Reverse Synesthesia in B&W Photography

A friend sent me an end-of-year note which, in addition to the rather boring compte rendu of all the things he had done during 2015 ended with this sentence:

“And, just to see how much my optic has changed, I re-read Nabokov’s Lolita. You know, I was struck by the colours in his words. I wonder if to a B&W photographer like you that means anything…”

Pithy. Yet I was interested in his comment, and instead of rereading Lolita, decided to read about Nabokov.

… I knew about his passion for catching butterflies and studying them. What surprised me is that he also was among the few recognized to have synesthesia, a neural crossing of the senses that makes one “hear” colours, perceive words and numbers in a spectrum of hues and textures, and ,my favorite, “smell” sounds. It is said that he associated the colour red with number 5, and he could smell sounds when in the field chasing butterflies.

Now my friend’s comment intrigued me even more, and I wondered if there can be a reverse synesthesia, where one sees all colored things in B&W or in shades of gray. I searched for this diagnosis but could not find it. So, perhaps I just came up with a new term for how a B&W photographer sees the moment, framed in his viewfinder.

Indeed, at least in my case, I do “see” the printed version of the photo just before I take it. I do not see colours, just a spectrum of gray. And that is why I might wait for the light to change if I have the luxury, or decide to do some darkroom work later on. Because I had already decided what shades of gray there will be in the photo just before I depress the shutter.

I once read that “expertise” is one’s ability to bring together dimensions of a thought or the strategy of an action in a way that others do not perceive it. So in some ways it is an enhanced perception capacity when just observing a chaotic (or ordinary) scene, one can create order, and find a story to tell.

So, went back and tried to find a couple of examples of my perception bias.

Taipei, Taiwan

I was walking when I saw this sign “I Think So Restaurant...”! Clearly it meant something else in Mandarin and the English translation was more than funny. Yet, the story for me was the humble building front with no resemblance to a restaurant. However, the building was dark, monotonous and the concrete highly weathered. The massage parlor sign next to it was bright, smooth, and much more inviting than the restaurant! I immediately opted for contrast, framing the continuum of the shades of gray and telling a travel story.

Barcelona, Spain

This man was a class act as a beggar. Actually I did not think of him as a beggar when I noticed his jacket, hat, cat in his lap, and dog next to him. Perfect combination of texture, shape and contrast. But the story was in the book he was reading – Agatha Christie was on the cover! I have to admit that I have not seen a street beggar ever read a book and be dressed so well (I was wearing jeans and an old T-shirt at that moment…) and certainly not to read Agatha Christie mysteries.  When I depressed the shutter, I recall thinking “Is there really a book inside that cover?”

But did not want to spoil the story by checking that out….

December 26, 2015

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015

An Eye for Photography

Like many at the end of a year, I have a tendency to aim at putting order into my environment. In my case it is an environment of books, papers, photographs and sometimes drawings.

So, yesterday I tackled a box full of old negatives and some printed photographs.

A photo I took back in the 1990s made me smile. It was at an art show in Virginia, a perfect venue for a street photographer. Of course I was most interested in booths selling photographs, paintings and sculpture. And I hoped to capture that one frame I will shoot to remind me of the day.

Perhaps this was it. The bearded man has that inconspicuous body posture which will not make him stand out in a crowd. Yet, it almost seems like he adopted that posture to keep an eye on things.

Or both eyes!

December 22, 2015

© Vahé A.Kazandjian, 2015

Spanish Walls

2015 is nearing its end, and new promises will soon welcome yet a new year. As I look back to more than 40 years of travel I enjoyed around the globe, I am reminded that many of the countries I knew as most welcoming, now have walls around them.

Here is a picture I took in 2000 in Bilbao, Spain. I was looking through the view finder of my 1948 Rolleiflex TLR to frame the calm posture of this man with the backdrop of arches and palm trees. I waited for a few minutes hoping someone else would walk into the frame to contrast the man’s posture, perhaps by rushing to catch a taxi or being late to a meeting.

Instead, this dog came out of nowhere, stood up on his hind legs and looked at me. It was that split second of the unexpected I was waiting for.

Today, as I think of walls, I wonder who is behind the fence: the man or the dog.

December 20, 2015

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015

The Naked Cowboy

I was sitting in the waiting room at the local car oil change place and picked up a few magazines to pass time. One of these was the October 2015 issue of “Money” magazine. I was just leafing through when an article caught my attention. The heading was “How Time Square’s Naked Cowboy Makes $150,000 a Year”.

The Naked Cowboy? I recall seeing him in 2000 but thought it was just a passing fad. He was still doing it in New York City fifteen years later!

I put the magazine down and Googled. There were many entries and pictures of him, even a biographical sketch by Wikipedia! I learned that his name is Robert John Burck and that he started his singing act in 1998. Interestingly, and probably because of his popularity, on October 6, 2010, Burck formally announced that he was running for President of the United States in the 2012 U.S. election.  I smiled imagining how the election debates would have been if he arrived to the debates in his attire (or lack of it…).

Upon return home, my curiosity led me to look in my photography Ali Baba cave for a picture I may have kept from that day in Times Square. And to my surprise, I found it! While there should be millions of pictures taken by tourists of him, I thought that mine was more in the street photography approach. It is not him the center of the scene but that young woman with her look.

One can only guess what she is thinking.

PS/ I am pleased to see that I was careful to include a glimpse of his patriotic underwear into the picture to show that he was not totally naked.

December 15, 2015

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015

Visual Anthropology: Do We See What We Were Programmed to See?

On a tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s summer home in Scottsdale, Arizona, I was reminded of one statement he had made about architecture. He said “A wall should define space, not confine it”.  He was the most famous American architect of the last century who pursued the art of designing structures in harmony with their surrounding and the people who live in them. He called it organic architecture.

He was an architect, but also an artist who incorporated social understanding with geometrical shapes. Perhaps that is why he called his summer home in Scottsdale Taliesin west, after the 6th century Welch poet. In Middle Welch Taliesin means “shining brow”, and Wright, of Welch descent, wanted his home to be the brow of the valley in the shade of the mountain.

… As a photographer, the harmony of each photo with its context is fundamental.  This becomes crucial for a street photographer who looks for a story about people in their cultural context. Sometimes called ethnophotography, the goal of street photography is to find the moment, the frame, and the authenticity of a scene that acquires a meaning only when the actual context (culture, geography, religion) is considered.

So, I thought revisiting a book I had read many years ago by John Collier Jr. titled “Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method.” To my surprise, the original 1967 book I knew has been updated in 1986, with the incorporation of more up to date topics and techniques with new photographic media. So, I was delighted to read again, for the first time.

The 1986 version is published by The University of New Mexico Press, has Malcolm Collier as co-author, and a very thoughtful Forward by Edward T. Hall who defines the central goal of the book as describing “Two interlocked processes of observation:  how to get information on film and how to get information off film.” Immediately I thought of Frank Lloyd Wright’s organic architecture: the information off the film can only be the interpretation of the observer, while the architecture is what was captured on film. These are two events (or processes) that are interpreted in a context that involved social, environmental and historical parameters. For example, Wright used the forms of the mountain chain to design the roof of his house. This kept the harmony with the environment but also the contextual authenticity. Similarly, a photographer recognizes a scene as representing a story, interprets its immediate implication for a photo and depresses the shutter. This is called “manifest interpretation” in psychology. Then, when the picture is printed, there are others who look at it and interpret it their own way. This is called “latent interpretation”.  A successful photo will have a high correlation between the manifest and latent interpretations, since the photographer would have contextualized the story of the photo just before clicking, and that manifest interpretation would closely correspond with the latent interpretation of viewers of the printed photo.

Just like the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright who, in more than 500 projects completed over 70 years, “knew” what would please the users of his buildings given their cultural expectations.

… The 1986 version of Collier’s book being printed in Albuquerque New Mexico, borrows extensively on the South Western Native American cultures to define context and interpretation “off film”.  One such observation made me think for a while. According to the authors “Navajo observers see photographs as literal information and language as coded interpretation.”  I find this description most germane with my struggle to incorporate photography into my literary, written work. Further, my academic researcher background shapes my pursuit for representativeness and authenticity of every photo I take.  Therefore, I understood the sub-title of the book, the “Research Method” perfectly when the authors stated that:

“Through photography it is possible to learn to see through native eyes. Verbally we can interview natives and share the realism of their visual context.”

… So, I went back to my photos and chose a few to represent my effort to think of the context of each photo before I depress the shutter, realizing that each culture has its own perceptual predisposition.

Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris

I saw this young woman in the crowd in front of the Cathedral. The beret is stereotypical French, but I wanted the rebellious attitude of youth to come through.

Just outside of Utah

This young woman has no beret, and is not rebellious in her attire. Her long and slim features are in harmony with the mountain range and the trees. I wanted to have her head just touch the clouds. This is a photo of horizontal and vertical lines, along with rolling mountain peaks and passing fluid clouds. It all seems in harmony though.

Prescott, Arizona

Sometimes it is not the form that challenges the contextual thinking but the inversion of the form that gets our attention. In this photo the harmony is disturbed because we expect the posture of the man to be that of the dog and vice versa. It is like seeing a military tank in the middle of rush hour traffic – we do not know if we should worry or just think that the tank was about to run out of petrol and hoping to find a gas station nearby…

San Francisco, California

I saw these chairs in the hall of a building and could not resist taking a picture. There seems to be an interrupted dialogue between them. I thought that there was a couple sitting in these just before I arrived: they were fervently discussing something; it was not just a talk. Then they left but the chairs kept the attitude. Perhaps the context. There was a story there!

… Were the chairs already the “latent interpretation” of the couple’s discussion while I was at my “manifest” stage in taking the photo? Was it visual anthropology or just anthropomorphism?

December 4, 2015

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015