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
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