some of them – I’m thinking Nabokov right now – “got down to work” by playing with them.

Another – now I’m thinking William James – “got down to work” by being open to them in his lovably detached manner.

[rdenney]

No offense taken. Engineers aren't all bad.

Thank you!

Rick "who does, however, know some bad ones" Denney

[rdenney]

You guys were talking about scientific writing ... I think that and legal writing are interesting examples. In both fields, language often has to be worked and practically tortured to eliminate possibilities of misundersting. The ironic result is that often no one besides a specialist can understand it at all.

Even so there are abject failures, especially in law, which deals with ideas that are less concrete than the ones in science. We have distinct schools of constitutional interpretation, which are divided by the same hermeneutic principles that divide schools of scriptural interpretation and schools of literary interpretation. The differences of opinion concern the nature of meaning itself, and certainly the mutable nature of meaning in language.

The result is that two judges can have opposite interpretations of the same law, based entirely on their philosophical stances toward interpretation.

This all makes complete sense to me. I have no shortage of experience explaining technical things in words (it's a large part of what I do for a living), and I promote better writing of engineering processes through systems engineering techniques. But I put these in the category of risk reduction, not risk resolution, precisely because words are imperfect. We imperfectly understand the ideas we are trying to express, and we imperfectly express them.

From a technical perspective, we could say something similar by realizing that the modulation transfer function of the optical, capture, and display components of photography are always less than one. Thus, distortion of some sort is always introduced in the process. We indeed do play with that imperfection, often by exaggerating it. This is the problem faced by legal and scientific writing, which faces the same limitation.

But it applies at a conceptual level, too, and this is where I think the correlation to language is strongest. The more we try to eliminate those distortions, the more we rob the image of the potential to express an idea that sits above the merely visual and looks down on it. Most of us are trying to capture some emotional or intellectual (bowing to Struan) response that defies description using any medium. We are always trying to improve transparency, but that assumes we have a clear idea of what we are trying to express transparently. The MTF of that idea formation in our heads is always less than one, and we are never completely transparent.

Adams complained of sharp images of fuzzy concepts, and your point is that all concepts are fuzzy, and that all expressions make them more so.

So, technical advances relating to new photographic equipment reduce technical flaws, but in so doing apply a pastiche of truthiness that is at best a myth. Artists, on the other hand, rather than experiencing those technical flaws as accidents the way snapshooters do, exaggerate them for effect. (I'm generalizing flaws here to include any purposed intent to interpose a layer of affect on the effect, which is about as Artspeaky as I get.) Thus, Cindy Sherman's shapshot style is recognizable as a style, not as an accident, and largely because of the other things that she did and because of what we know about her, which brings in selectivity and editing.

(On prior point I'd like to respond to: Google's street view, or whatever, cannot have serendipity, because it imposes a standard time and set of conditions for making it's photographic survey. Photographers often take advantage, sometimes without prior planning, of non-standard times and conditions that Google would reject.)

Rick "who may have learned something he probably already knew" Denney

[Jack Dahlgren]

Well, I think that’s a noble stab! Maybe Paul will think so too. But I also think it’s natural for a professional engineer (such as yourself) to make claims about science that may border upon being, well, just a little extravagant. For while the language of science does try to be objective, it is itself an “abstraction” from experience – useful and far from unreal, but thin and bare and poorer (less than 1:1) than the world it analyzes.

I've personally found that good engineers are quite aware of the fact that the models they use are quite approximate and abstract and that there are limits to their use. They realize that things like safety factors of 50 and 100% make a mockery of any more than a couple of significant figures. The not so good engineers may take things a bit more literally - or should I say fictionally?

[Jay DeFehr]

Rick,

I think your writing is among the clearest I read here, despite your engineering handicap.

Regarding serendipity, how does planning rule it out? Don't photographers regularly plan their surveys, yet take advantage of serendipitous unplanned events during their planned survey? Couldn't one argue that since the google car has so little "in mind" about what it plans to photograph, that it leaves more room for serendipity? Put differently; doesn't leaving more to chance leave more room for happy accidents?