Reflections in Water as a Metaphor: Archetypical Landscape Picture!

[Asher Kelman]

Originally Posted by Jack_Flesher

IMO the 1DII is a decent landscape camera. Here is a shot I took a few years ago with one and it prints well up to 16x24. There was a time I claimed it was nearly "as-good" as a 5D for landscape and while it is close, I would say with proper processing the 5D is better, giving about one more size up on a final print:

Stunning!

This image comes from the thread discussing the use of the 1DIII for Lanscape Pohtography [url=http://www.openphotographyforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2240] here. The ability of an image to arouse reaction and create an expreince that is compelling in some way is part of what distinguishes art.

So what's your reaction to this particular image what ideas and thoughts come to mind. I happen to like the photograph and I hope you do to. We do, I believe, respond to images by reflexes and reactions encoded by our evolution, culture, upbringing, experience, openness, imaginationm interlect, esthetic preferences and education. In spite of this melange of motivations, we have major rections that transcend our differences and are transcultural and enduring.

I postulate you might find some of these reactions embeded in Jack's picture. So what about you?

Discuss here the meaning of this picture, how it makes you feel and react and what it might mean to you?


Asher

[Edward Bussa]

Well, my first reaction was Wow!

Then I think my eye got trapped in the negative space. I felt captivated.

Then I noticed the smooth green color in the water and the line between it and the reflection of the sky. Soothing

Then, thinking about your post and what other reactions I could have, I noticed the valley and its shape and the textures and thought of a woman.

The rocks coming up out of the water is ALWAYS appealing. I'm not sure why.

[Asher Kelman]

Originally Posted by Ed Bussa

Well, my first reaction was Wow!

Then I think my eye got trapped in the negative space. I felt captivated.

Then I noticed the smooth green color in the water and the line between it and the reflection of the sky. Soothing

Then, thinking about your post and what other reactions I could have, I noticed the valley and its shape and the textures and thought of a woman.

The rocks coming up out of the water is ALWAYS appealing. I'm not sure why.

I like that insight and reaction.

Could you provide a picture of a woman to show this pattern.

Asher

[Nicolas Claris]

Originally Posted by Asher Kelman

Could you provide a picture of a woman to show this pattern.

I'm affraid it may be too "personnal"!lol!

[Ben Lifson]

that it makes him think of a woman.

Ashes asks,

Could you provide a picture of a woman to show this pattern.?

Two W. B. Yeats lines -- the first from the poem "The Wild Old Wicked Man" gives reason to believe Ed Busha's thought doesn't need illustration, that the thought is probably universal

"Because I am mad about women
I am mad about the hills"
Said the wild old wicked man
Who wanders where God wills.
"Not to die on the straw at home,
Those hands to close these eyes,
That is all I ask, my dear,
From the old man in the skies."
Daybreak and a candle-end

But now I'll hunt down a copy-able scan of the Venus von Millendorf (centuries certainly, perhaps millenia? before Christ). All one needs to do is to turn it clockwise, upside down, counter-clockwise and right side up to see the antiquity of Ed Busha's thought.

yrs

ben


www.benlifson.com

[Ben Lifson]

(sorry I got the title wrong)

Here she is rightside up

If I did this right

[Asher Kelman]

Ben,

I like you quotation! I also enjoy your company even more.

Yes, there are all those inherent possiblities. I just was probing to determine what Ed saw. I am attempting to learn how people relate to images that we immediately like. We cannot drill down to all the motivations, of course. However, for someone who feels restricted in self-permission to explore these possibilities, the candor of others to express what they feel might edge the perfectly qualified photographer of subjects towards richer appeciation and perhaps production of imagery beyond what is photgraphed.

A jazz payer said, "One must not just play the notes, one must play what is between the notes!". However, there is a stage in which one can technically do a job to perfection but yet not embed in that work the human values, emotions, ideas and imperitives that might be tranmitted with that rendition!

Here we are deealing with the realization of what these human values might be.

Yeats of course understood completely because at first he felt it!

Asher

[Ben Lifson]

Well she's awfully small. Let me see if I can make her larger.

I think this might work

It won't be in the body of this note, it will be an attachment

[Ben Lifson]

No, not yet. I*'ll try again

Well, I give up.

Here's a link to several pictures of her.

http://images.google.com/images?svnu...on&btnG=Search

You can download them yourselves and, in photoshop, turn them upside down and you'll see the Hills analogy in both the breasts and the vulva.

It's worth the effort. She is, deservedly sok, one of the most famous Venuses in art history.

She's terrific.

And she's only a couple inches high.

If I could import a file here from my own work I'd show you a 21st century version of her, a picture of her, a found photograph of a large woman, in the nu_ (syn. unlothed), taken either by herself or by someone else, only that part of her body from waist to mid thighs... My somewhat desaturated photoshopped version of it turns her flesh stone colored so that it resembles that of our very ancient venus...

Who, the Venus von Willendorf, keeps getting re-interpreted again and again every year in stone, in paint, in photographs, all over the world. It stands to reason. She is a masterpiece, after all.

Her last great re-incarnation is in one of John Coplans' photographs of himself in the nu_ (syn. unlothed). Again, if I could import a scan of the Coplans picture here I would. But his works are easily available and his version of himself as the Venus von Millendorf is easy to recognize. It does look very much like her.

Pity you can't see either. John's picture is also a masterpiece and my re-doing of this found amateur woman's self-portrait as the Venus von Millendorf is rather startling in its own way.

Alas for my less than rudimentary knowledge of computers.

yrs

ben

www.benlifson.com

[Edward Bussa]

Just to clarify, my last name is BuSSA not BuSHa. Not sure if the spelling error is on purpose or not, but I find it hillarious! =D

[Edward Bussa]

Asher,

Speaking of music, I find visual arts to be less accessible than music... Music seems so universal and natural. People seem to be able to naturally interpret and personalize it. It seems like that process with visual art is more work for me.

Do you find this true as well, or is it just me?

[Ben Lifson]

Dear Mr Bussa,

Not intentional.

But you're in good company. I mis-spelled the title of the Venus statue too.

Sorry.

I'm still a little shakey after fainting on the highway at 70 mph Wednesday and spending most of Thursday in the Emergency Room.

Things are clamming down thow, I feel much clammer than yesterdayh.

yrs

[Edward Bussa]

Originally Posted by Ben Lifson

I'm still a little shakey after fainting on the highway at 70 mph Wednesday and spending most of Thursday in the Emergency Room.

Sheesh!

No apology necessary, I thought it was quite funny and more than a little Freudian.

It is good that you are feeling better. I hope you continue to improve and adjust!

[Ben Lifson]

Dear Mr Bussa

After spending nine hours at this computer, image capturing and photo-shopping ( I love that term. We had grocery shopping then window shopping then Smokey Robinson & The Miracles sang Shop Around

"'Youve got to get yourself a bargain, son,
Don't be fooled by the very first one;
A pretty girl comes a dime a dozen,
Find...who's going to give you good lovin',
Before you take her hand and say 'I do' now,
Make sure her love is true now,
Make sure she's in love with you now,
I'd hate to see you looking sad and blue now,'
My mama told me
'You better shop around!'"

and no Photoshopping.

Anyway, having spent over 9 hours today image capturing (I love found photographs everywhere including the Internet) and Photo Shopping

While listening to late Beethoven String Quartets and Mozart's complete String Quintets (an extra viola!)

I don't know if music is any more accessible than visual art.

But what makes it useful to the visual artist is

That it's another exploration of form

In a different medium

And highly abstract

so that it can influence the photographer

with respect to form\

but not trap him/her into imitating any specific visual artist's form.

It takes a strong visual artist to be able to be influenced by another one and at the same time not imitate him/her

Robert Frank listed as his only visual influence the photographer Bill Brandt

But Frank's pictures, at least beginning w/ his arrival in New York, 1947, don't look anything like Brandt's, except for a lot of black

He was also imfluenced by a sentence in Andre Malraux's "Man's Fate"

But he was probably also influenced by the free jazz of Ornette Coleman.

When, in the 1950s, Coleman, Charlie Hagen and Don Cherry opened what was supposed to be a few-week engagement at The Five Spot in Greenwhich Village -- and stayed playing there for months, I'm told -- Robert Frank and his friend the abstract painter Franz Kline were there often, listening.

But then, Frank was also influenced by Kerouac, Ginsberg, etc. and the 10th Street painters, who were themselves highly influenced by jazz. (See Kerouac's homage to Lester Young in "On the Road".

So...

Who knows?

It depends on what you' grow up with, in part.

And how soon or how late someone shows you what a visual composition is, so that you know that no child could make the paintings of Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock or any other supremely great abstract painter.

Visual composition is one of the most difficult things to explain to someone who can't see it.

But as very few people are, in fact, born with the ability to see a composition without having to have had someone instruct them in what a composition is...

Composition itself can't be supremely difficult either to teach or to see.

Picasso was so haunted by one composition by Delacroix that he, Picasso, had to make at least 24 paintings based on it, taking Delacroix's composition apart and putting it back together agaihjn, with different forms, different colors, different figure ground relationships, different space, and sometimes with more figures than Delacroix put into his -- Delacroix has four, some of Picasso's variations have five -- until he could understand, at least thought he could understand, how Delacxroiz made that composition -- The Women of Algiers

The current movie BREACH showing at many theaters right now is an extraordinary long series of virtuosic compositions in that currently almost-panoramic frame, similar to the Lumix 6x19 aspect ratio frame (with pictures, height ALWAYS

[Ben Lifson]

Height ALWAYS comes before width...

So the movie is a good thing to study for any photographer using the Lumix or any other panoramic or near-panoramic frame.

The other movie to study this in is Tartovsky's "Andrei Rublev"

And the painter to study for wide frame compositions is, of course, the 15th (or 16th?) century Venetian painter Carpaccio.

The thing that makes BREACH so fascinating is that whereas Carpaccio, of course, and Tartovsky, use classical compositional means to make their panoramic and wide-frame compositions...

The director and cinematographer of BREACH used entirely modern means

So modern thqat,k together with the modernity of their subject matter (FBI, Spies, Sex, Guns), their modernity diguises the virtuosity of the compositions.

I suggest that anyone who wants to study this movie whose visual intelligence, naturalism, realism and virtuosity are at least FIRST RATE if not sometimes charged with GENIUS should watch the movie wearing a set of those noise reduction/elimination earphones that are so strenuously advertised in Airports these days ... BOISE is the best known maker...I think

So that you can watch the movie without hearing the dialogue and, therefore, without getting caught up in the plot, which is trivial, and in character development, which is almost non-existant.

As a drama, it's really bad, this movie.

But as a visual composition it soars into the stratosphere, well above most Hollywood movies and certainly is to the academy award films that I've seen what Mount Everest is to an ant hill.

Movies are, after all, pictures that move. Take away the sound track and you still have a movie, probably a better one than with the sound track.

Take away the visuals and play only the sound track in a dark theater and you have only a radio play and, in most instances from Hollywood, an incomprehensible radio play at that.

So, Mr Bussa, if you want to work harder at understanding visual art you could do worse than to watch BREACH wearing noise-reduction ear phones, or with wax in your ears (like Odysseus passing by the straits of the sirens).

Another good film for watching without the sound track is FULL METAL JACKET. You'll see how good it is if you pay attention to the backgrounds, ONLY THE BACKGROUNDS in the first half, in Marine Boot Camp, and, in the second half, the long sequences of a) the interviews with the soldeiers and b) the advance against Hue, or wherever they are, that very very long scene shot in I think one piece of film.

]A third film to watch w/o the sound track is Alfred Hitchcock's early B&W Thriller THE THIRTY NINE STEPS. You[ll find you can understand about 95% of the story WITHOUT WORDS. And without words you see what the film really is: A LONG COMPOSITION BASED ON INDIVIDUAL STUDIES OF THE HUMAN HEAD AND THE HUMAN HAND.

Happy Trails to You

I've got to take some medicine and get to sleep. If I can. Can you imagine? You're driving down CT Route 2, a 4-lane divided highway, and suddenly you can see the road as though only through a glass darkly, through a veil as dark as those on Gloria Swanson's hats, through several chain link fences jammmed up against each other, through spider webs, and you have to struggle to stay in your lane and you thank God you're alone on the North Bound side and the highway is divided by a 50 foot woodland strip right there. And you make it through the 5 second almost-black-out

without incident or harm

but still

leaves you a little jittery

anti-anxiety medicine surely do help

yrs

ben

www.benlfson.com

[Asher Kelman]

Originally Posted by Ed Bussa

Just to clarify, my last name is BuSSA not BuSHa. Not sure if the spelling error is on purpose or not, but I find it hillarious! =D

Well my name is different too

Originally Posted by Ben Lifson

that it makes him think of a woman.

Ashes asks,

Could you provide a picture of a woman to show this pattern.?

Well Bussa is Busha and Asher is Ashes! Well if that isn't art, what is?

ASHER

[Ben Lifson]

I watched BREACH again today, at my local theater.

Not having a noise reducing headset, I kept my fingers in my ears through most of the 2 hour movie. Couldn't hear much dialogue.

A painter friend went with me.

When we left the theater he said, "Martin Scorsese should just acknowledge defeat, that he doesn't know anything about visual composition. And here everyone is wondering if he'll get an Oscar. For what? Compared to this movie, if what Martin Scorsese knows about visual composition were sugar it would dissolve in a drop of water."

There is more visual art in five minutes of BREACH than most Hollywood directors of Martin Scorsese's or Quentin Torrentino's abilities can create in five movies.

Just the use of color in BREACH is to most Hollywood movies' use of color (including that of things like Dream Girls) what fool's gold is to the real thing.

In one of the last scenes, in the FBI office where the hero has his last interview with the woman agent who has been directing him in the investigation that is the movie's subject, look at the pens in the bookcase behind the young hero's desk.

That's how color makes great art.

That one scene alone can tell color photographers more about color than about 99.99% of all color photographs published today, fine art, photojournalism, illustration, etc etc etc etc.

BREACH.

The most important film of the year for anyone who wants to learn about

Color in visual art
Composition in visual art
The above in photography, specifically.

No serious color photographer should see it fewer than 5 times AFTER he/she has seen it paying attention to story, plot (story and plot are two different things), dialogue, character development etc.

Again, if possible, watch it without being able to hear a word.

yrs

ben

www.benlifson.com

[Asher Kelman]

Thanks do much Ben for this gift!

I would not have seen thew movie and I will now.

BTW, what's happened to your Epson RD-!? I hope it's still giving you the joy you had months ago!

Asher