Equivalence: The Perennial Trend

[Miguel Coquis]

space&time carved patterns
invisible light paths discreetly shown
flesh and bones inscriptions...
Coussegrey, France

Square bellows 13x18 wooden camera.
Voigtlander series VII (1890)
Intuitive exposure time
D76 + borax second bath
Dev +2

[Miguel Coquis]

It's raining for a while, continuously cloudy sky in August, not often in the summer season.
View of the forest, water that comes from above singing along the riverbed.
A moment to breathe deeply.
Petit Moulin des Vaux de Cernay

[Rhyno214]

Shot with my Chamonix 11x14 of my neighbor's rusty shed. Film was Bergerr 400 and the lens was my Nikkor 450mm.

[austin granger]

Thank you Miguel, for your kind comments on my earlier photos.
Here is a recent one that I feel fits in this thread:


In an Abandoned Fortification, Oregon Coast by Austin Granger, on Flickr

[h2oman]

Elsewhere I started a thread about what makes a photograph "good," and one person volunteered "If I like it, then it is good to me." I like this photograph (a lot!), so it is good to me. But I think I can go farther.

What I see here is a block of concrete, sitting in the corner of a room with a sand floor. The concrete is lit by light from two glassless windows and maybe, perhaps, by light from some other source. I like this photograph for a number of reasons, which I will give in no order of importance.

First, the photograph is executed with technical competency - sharpness and tonality are excellent. These things are not sufficient to make me like a photograph, but in this case I feel they are necessary to make this photograph work. Second, I'm pretty sensitive to symmetry and asymmetry in art, and I like the way this has both. Centering the corner of the room alone is nice, but the symmetry of the two windows are really icing on the cake! And then the block's positioning breaks the symmetry very nicely.

The photograph is very rich, texturally. There is the contrast between the hard concrete and the plants outside. The top of the block and the sand are very tactile. It is very nice how the walls are broken up by the two (wod?) strips on the walls, and the rolled-on paint on the left wall.

The image, to me, has mystery in spades. Where is the building, that it has all those ferns outside it? What was the function of the block? Who painted those hearts on the wall,and what did they symbolize for that person? (By the way, one heart would be interesting in terms of mystery, but in terms of the aesthetics of the photo itself, it is even better to have the two concentric hearts!)

Just an hour ago I had to make a difficult phone call regarding some annoying business, but looking at this image after that puts me in much better spirits. Thank you, Austin, for sharing this.

[h2oman]

And there is an additional mystery that just occurred to me, and would likely not occur to non-photographers or those not familiar with cameras that have movements: Was the introduction of distortion by pointing the camera downward without using fall intentional on Austin's part? It is likely I would have made the photograph either with or without fall, without considering the merit of doing it whichever way I did not choose. If I was more thoughtful, which I rarely am, I would shoot it both ways and decided after the fact which I preferred.

[Tin Can]

Equivalence: The Perennial Trend
Minor White, PSA Journal, Vol. 29, No. 7, pp. 17-21, 1963

https://www.jnevins.com/whitereading.htm

[austin granger]

Thank you Gregg, for your very thoughtful response.

I think I may have written about my personal interpretation of the idea of "equivalence" somewhere earlier in this thread; forgive me if I'm repeating myself. For me, equivalence occurs when the ostensible subject of a photograph seems charged with meaning beyond what it is on the surface. I guess another way to put it would be that pictures are equivalents when they evoke ideas or feelings that seem to transcend the subject matter. Of course, in some ways, it's a bit of slight of hand, but if the viewer is of a certain receptive mental/emotional bent, it can work, at least sometimes. Anyway, for me, the concrete block seemed like a treasure chest, or a box of mementos, or even a small sarcophagus. It seemed...important. And those graffiti hearts were most definitely related to whatever was inside. This is how my mind works. :-)

As for the distortion, it's funny you should mention that. My first instinct when I'm using my view camera is to level everything and use rise and fall and so on, but occasionally, and definitely here, I'll think to myself, "well I don't HAVE to do that. Why not just use it like I would my other cameras?" So that's what I did here, and when I saw it on the ground glass, I decided that the distortion helped emphasize the importance of the block/chest/sarcophagus by stretching it toward the viewer.

As to what purpose this place originally served, I honestly have no idea. This might sound strange to say, but when I'm photographing, I'm often not interested in reality, or I suppose I should say that I am interested in it, very interested, but more as a kind of vessel than anything.

Thank you again.

[Tin Can]

For me gazing into reality... and/or Astral images are equivalent examples

Is it what we think it is

Where is reality

https://www.largeformatphotography.i...=1#post1610401

[Joe O'Hara]

Thank you Gregg, for your very thoughtful response.

[snip]

As to what purpose this place originally served, I honestly have no idea. This might sound strange to say, but when I'm photographing, I'm often not interested in reality, or I suppose I should say that I am interested in it, very interested, but more as a kind of vessel than anything.

Thank you again.

I also like this picture very much both for the quality of the light, and the enigmatic nature of the whole scene taken together. To me that is one of the most intriguing aspects of photography, the way the camera treats every element in the field of view equally-- unlike human vision, where the eye skips around constantly and spends most of its time on the "interesting" parts. As a result, the juxtapositions in photographs can be highly evocative and sometimes rather mysterious.

As an example of how my mind works (if that's the word for it), at first glance the pipes underneath the concrete block looked like toes to me. Possibly the result of watching too many Road Runner cartoons as a kid.