A series of studio experiments started today with Luke, Alkistis and Daz joining a session of two hours where we “played” we space, communication, relationships during the photographic process.

Warming up- opening our perception.

Some years ago, I  attended an inspiring workshop with Katrin McPherson, renown  video-dance maker. One of the exercises she gave to us was to work in groups of three in the following roles: One was the mover/dancer, one was the camera-person and one was the camera-operator. We used this task to explore different ways of looking into/at things. The camera-operator had to manipulate the body and posture of the camera-person offering him/her different perspectives of the action occurring in space. The camera -person had to open/close the eyes only by command of the camera-operator…

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Afterwards we  used a task to make some pictures with Tutu’.

TASK

• Create an image where  Tutu’ (a wooden colorful mouse) and someone else interact with each other.
• Use verbal communication to make understandable what kind of atmosphere/feeling you want to create.
• Take a picture when you feel that the image is how you would like to be.
• Just one shot for each situation/image you create.

While I was reading articles about blind photographers – like Kurt Weston, Bruce Hall, Gerardo Nigenda, Pete Eckert, Evgen Bavcar etc- I started being curious about the things that I don’t see while I take photographs of what I see; What happens when I don’t rely on my sight. A simple thought that came in my mind was to hide a camera on my backpack that I will trigger through a remote control in order to take  rear facing pictures. One front-shot relying on my sight and one back-shot without relying on my eyes.

So first I had to spend some hours to hand/home-make a pack where I will carry my hidden camera. I am not good in handcrafting but something would come out. In the meantime I was thinking of Miroslav Tichý, a photographer who used homemade cameras constructed of cardboard tubes, tin cans and other at-hand materials to take thousand of pictures in his town. Most of the people  were didn’t realize that they were being photographed perhaps because they didn’t realize that the parody of a camera he carried was actually a real camera.  So making a pack to carry my “good” camera would have been easier. Even if it took me more time than I imagined.

Homemade backpack to carry my hidden camera

Secret Camera from (In)visible photographer on Vimeo.

The next step was to set up a task for my self.

– Take two cameras: the “secret camera” and another handy camera

Camera: CANON 400D , and CASIO EXILIM.

– Go out for a walk in town.

Location: Lincoln city. Time: 1hour

– Track your route.

Tracking system: Application on mobile phone: MapMyRun.

– Ask for someone to document your actions.

– While you walk spot what you find “interesting”, stop and take a double picture: One with your handy camera and at the same time (with the remote control) a rear facing photo with the “secret camera”.

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VIDEO ROUTE #1#

Monks Road – Guildhall Street

On the left: Pictures taken forward facing.

On the right: Pictures taken rear facing (secret camera).

Daz was  taking pictures of me while I was taking pictures.

Reading:

Flusser, V (1983), Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Gottingen: European Photography.

I. IMAGE

Keywords: Image, surface, meaning, scanning, eyes, magic, historical linearity, linear writing, codify, co-note, conceptualization.

Key concepts:

• Image are significant surfaces.
• Image substitutes scenes for events.
• Images are not “frozen events” but translations of events into situations.
• Meaning rests in the surface.
• Meaning is enclosed in scanning the image. Meaning enclosed in the image itself; Meaning enclosed in the observer.
• Magic vs historical linearity.
• Linear writing transcodes circular time of magic to linear time of  the history.
• “Textolatry” reach a critical phase in the 19th century.  That period is also when technical images are invented: “in order to render texts imaginable again, to charge the with magic”.

In this chapter Flusser speaks about the the “traditional image” which will be differentiated by the “technical image”.

According to Flusser, images “are mediations between the world and human beings”. He argues that people  live in a world that they don’t understand. They try to understand by using media that help them to decipher elements of this world. So these media function as  mediators between man and the world, making the world more intelligible. “Traditional images ”  like painting or a drawing  can generate information about the world and at the same time they give their own interpretation of the world. Images are no just “frozen events” but “translations of events into situations.

“Idolatry” for Flusser happens when the images dominate in man’s conception of the world. When “man lives as function of the images he has produced”. The image becomes the concrete reality: World of experience- to world of imagination. When the man forgets that the images are created by him in order to find his way in the world. Instead of using the image as a means of orientation he considers the image as a faithful representation of the world as such.  It’s then that imagination  becomes hallucination. This lead to the invention of written text: “linear writing”.

From “idolatry” to “textolatry”

Linear writing:

• will bring with it a new form of consciousness: conceptualization.
• will produce a new universe different from the one the traditional image created.
• Time is perceived linearly: goes from a beginning towards an end.
• Not longer magic but historical consciousness.

  “Texts admittedly explain images in order to explain them away, but images also illustrate texts in order to make them comprehensible.” As a result the magical thought becomes conceptual thought. But when “texts are not longer imaginable” then it appears the need to invent a new medium  in order to explain the texts again. It’s then , in the 19th century of extreme textology, that photography will be invented.

II. TECHNICAL IMAGE

Keywords: technical image, apparatus, objectivity, post-history.

• According Flusser photography was invented in a turning historical point and a hidden purpose was that of recharging images with magic.
• technical images attempt to explain texts.
• Although the technical image (e.g. a photograph) appears to be an objective reproduction of reality, it is not.
• they are meta-codes of texts.
• Imagination transcodes concepts from texts into images.
• The technical images are images: therefore emit magic and seduce their observers.
• photos are surfaces that arrest flux.
• Traditional images: first-degree abstractions, abstracted from the concrete world. Refer to phenomena
• Technical images :third-degree abstractions, abstracted from texts that are abstracted from the concrete world. Refer to concepts.

Flusser claims that nothing can resist at the attraction of the technical image; every daily action (artistic, political, scientific) aims to be photographed and become part of the eternal memory. The result is that every event or action tends to become a magical ritual and lose its historical character. Everything becomes eternally reproducible.

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Flusser:

“Photography was invented in order to render imaginable the events around us. Not only the political events but also the scientific and technological. Photographs transcended history and they froze events into happenings. They took events out for their context, they trans-coded them into happenings and then they went back to the history. And they could be used as memory of history: documentation. Images were used to document historical events. It was not so easy cause the problem of subjectivity came into it.  Photography was invented to give an objective image but since camera is coded is less objective than painting. Still the idea was that there is history and then there is a photographer, and he steps back from history  into something we might called mystical transcendence, and out of this he photographs. There is a problem:   The moment you step back from politics into images you can no point of view. The politic point of view is lost. Because out of politics an event has many point of view. you dance around the event, and the more you have, you collect point of views, the better is your image. So that the photographer, who dances around an event, look at the people with  camera, there are dancers, they tried to be phenomenological but they don’t succeed. Image makers do not think that they cannot think. Thinking is anti-image. So they dance around it, and by collecting points of view they destroy ideology which is the insistence in one point of view. If you listen a photographer: “every point of view is the same, the problem is how many point of view I can collect.

The idea was that image  should to document politics. in the middle of the 20th century and especially after war, politics were made in order to be in a picture….we advanced toward an image. Everything wanted to be photographed and filmed, and taken in a video. The purpose is to be in an image…Politics is aimed at being taken, aufgennomen, in an image…Events began to accelerate. They rolled toward the image. ..and there were the people with the television cameras, and there were the photographers, and there were the people with this film, the filmmakers,  they were standing there and all the history rolled toward them and they said: “Please take me, please put me to the image”. Why people to do that?”

 Every image is strongly magically coded. Initially was made in order to orient people, i.e to hunt. And when people were exposed in the imgae, made rituals happening and then went to hunt the animal. Those images couldn’t be out of rituals.

Notes from interview:

• Happening: result of an accident. An accident that becomes necessary. (i.e coronation of a king after the death of the previous one. It contains elements of magic)
• Event:has causes and effects.
• Image is anti-political but it’s still structure.
• Invention of writing: social revolution. Before the power was in the hands of magician, who manipulated the behavior, made decision in function of rituals and magical values. With the invention of writing a new class – literati- decision makers with different way to experience world. For magician: world= circular. For literati: world=linear. Causality takes the place of destiny.
• 16th century: the invention of printing press that rendered writing first to the bourgeois and later to whole the society. Alphabetic code was not secret anymore: democratically diffused. The code became profane. At the same time, mathematics, mostly arithmetic became the code of science; a new secret code became about: the mathematic code; anew elite of science and technician who used mathematics> formal, analytical, systematic, structural way of elite thinking. Science proposed overall knowledge of the world that can’t be visualized.
• Photography was the first product of applied science that transcode equations into images. The first Photographers were not conscious what they were doing, that is the apparatus that make the images, that the photographer isn’t necessary cause you can make automatic cameras, that sciences and technology itself make images. When they understood that they tried to make images which are not programmed in the apparatus. Instead of working for the apparatus they started working against it. Sicen the end of 19th century is an effort against apparatus. On concrete level people use apparatus in different ways.
• Photography sucks in history like a vacuum cleaner.
• It s possible with photo to create history.
• You can take elements from out an image and align them in a thread. Pictographic writing. Writing’s purposes is to destroy images in order to explain them away.

METHODOLOGY- METHODS

In calling for multiple forms of observation, analysis and representation, the methodology of my research draws on middle ground-qualitative approaches, like Crystallization. Following Ellingson’s suggestion that

“Crystallization provides one effective approach to richly describing our findings and to making both overt and subtle manifestations of power in analytic, narrative/artistic, critical genres.”

I will see my research through a Richardson’s crystal that “reflects within themselves, creating different colours, patterns, and arrays, casting off in different directions.”

QUALITATIVE Methodology:

– An interest in meanings, perspectives and
understandings;
-An emphasis on process and interactions
-Triangulation of methods (usually 3 methods to
support findings)

CRYSTALLIZATION:

• Offer deep, thickly described, complexly rendered interpretations of meanings about a phenomenon or group.
• Represent ways of producing knowledge across multiple points of the qualitative continuum, generally including at least one middle-ground (constructivist or postpositivist) and one interpretive, artistic, performative, or otherwise creative analytic approach; often crystallized texts reflect several contrasting ways of knowing.
• Utilize more than one genre of writing (e.g., poetry, narrative, report) and/or other medium (e.g., video, painting, music).
• Include a significant degree of reflexive consideration of the researcher’s self and roles in the process of research design, data collection, and representation.
• Eschew positivist claims to objectivity and a singular, discoverable Truth in favor of embracing knowledge as situated, partial, constructed, multiple, embodied, and enmeshed in power relations.

More specifically, I intend to proceed to my research by using:

a) (hetero)Phenomenology to pursue information regarding embodied experiences of others -photographers in action- through observation,mapping, documenting their process and interviews. Phenomenology focuses on experiences of the
body/embodiment.

“…the first moment of phenomenology  originates in doing, but accompanying this doing is a weaving in and out of a link or thought, a line of questioning? (Kozel, 2007, p51).

Phenomenology (Kozel, 2007) :

-Take attention to this moment.
-Suspend the main flow of thought.
-Call your attention to your body and what it is experiencing (are you short of breath, is your back hurting, are you hungry?)
-Witness what you see, hear, and touch, how space feels and temperature and how the inside of your body feels in relation to the
outside… Register thoughts but do no delve… Your data depends on your context
-Take a break (a moment, a day, a week, a year).
-Describe what you experience. Take notes, record…
-Take a break.
-Reexamine your notes with an eye for what seems significant…set yourself the task of further research into ideas that relate to your
experience

“A phenomenological document can range from the scholarly to the more poetic and the document can be visual, physical, written or
spoken… An effect phenomenology provides enough concrete detail to resonate with the embodied experience of the targeted group of recipients and combines this with a level of theory or conceptual engagement that lends the experience to a wider relevance…? (Kozel,
2007, p.55).

-The heterophenomenologist is a situated researcher, who interprets what is experienced by another.
-It relies on shared experience or some degree of empathy.
-By understanding another we understand ourselves and perhaps a wider community.

b) auto-ethnographic performance for self reflection and witnessing of inward and outward self-experiences.

Autoethnography is an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze personal experience in order to understand cultural experience. This approach challenges canonical ways of doing research and representing others and treats research as a political, socially-just and socially-conscious act. A researcher uses tenets of autobiography and ethnography to do and write autoethnography. Thus, as a method, autoethnography is both process and product. (Carolyn Ellis, Tony E. Adams & Arthur P. Bochner)

c) technological approaches that will help on tracing photographer’s movement in space.

Some of the methods I plan to use through my research are:

-written record either in the form of an online diary or blog, or a hand written
notebook.

-diary-video/photo documentation of the process.

-use of a blog, during the research process, to collect, reflect, share and receive feedback about the out coming materials and results.

-recordings of sounds of the photographic process.

-reading of texts in relation to the photographic process as source for further questions and inspirations.

-creation of body-maps and mind-maps.

-interviews for collecting information about the personal experiences of photographers in relation to their embodied experience.

-collection of exercises based on movement inspired forms and somatic practices, for physical exploration during the photographic process.

A practice – based research about the hidden performative dimensions of the photographic process.

KEYWORDS: photographer, process, somatic practices, gesture of photographing, performance, invisible, practice-based research, physical and mental challenges.

“Viewing the motion of a man with his camera (or a camera with its man), we are looking at the movements of hunting…While hunting, the photographer moves from one space-time category to another, and he combines the various space-and-time categories while on the move.” (Vilém Flusser, 1983: 23).

What happens when the lenses turn towards the person behind the camera?

This practice-based research seeks to investigate and explore from within the photographic process, revealing its hidden and invisible performative dimension as a site specific event. I look at photography as somatic practitioner with a background in dance/improvisation/performance and with a specific interest in the creative process of making art. According to Susan Sontag: …picture taking is an event in itself…while real people are there out killing themselves or other real people, the photographers stay behind his or her camera, creating a tiny element of another world (Susan Sontag, 1979: 11 ). But what are exactly those tiny elements that the photographer creates and what do they reveal about the gesture of photographing?

We are used to speaking about Photography and/or Photographs, having little discourse and interest on the persona “behind the scenes”, the photographer and his/her creative process. Therefore my main concern is to explore what remains invisible in photographer’s process. Specifically, this research starts from the position that taking photographs can be seen as a performance already in the moment of its happening; a site specific performance that occurs either indoors or outdoors. By taking a closer look to the photographic process, the aim is to create a new archetype figure of a photographer whose perspective, points of view and embodiment are challenged to reveal the hidden aspects of an event, able to communicate beyond the photograph itself.

The (in)visible photographer becomes the target of investigation, exploration, tracing and mapping while s/he prepares, moves in the space, interacts with the subject(s), gives directions, manipulates the camera, decides and clicks. The focus is the postures, stances, micro gestures and physical movements the photographer performs whilst working on his/her practice. The various tools and equipment that s/he uses and how s/he relates to them. Photographer, as performer, moves in a space where s/he interacts with other people and objects. The photographer emerges as someone “… in perpetual movement, someone moving through a panorama of disparate events with such agility and speed that any intervention is out of the question.” (Sontag, 1979)

In this practice-based research, I as performer and researcher step to the other side and rather than being observed, looked at or captured by the photographer – observe, look, capture and recompose the photographer’s process in such a way that the intersection points of performance and photography – which often have been seen as two opposite practices – get blurred.

This is intentionally a practice using cross-disciplinary approaches and involves the creation of new audio visual work based on the findings/material of the research.

The broad subject of the proposed programme of research regards photography as practice in collaboration with professional photographers, site-specific performance and performance art documentation. I will be also looking to different somatic practices in order to investigate and explore the physicality involved in the photographic process and how the photographer’s body can be challenged.

Aims and objectives:

While there is a broad theoretical understanding on the medium of photography, cultural debates around the status of the photographic image in the 21st century, analysis of the different ways to look at photography and photographs, there is very little concerned with the photographic process. Therefore this practice based-research aims to undertake an original investigation and to explore how the hidden and/or invisible performative elements of photography can be revealed and be used in order to redefine the importance of the process as creative practice in the field of photography. In this way, a new archetype can emerge that blurs the confines of photography and performance.

The main objectives are a) to establish a way to trace, map and define the movement patterns of the photographer during his/her process and b) to demonstrate the new knowledge through creative outcomes in the form of an audiovisual exhibition around the “(In)visible Photographer”.

Research questions which will be addressed.

Through this exploratory process I seek different answers to my main research question:

-How can we reveal that taking photographs is a performance already in the moment of its happening and what will change in the way we view and approach Photography as an art-form when we turn our focus on the Photographer and the actual gesture of photographing? What happens when we bring within the practice physical and mental challenges?

-What kind of figure/archetype emerges through challenging the photographing process by integrating performance practice within it?

Sub/questions to be taken in consideration are:

• How and when the photographic process becomes a performative event?

• How can a body pattern or a body language be codified in relation to the photographic process?

• To what degree can the movement vocabulary (learned and generated within this research) generate a site-specific performance?

• How far the body becomes reflective mechanism for the experience of the photographer?

• How far can the gesture of photography be challenged?

• What changes in the relationship and dynamic between photographer and subject when the photographer becomes visible and conscientiously part of the event when the photographer knows that s/he is watched ?

By observing, investigating, documenting, tracing and mapping the process of the photographer, I will try to gather information and material pn:

• What kind of imprints the photographer leaves in space.

• Which are the different ways a photographer uses the body and physicality.

• What changes when photographer’s physicality/body is challenged through limitations/scores enforcing him/her to bring attention to his/her body during the photographing process?

• What changes in the aesthetics, relationship, interaction with his/her subject of work?

This is blog is a visual space where I will gather my thoughts, reflections, question&answers, information, visual/audio/textual material, inspirations, quotes etc regarding the new journey on which I set off: my dissertation, the final work with which I will conclude this important experience in the MA/MFA Choreographing Live Art programme.

Ready for a new challenge!

Title of the dissertation:

The (in)visible performance of the Photographer: a practice-based research about the the hidden performative dimension of the photographic process.

Fields of interest: Performance art, photography, somatic practices, alternative choreographic strategies, philosophy, visual arts.