Gesture and Sign Language

While searching for articles on Artificial Intelligence and computer modeling, I came across a rather unusual book where the proceedings of a conference in Germany were compiled. The title of the book is “Gesture and Sign Language in Human-Computer Interaction”. The conference was held in Germany in 1997 and was called the “International Gesture Workshop.”

International Gesture Workshop! That was enough for me to get side-tracked in my search and learn more about human gestures and modes of expression.

… Having grown up around the Mediterranean Sea it is easy for me to understand the role and importance of gestures during a conversation. In fact I think that if the nations around that bluest of all seas had no language at all, they could perfectly communicate, interact and debate any topic using their hands, arms and body gestures!

I learned that there is an entire science behind all this. What I call gestures is defined as “spatial information”. And the parameters determining this spatial information are: hand movements, hand shape, hand location, orientation of the hand vis à vis the body, and facial expression.

…Needless to say I started thinking about some pictures I have taken only because I was interested in the position or orientation of the hand or arm and the story that simple gesture suggested.

Here are a couple of unpublished pictures.

The arm of this woman is perfectly positioned to express the pleasure of watching the ocean waves on a sunny day. Of course one can also say that she might have been depressed, unhappy, or otherwise aloof and that all she was doing was holding her hair on a windy pier. Maybe. But for me it was a message of relaxation and pleasure.

This fisherman saw me holding my old camera and smiled. Was he also a photographer? Did he own that 1970’s Nikon lens I was using? And while he was contre-jour (see the flare of my old lens diaphragm on his chest) I pointed the camera at him. He raised his left arm holding the fishing line in his hand. No words were spoken but he seems to be saying “No fish but isn’t it a beautiful day?”

For me it was his interest in my camera and lens that was important, not the fish or empty line.

Needless to say I have taken many pictures intrigued by body language. That is what a street photographer does as he searches for a story. Yet, my most cherished body language photo taken in the street is not of a human. Neither of a dog. It is the picture of a tiny Mantis I took years ago with a Ukrainian Salyut medium format camera. Here it is:

When I saw the Mantis on the sidewalk I stopped to look, and got close to see better. It was at that moment that it “stood up” and assumed the perfect posture of a pugilist! I had never seen such a reaction before. Was I being anthropomorphic in interpreting his “spatial information”?

Here is more about that encounter: http://liveingray.blogspot.com/2013/10/fighting-mantis.html

… So what will I do next time I see someone expressing a feeling or desire using hand, arm, facial or body expressions? My guess is that I will have a camera hanging around my neck and my own body language will be: hold the camera to your face, turn the focus ring of the lens with your left hand, use your right index to depress the shutter, use your right thumb to rewind the film, and walk away as if nothing had happened!!!

April 17, 2015
©Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015

Turtle Rock on Watson Lake, Prescott, Arizona

I was kayaking on a small lake in Arizona, at 5500 feet altitude. After kayaking on oceans which has the skyline of tall city buildings, and lakes surrounded by spruce trees, kayaking in lakes surrounded by granite boulders is a new experience.

The boulders are bare but trees have managed to find a soft spot to grow roots and defy convention. Birds were making their nest in every crevasse and every crack in these rocks. And the water was cold making me forget that I was surrounded with high desert.

I saw a dome shaped rock that seemed bleached at first sight in stark contrast to the surrounding brown of the granite dells. Then looking at the cormorant and ducks flying around it I realized that it was a popular landing place for all these birds who had left their marks over the rock.

When I paddled at a slightly different angle, the rock turned to a turtle. A calm, accepting and serene turtle. It had given respite to birds tired of the heat, and now let me discover its identity only because I was at water level.

… As I clicked on the shutter, it was clear to me that to discover one has to be at the same level to people and nature. That is why I like street photography, and being at the water level in a kayak was like walking the streets with an old camera hanging from my neck. Looking from above or from distance keeps little secrets unnoticed.

And I wondered if when the water gets low during the heat of August, does the turtle slowly shake its legs and move to another spot?

I have to come back and find out.

April 5, 2015
©Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015

Thank You!

This is a special entry on this blog which I started 2 years ago. As many of my visitors have discovered by clicking the “About Me” icon, I do have two other blogs as well which are often visited regularly by my unknown-to-me readers… Indeed, while I can see the countries of the visitors and the pages they visited and read, I do not know who they are nor can I discover their email addresses. I think it is better that way.

The reason I am posting this short note is that my three blogs were visited 10,000 times as of today! It is an important milestone since my blogs’ focus areas (photography, poetry, and literary essays) are of interest to people who are not just surfing the Web but purposefully looking for specific topics.

Further, the tally of the countries shows that I have had the privilege to be read by visitors from 62 countries!  It sure gives me the encouragement to continue to share my street photos and literary essays with renewed passion.

So, to all of you who I do not know by name but who read my work, THANK YOU! And for those of you who after reading sent me an email (or two) and shared your thoughts and suggestions, please know that you have helped me tell my stories better.

Hope our joint and mutual journeys continue.

February 19, 2015

©Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015

Faces from the Deserts of Africa to the Desert of Arizona

A street photographer develops a sense about the moments when a facial expression alone would tell the story of the surroundings. Fear, surprise and pleasure are among the most common expressions I see in the viewfinder when I point my camera to describe the moment.

Facial expressions, in addition to body postures, are especially important to detect or anticipate how the moment will shape up since I use 50mm and 105mm lenses in most situations, which means that only a small portion of the environment’s “canvas” will be framed and thus the story of the scene has to be extrapolated by the viewer of the picture.  Compared to wide angle lens photography, shorter lenses present special challenges to the photojournalistic photographer.

Over the years I have also realized that a “facial” expression is not limited to humans. Of course animals, especially dogs most commonly encountered in the streets, have wonderful attitudes that we humans seem to understand and react to. But we also seem to find “facial” expressions on non-living things, in an anthropomorphic way…

So, here are a few pictures where facial expressions uniquely tell a story.

I took these two pictures in Morocco. The spice vendor is photogenic enough to make this low-light, medium format film picture, but a closer look at the two customers adds quite a bit to the scene. Each has a distinct expression describing their interests in the spices or even their likes and dislikes.

The second picture, from the desert of Morocco, is that of a road side vendor who could not convince us that the bracelets were made of pure silver. One can see his strategizing, as he followed us, on what to say to make us believe in the quality of the bracelets!

This one is the expressions of two Australian Collies I saw outside of Phoenix, Arizona. They were watching the crowd in the street and I almost thought they were planning on how to herd the crowd! After all, herding sheep is what is programmed in their genes and I wondered if every group they meet looks like sheep to them…

But I am perhaps not alone in seeing things in a familiar way. While hiking the Granite Mountain near Prescott, Arizona, I saw these forms on the branch of a tree recently burned by forest fire. Somehow the fire had drawn the faces of a boy and a Teddy bear. See them? Or am I the only one letting my fantasies and imagination run freely?

Finally, could not resist posting this snapshot I took in a hotel in Zimbabwe. As I was walking to my room, this ironing board seemed to be the welcoming hotel staff! Again, am I the only one who saw the facial expression on this ironing board?

Perhaps we all get affected by our profession (“professional deformation” as say the French) and see the world through a particular optic. Indeed, I often see a framed picture when I look at scenery, a portrait photo waiting to be taken when I look at a person, and a story unfolding when I walk among a crowd.

Who knows, maybe one day I will find that person and facial expression that will tell all about why I take street photos. Till then, it will be a collage of people and places, and I will continue to enjoy every click and rewinding sound on my mechanical film cameras!

January 26, 2015

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015

Scanning Old Negatives

I got a magic box as present this Christmas. It is a digital scanner for 35mm and 120mm film… When I opened the box I think my heart missed a beat. A digital film scanner?

Well, there is a reason for this gift. Over the past 50 years I have accumulated miles and miles of film negative strips, and somehow managed to keep them… I do not cut my film strips: I do label the negatives for the frames I printed and store them away. In boxes, old suitcases, and air-tight plastic bags.  Of course I have my favorite strips in special boxes, many of them old shoe boxes. Amazingly I have shoe boxes from countries that either do not exist anymore, or have changed their names, or at least their borders. Sometimes I think that these boxes have more historical value than the film negatives cached in them.

And since it takes about an hour to decide which frame to print in the darkroom, make a few attempts to get the right exposure, wash and hang the paper to dry, I rarely print more than 3 frames from a 36 shot 35 mm film, or 2 frames from a 12 shot 120 mm negative. The rest are kept for nostalgic reasons….!

The picture is clear: one of these days these boxes and negative strips will take over our house. We will have no place to sit or for our dog to sleep. Worse, I have nightmares that the rejected and hence non-printed negatives will join together and attack me in bed one night!

The revenge of rejected film….

So, the scanner is supposed to “easily” scan all the negatives I have and store them on a memory card not bigger than the lens cap of a 1956 rangefinder lens. Hundreds of thousands of negatives on that gizmo!

I have an open mind, and decided to try the new scanner. Here it is on my desk next to my beloved 1965 Mamiya C33 medium format camera. The scanner weighs less than the camera I have carried around my neck in 4 continents.

I searched in one of the rejected negatives’ boxes and found a strip labeled “Singapore.” There was no date. I looked at the strip holding it to the sunny window and recalled taking the pictures. It should have been in the late 1990's. It was taken in very low light, handheld, on ASA 100 film. It was off focus, so I had not printed it.

Chose a frame to be my first test on this scanner. I followed the instructions (in English but written in Taiwan, hence a mix of Chinese phraseology and mode of expression… But I figured it out.)

Pushed the "Scan" button and here is what I got:

 And here is the original size for those who would like to scroll and see the imperfections of the film and scanner:

My initial reaction was “NEVER!” That I would never transform my negatives into this low resolution, pixel happy, flat, and two-dimensional interpretation by a scanner. I think my heart stopped another beat or two.

I turned the machine off and promised to my “rejected negative strips” that I will print them only in my darkroom.

…. A few hours later I looked at the scan again, since my curiosity was not yet satisfied.

Well, albeit unintentional, there was a certain charm to this scan. I cropped the scan a bit to give it a panoramic feel (original picture was taken on 35 mm film) and a representation of what a street photographer looks for. In this case there are 10 case studies of human posture, articulation, and attitude all in one frame!

And that made me think again about the old debate concerning a “story” vs. the technical attributes of a captured moment.

…Will I use the film scanner again? I do not know. But for now the old and the new seem to have found a happy coexistence since neither tries to replace the other.

January 1, 2015

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015

Imagineering

It is said that when a motorcyclist wears a helmet, he drives faster and takes more risk. That in a controversial way, protection makes us feel more immune, leading perhaps to more reckless behavior.

It can be said that youth is also like that protection—that we start worrying about our organs, our joints and our dreams when youth is gone.

… And yet, we cherish dreaming about what has not yet been dreamed about. We reward people who take risk; even promote exploration knowing well that there is no exploring without taking risk, and that there is no dreaming without waking up!

When it comes to photography or artistic expression in general, I have always favored the risk taking. Not necessarily by going beyond what others had done, but by not doing what others had done. Of course there is no discovery without risk taking, but can there be discovery without exploration?

Take for example my obstinate (and according to many colleagues silly) desire to use film and old mechanical cameras when I could get a wonder machine for the price of film I use in a few months and take thousands of pictures a day. Then, with just pressing one button, erase 999 of them and start again. I do not think that I am exploring, nor taking risk. Instead, I am rediscovering and celebrating a form of expression in its original form. When I expressed this idea to a colleague, he put down his Nikon-can-do-it-all digital wonder box and replied “Then why don’t you mix some blood and vegetable dyes and paint on the walls of a cave?”

But we reward risk taking, and especially dreaming. My favorite term for it comes from Walt Disney Corporation where their design and development arm is called Imageneering. How wonderful a word that is! It is applying the principles of discovery, design and application (engineering) to the introduction of an idea that others had neglected or not thought about.

There is also a term I had hoped was my own discovery but alas, found that it has existed for a while now… It is Imagineering, which is a technique used by groups of people trying to guess how things would be (outcomes, processes, designs) if there were no restrictions to making them happen.  To me, that is the ultimate in risk taking as it ignores all contexts and surrounding.

… I chose three pictures to reflect on these ideas and concepts.

First, a cloud formation that reminded me of jelly fish and the ocean. It was not the formation itself that attracted my attention, but the speed at which all changes in a split second. Indeed, seconds after I took this shot the jelly fish were gone, so was the ocean. I was left with cotton clouds, blue sky and an ordinary day.  Yet, for that short space in time, I could smell the Atlantic!I was dreaming, perhaps ‘Imagineering’.

The second picture is from a Veterans’ Day parade. This veteran, sitting in a 1940's Jeep, was challenging the premise that others are supposed to take pictures of the parading veterans. Instead, with his point-and-shoot camera and that wonderfully seasoned look, he took pictures of the crowd.  I cropped the picture to tell the story at the expense of losing definition and detail. Yet, when I look at it, I wonder what he was thinking. Perhaps that he was trying to capture the expressions of the crowd. Or in his mind, he had just swapped the machine gun on the Jeep for a camera!

Finally, would this motorcyclist look good in a helmet? Given the gray hair he so abundantly displays, he has been biking for a while. Did he take risks? I am sure he did. Yet I found him and his bandanna perfect as foreground to the “Devil’s Pantry. “

I was watching a video about the Amazon region and a Brazilian saying stayed with me:

                 “The Amazon has answers to the questions we have not yet asked.”

Can it be that risk taking and dreaming are the answers to the questions we will eventually pose?

December 6, 2014

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2014

Foreground Optical Effect

I was reading a recent article by researchers from Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) School of Science, The University of Tokyo about how supernovae and other structures of our universe can fool us!
This finding was about how one can misjudge the size and nature of a supernova if by some cosmic realignment a vast object (say a galaxy) finds itself between the supernova and our observational field. According to the team of researchers, which include 2011 Nobel Prize winners in Physics , “a massive object between us and the supernova bends light rays much as a glass lens can focus light. As more light rays are directed toward the observer than would be without the lens, the supernova appears magnified.”

Wow! That means “run-of-the-mill” supernovae may be mistakenly considered to be bigger, brighter and especially new discovery.  The Authors call the behavior of the galaxy as ‘gravitational lensing’ and the resulting misleading a “Cosmic Illusion”.

… For me, optical illusion is sometimes key during photography. Not to deceive the observer, but to give the picture the illusion of depth on a two-dimensional plane that is a photo (at least on paper, under the 1950's enlarger in my darkroom.) And with careful positioning, one can give illusions regarding relative size, and playing with the shades can transform a morning shot to a midnight bathing in a full moon or hiding under dark clouds.

So, I went back to my street photos to find an illustration. Here is my earthly interpretation of what happens when a ‘galaxy’ gets between a ‘supernova’ and the photographer! 

Of course I laughed  looking at the picture as I had certainly not thought about such an interpretation when I took it. I suppose every artist has such moments: a poet writes a line hoping to use it one day; a painter sketches a thought believing it will find a context soon; and a musician hides his many incomplete music sheets under “May be one day” pile!

But, the idea of the illusion and this picture made me think about more daily reactions we all have regarding the past. Would this young girl look just a young girl without the well-seasoned persona of the man? Can one look at this picture and think of the man as the passage of time and therefore somehow embellish, romanticize the past? Is it an illusion when we think that the ‘good old days’ were better than now? If so, is it because of the passage of time that serves as the ‘gravitational lensing’ giving the illusion that all was grand and lovely in the past? While Bing Crosby sang “Love is better the second time around”, why do we still remember our first love, and often with tendresse?

Is it all an illusion?

.. And I laughed again remembering how a friend of mine, who grew up on a farm, used to reply when someone used the old adage of “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence”. 

His quick response was:

“Yes, it is greener because there are sheep there that leave copious amounts of droppings. Try to walk barefoot on the other side of the fence!!!”

  

Robert M. Quimby et al.  Detection of the Gravitational Lens Magnifying a Type Ia Supernova.   Science April 25, 2014

December 3, 2014

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2014