682 - Little Boy Blue

Well, I guess I've written enough today, but here is another image, shot this morning. I already photographed this tiny bicycle once and then did not use the image, so here it is again today, this time cropped to a square.

The Song of the Day is Tom Waits' "Little Boy Blue", sung by the wonderful Holly Cole on her albums "Temptation" and the live album "It Happened One Night" (at least it's on my copy of the Japanese version). See her perform live on YouTube. Good news is, that she seems widely available now, and Amazon even has sound samples of most of her albums. I suggest, if you don't know her yet, check her out. You won't regret it.

681 - The Meaning Of Life

Paul Butzi recently wrote about the sources of meaning in photography. He was inspired by a comment Seth Glassman made about another of Paul's posts, that one inspired by a third post on Doug Stockdale's blog (don't you love the blogoshere?).

Paul is mostly concerned with the fact that, while it is difficult to give a single photograph precise meaning, a series of photographs condenses and focuses meaning, and the more so, the longer the series. This is quite obvious but important to keep in mind.

One side topic were the sources of meaning, and Paul writes

But I still think that the meaning was in the scene before I photographed it, would have been in the scene even if I hadn’t strolled along, and was not placed there by me.

which finally was the reason for me to chime in. In a comment I already wrote

I think it’s fundamental to note that the whole concept of meaning does not make sense without communication, even if the communication is only between you and yourself. Meaning is either shared meaning or it is not at all, and when you think about it, that has quite a tail of consequences, e.g. that meaning can’t simply reside in configurations of objects. It needs a thinking mind.

and that's exactly where we need to go into some depth today.

What is "meaning"? Does a stone or a tree mean something? Does a book or an image? And if they meant something, to whom would they mean it? To me? To you? To everybody? And if so, would they mean the same to everyone? And if so, why? Or if not, why not?

Let's begin with some observations. Some days ago we had the matter of women wearing headscarves, centered around an image of a most probably Turkish woman. While looking up the correct term on Leo, I came upon a (german) discussion in their forum, where a fellow Austrian mentioned, that in his youth (whenever this was) in Burgenland, the most eastern province of Austria, neighboring Hungary, married women were more or less required to wear a headscarf. The way he says this makes clear that it is not the case any more. Thus we can say that the headscarf, worn by a woman at that time in that place, carried the designation "married", and I guess nobody will object when I call this a "meaning".

Let's look into that further. A headscarf is a piece of cloth. They come in all sizes, colors and designs. The same piece of cloth, not worn by anyone, certainly does not carry any designation at all, it does not mean a thing. But even in that particular configuration the meaning is local to a place and with time it has changed or vanished. If you ask me, these facts don't portend well for a concept of "meaning" that's inherent to objects or even configurations of objects. Thus, from now on, I take it as given, that "meaning" is assigned.

There is more to learn from this example. Upon first thought it would seem that at least there and then this meaning has been universal. Everybody seems to have known it, but even that is only correct for members of that very culture. Someone from, say, the US would not necessarily have "got" this meaning, at least not without having been told at least once.

Now, this is important: meaning is not universal, but it can be shared, and this is done via communication.

Is meaning shared easily? Does shared meaning automatically mean equal meaning? Even that is not the case, and you see it at once when you just have a look at Ted Byrne's comments to "677 - A Stranger In Town". We talk about "left" and "right" as political concepts, but it becomes instantly clear that Ted and I "mean" different things by that. We are certainly able to communicate, and with some exchange we can easily adjust our meanings, at least temporarily, to meet at common ground, but this is not instant at all. We share the exact symbols but only approximate meanings.

To me this again hints strongly at the individual human mind as the source of all meaning.

What does all this mean for art, and there especially for photography? Is it a problem that meaning is always subjective, and that even in a rigidly defined system like a language (well, it's not math, but certainly much more precise than photography, right?), even in such a system, meaning is neither automatically available nor instantly shared? Does this take away from our expressive power? Does art suffer from vaguely defined meaning?

I believe it does not. Let's again look at an example. This time it is one of the most ugly pieces of architecture in Vienna, a so called "Flakturm", meaning a massive tower built during WWII as a base for anti-aircraft artillery. Vienna has six of them, and because they were built to withstand all allied bombardments, they are practically impossible to get rid of. Now, one of them, the one in Esterhazy Park in Vienna's 6^th district, has been used by the American concept artist Lawrence Weiner for an art installation. It was painted white at the top, lit at nights, and it carries the monumental inscription "Smashed to pieces (in the still of the night)".

Weiner's installation is certainly recognized as art. Let's look at the most important part of it, the only one that has survived and is easy to see for everyone, the inscription. Ask anybody on the street what that is, up on the tower. You will most likely get "Art" as an answer. Depending on the person it may come with a derisive smirk, but nevertheless the art aspect is generally recognized and agreed upon. Why? And what is the exact meaning of this installation? Is there such a beast at all?

Let's look at the text itself. There is a strong tension between the concepts of "smashed" (which implies noise) and "still of the night" (which does not). This tension is what we feel as surreal, and surreal means there is no obvious, inherent meaning at all. Neither of the two fragments of this text is surreal, both could be said to have meaning, but the combination is surreal and in that surrealism it is void of meaning. It's easy to see that just that property makes it art in the first place. It is art because it is ambivalent. It is art because it can work as a receptacle for all kinds of meanings that we like to project on it.

In the end it does not seem to be a problem that we photographers have trouble forcing our images to have an exact and universally shared meaning. Much more than a weakness, it seems to be a strength. Art's power lies in ambivalence. There is nothing to worry about.

The Song of the Day is my only one with the word "meaning" in its title. It is "The Meaning Of Life" from the Monty Python film of the same name, available with lots of other famous songs on "Monty Python Sings". Hear it in the intro to the movie on YouTube.

680 - Two Of A Kind

What's that you ask? Well, that is one way how newspapers are sold in Austria on weekends. Pouches with newspapers are mounted at signposts, with an attached receptacle for money, and people who take a paper are expected to insert the appropriate number of coins. By and large this even seems to work.

I have seen some more mechanic solutions where you would not get the paper without inserting money, but those vending machines seem to not have survived the currency change that happened in 2002, when Austria gave up on its Schilling and embraced the Euro. In fact it was the same with most vending machines in low profit businesses. The cost of adapting the machines to accept the new coins was prohibitive and caused many goods to not be sold this way any more, or in the case of newspapers, it brought a revival of trust. What a nice effect :)

The title? Well, those two newspapers "Die Presse" and "Der Standard", hanging there in concord, are two of the best newspapers in Austria, one strictly conservative, one liberal, and they both compete for the same small market of highly educated people who don't submit to the yellow press. Of course they try to be different, just look at the colors of the money boxes :)

And there is more irony to it. The red sticker in between, reading "Krone Hit Radio", advertises for a radio station owned by the biggest and one of the worst of Austria's newspapers, "Kronen Zeitung". What a rare display of unity.

Let me close with one more bicycle, one more Puch. Both of these images were shot with the Nikon 85/1.8, both wide open. When I left work yesterday (yes, it's morning again) at 7pm, it was so dark that I decided to change from the slow 70-300 to something real fast, and I feel that the 85 is underused. I'll be off for work in about an hour, and I'll keep this lens mounted for now. Weather has not improved anyway.

Some time passes ... nope, I will not. I just come from the bathroom, and while I was indulging extensively in the joys of hot water, weather has considerably improved. The sun is shining again, it's got to be back to the 70-300 :)

The Song of the Day is "Two Of A Kind" by Memphis Slim. I have it on disc 53 of "The Ultimate Jazz Archive", but if you look for something more ... well ... slim, I'd suggest the 1961 album "All Kinds of Blues".

679 - All The Tired Horses

It's Saturday, I am in Vienna to work over the weekend, and these are the images of Friday. Well, there's at least one advantage in staying here: there is no dearth of Friday images as usual.

Yesterday all was about bicycles, ranging from moderately new to very old, but all of them tired and standing resting.

Therefore the Song of the Day is Bob Dylan's two line lyric wonder "All The Tired Horses" from his much ridiculed 1970 album "Self Portrait". Hear it on YouTube.

Now really: How are we supposed to get any ridin' done? Hmm.

678 - Sit Down

It's Friday morning now, I'm almost off to work, so let's keep this short.

Yesterday I was swimming, and this is an image from Vienna's biggest public bath, "Gänsehäufl", an island in the back waters of river Danube.

The Song of the Day is "Sit Down" from the 1990 James album "Gold Mother". See this fantastic version on YouTube, live in Manchester, or this one, Manchester as well. That's what I call a concert :)

677 - A Stranger In Town

Ah, that's how it looks like. The threat of threats, the downfall of Western Civilization^TM, a Turkish woman wearing a scarf! It's election time again in Austria, and the two biggest parties, those that were in a coalition for merely two years now, are going to lose big time. At least that's what the prophets say.

What does this mean? More votes for a democratic, constructive opposition? No, of course not. The extreme right is predicted to be the big winner, and of course they blame foreigners for whatever runs wrong in this state, and of course it's most of all against Muslim minorities like the Turks. In fact we have quite a strong Turkish minority here in Vienna, in some parts of some districts they are even the majority now. Frightening, huhh??? All those scarves!

Oh well!

The Song of the Day is "A Stranger In Town" by Dinah Washington. I have it on disc 2 of the collection "The Complete Dinah Washington on Mercury, Vol. 7". Pretty pricey nowadays.

676 - Mother Stands For Comfort

I'm back to color again with three of yesterday's images, one from the morning and two night images.

The first is shot into a street on Spittelberg, the heart of Vienna's 7^th district, home of a lively artistic community. 270mm, f5.6, ISO 2200 at 1/15s, handheld. Did I ever say I love VR?

The second is a Harley that I simply could not ignore. Even for 70mm and already with my back against the wall, I was a tad near, thus the composition. Still, with the rails in the background, I think it works.

The Image of the Day is straight from the camera. Why exactly this image? Well, it's something in the gesture of the child, something carefree, something trusting, something comfortable that appealed top me.

The Song of the Day, "Mother Stands For Comfort", is from Kate Bush's 1985 album "Hounds of Love". Hear it on YouTube.

675 - Dexter Rides Again

Black & white, the last refuge of the color blind, as Ted likes to say. I don't do it very often, but sometimes it is a no-brainer, for instance when there is not much color to begin with.

I shot these two images yesterday morning on my way to work, and the interesting thing is, that I had something totally different in mind. I wanted to use the long lens to capture the hundreds of cables above our streets, long rows of light fixtures dancing in between. In fact I did and the images were not even bad, at least workable in any case, but then this image of a bicycle rider came in between, and somehow everything else paled.

Does this happen to you as well? That you go out with a certain goal, determined to concentrate on a certain kind of subject, and then the unexpected happens? What do you do? Do you give in as I did?

For all who don't like B&W, here is something in color. Although, it's graffiti on a garage door, and some people don't like graffiti either :)

The Song of the Day is "Dexter Rides Again" by Dexter Gordon. I have it on disc 84 of "The Ultimate Jazz Archive". I even found a sound sample. It's the background music to a video about "HAM Radio:PL-259 Installation Made Easy and FUNny". Oh well.

674 - From A Distance

It was no particularly beautiful day today. It was a bit hazy, but good enough to go swimming. I shot 17 images in 20 minutes, three of them are here, the Image of the Day and another square ...

... and then there is one more that could be in my "Electric Ladyland" series.

It's late and I leave you with the Song of the Day, "From A Distance" by the Divine Miss M, to be heard on her 1990 album "Some People's Lives". Hear the album version and a live version on YouTube.

673 - De Colores

Some days ago Mark Hobson, "The Landscapist", wrote a very interesting blog entry "on seeing". He says

So, it comes as a surprise to me that most others do not look and see in anything like the manner I do. It has become increasingly obvious to me that most people are almost blind to the physical world around them. They seem to look and see enough just to navigate (I mean that literally) their way around the planet but beyond that actually take notice of very little of the physical world that they inhabit.

and later down, after some examples

It is often remarked, when someone does something remarkably stupid, "Where was he/she when they passed out the brains?" I am beginning to wonder, "Where the hell were they when they passed out the eyes?"

Contrary to what the latter quote may seem to imply, Mark Hobson's humorous rant was in no way judgemental, he simply reports this as facts, but it immediately connected with me, I read it a couple of times and I thought about what this means for me, for my work and for the satisfaction that I can get out of it.

Take this image, shot yesterday, Saturday. I was on my way to the lake and I stopped in one of the places that I often do, knowing they are always good for an image, regardless of the lens mounted. I arrived there, saw blossoms in blue, yellow and white against a rich green backdrop, complemented by the brightly red insulators on the fence posts. Wow! I even knew what the final image would look like, the rough composition, the distribution of sharpness, etc. I needed to experiment with aperture, because my use of the 70-300 at 300mm has not become fully automatic yet, but basically all was there from the instant of first sight. This is a photographer's view. I know that most people, seeing me crouching there, would ask themselves what the hell I was doing and why I did not take a nice image of the gorgeous panorama.

Well, I guess in this case the outcome is an image that easily communicates what I saw, and most of the people, who would not have seen what I did, will admit that there was at least some value in taking the picture. This is not always the case though. Sometimes not even the final result makes those, who have not "got it", get it.

What does it mean to have "got it" anyway? It is certainly not about intelligence, because I know extremely bright minds who are completely blind to those things. It is also not a general sensibility that one has or has not and that applies to all senses.

I am sure that in most cases when I am pleased with a work and most people don't "get it", there is still something to be got, and that the general refusal is not automatically a sign for a "miss" (though that can be as well). For me the proof lies in the fact that those people who still like it, are mostly fellow minds, artists whose works appeal to me, who speak a similar language.

Can it be learned? Yes, I think so, at least to a certain degree. I think I wouldn't have seen this image a few years ago, i.e. before my liaison with photography. Being curious, experimenting, seeing results of others, all that makes you see potential that you wouldn't have been able to see otherwise. Openness and curiosity, these are two important aspects on the producing, as well as on the consuming side. I guess you can only see what you are open to see, and this applies to artists and audiences.

And then? I believe the rest is passion. I am passionate about photography, and that makes me "get" some things that others may not get. Others are passionate about quantum physics, and it is immeasurable how much I don't get about that. Nothing to worry about, nothing to brag about. We are what we are, we are different and that's a damn fine thing. The world would be boring without it.

The Song of the Day is the Mexican folk song "De Colores", sung by Joan Baez on her 1974 album "Gracias a la Vida". Hear it on YouTube.

672 - Only Pretty, What A Pity

"It’s Pretty, but is it Art?" Paul Butzi recently asked on his blog, quoting from an article in the Wall Street Journal. The article is about Dale Chihuly, his art glass and about why the exhibition "Chihuly at the de Young" is inappropriate.

One of the more offensive arguments is that

The word most commonly used by Chihuly-fanciers to describe the works is "beautiful," a concept of little value in defining serious art after the Impressionists.

Paul strongly disagrees, so do I, and on that grounds we could forget the nonsense, but on the other hand it is maybe a good opportunity to reflect a little about three different notions of art:

Art as in "what artists do" is a process of interacting with reality, a process of discovery that is by necessity explorative, experimental, iterative and dynamic. The artifacts may be beautiful to the uninvolved observer or they may be not, and that really is not the question. The question is, whether they connect to the viewers, make them think, make them ask questions, make them dream, involve them in any way. If so, then art is successful. Beauty is a way to that end, but definitely not the only legitimate. I think from the presence or the absence of beauty alone, nothing can be concluded. If it works or if not, that is a guts feeling and it is individual. This is what I feel is True Art.

The second notion, art as an object of trade, has a severe problem with a couple of those properties that I have claimed for true art. The dynamics of exploration tend to produce unpredictable results. Gold is not dynamic, neither are diamonds and, thank God, neither is Van Gogh. That's the reason why the art market loves two kinds of artists: dead artists and those who are Good as Dead.

A dead artist can't ever produce anything again, and that keeps prices high and supply restricted. Like big diamonds, huhh?? A dead artist can't ever say or do anything that decreases his value. Compare this to Steven Demetre Georgiou aka Cat Stevens aka Yusuf Islam. Someone held a record contract with him and that contract lost value with his turn to Islam, and it again lost value with the partial quotings after 9/11. OK, that is a popular musician, but the point is, no way this could happen with Monet, Picasso, Dalì or Adams.

The other kind of artists is those who are Good as Dead. They don't change. They behave. At some point of their career they have "found their style", as the euphemism goes, and now they stick to that, risk nothing, make a living of producing the ever same things in the ever same ways and in restricted quantities.

This is not living art, it is dead art. Most of these things had value at their time, some keep their value, but the artists have ceased to contribute anything original, new or meaningful. It's repetition for the sake of the market.

Finally we have a third notion of art, and that is the trivialized conception of a de-sensibilized public opinion. Here we mostly find the equation "Art = Beauty".

The general public does not care much about the process of art, but they do care about emotions. Their emotions. They do feel when they get involved, and beauty is a powerful means to that. So are ugliness and fear, but because the public does not care about the deeper aspects of art, they see it as something pleasurable to be consumed. Only beauty can easily fulfill that role, and thus the equation.

The article about Chihuly is from the elitist perspective of the art marketeer, and it is arrogant and silly, especially the quote about beauty. It's especially stupid, because art was never only beautiful, even less so before the impressionists. Art was about power, about devotion, about passion, just as True Art is today. What does he mean by "a concept of little value in defining serious art after the Impressionists" anyway? Does he see the Impressionists as the last who had a right to claim beauty? Oh dear, they were about truth, not beauty. Some of their images just happen to be beautiful, that's all.

Now what about Chihuly, you may ask. I didn't know him before I was pointed to him by Paul's post. What I see on his site certainly does not particularly involve me, and from my guts I would put him into the category of artists who know how to make a living by virtue of their style. At the end of the day there may be a case against Dale Chihuly's art, but a plump attack on beauty is certainly the wrong way.

The Song of the Day is "Only Pretty, What A Pity" from the 1968 Lovin' Spoonful album "Everything Playing". No lyrics, no video. Sorry.

671 - Now You Say You're Sorry

I saw these two graces yesterday morning, I saw them today, and today it was about time to eavesdrop on them.

The title is a line from the Song of the Day, the Arthur Hamilton standard "Cry Me A River", originally written for Ella Fitzgerald. Boy, a song written for Ella, so her version must be pretty much the best, huhh?? Wrong. Nobody ever sang this song with more icy disdain than Barbra Streisand on her 1963 debut "The Barbra Streisand Album". Hear it on YouTube. On the other hand, Ella's version is, well, what can I say, it's Ella. It's only not the right emotion :)

Edit: Oh dear, I just found another version by Ella. Had to share this as well. WOW!

670 - The Letter Home

This is one of the few images of yesterday, Wednesday. It was a gloomy day, all the time on the verge of drowning Vienna, but surprisingly it finally didn't. I shot this image very near home, it's what I call a desparation shot, but for that it turned out pretty nice.

The Song of the Day is "The Letter Home" from Elvis Costello's 1993 collaboration with the Brodsky Quartet, "The Juliet Letters". I have linked to the double CD re-issue, I have the 1993 single CD original. Some bonus tracks can't be wrong, can they? See here for a sound sample.

669 - The Night Comes On

Tuesday I've been at work till after 8pm, and that's the time when light fades away, evening falls.

You know, I have all sorts of funny rituals, and one of them is, that I use any new lens for quite some time exclusively. Sure, I may be forced to change for a shot or two, especially when someone asks me for a particular image and it is simply impossible with my current lens, but apart from that I pretty much stick to my rule.

Why? It keeps you creative. You are forced to try all sorts of things, and while doing so, you discover funny ways to work with your lenses, ways that you would not have gone otherwise.

In this case I found that it is an interesting problem to use a 70-300/4.5-5.6 in low light. Normally I use this lens with an Auto ISO threshold of 1/100s, and that means that the camera automatically raises ISO as soon as the shutter speed would go below 1/100s. Now, in low light that would almost always mean ISO 3200, and so I decided to try if VR on this lens is worth it. Well, it is.

The first image was shot in twilight at 70mm, ISO 1250 and 1/15s. Ouch! Still, it came out perfect. What I did in post-processing was only related to color. Basically I have combined two versions with different color temperatures and then added saturation, tweaked contrast, etc.

The next image, the train and the ghost of a man, was a tad more daring. 300mm, ISO 2800, 1/15s and me leaning to a lamp post. Wow! Did work.

The final image, the Image of the Day did cost me some effort. I crouched on the sidewalk, leaning on some support as well, and shot a series until I got the lines where I wanted them to be, plus the street with a nice distribution of people and a car. That's the most unnerving thing about long lenses: There is so much potential for distractions, that you sometimes have to wait for a long time until your perspective is clear. 300mm, ISO 1400 and 1/15s, but in this crouching position the lens was much harder to hold steady.

It may not be apparent from the size displayed here, but in post-processing the Image of the Day I ran wild and applied some pretty graphic effects. Here is an 800x800 crop at full size.

The Song of the Day is Leonard Cohen's "The Night Comes On" from his 1985 album "Various Positions". Hear a sound sample at last.fm and see a very nice cover version by the Avalanche Quartet on YouTube. And they have more Cohen covers on YouTube. Well worth to be checked out. I did and have just ordered their first CD at fazerecords.

668 - Hello Sunshine

Slippin' behind again. This is the image for Monday, taken Monday afternoon. Weird reflections on the pavement. I would have had some more images, but at the moment I am completely unable to process them :)

The Song of the Day is "Hello Sunshine" from Aretha Franklin's 1968 album "Aretha Now". Hear the sound sample there and hear Wilson Pickett's version on YouTube.

667 - Electric Ladyland VI

I've spent most of my day sleeping and mulling over a title for yesterday's entry, and what meager fruit I earned, I earned it late afternoon on my way to the lake. I was really in a hurry, thus I had no time to experiment. I settled with an image that I had already taken once and not used then. Today I used the new Nikon 70-300 VR at 112mm and f8.

As always in this series: The Song of the Day is still "Have You Ever Been (to Electric Ladyland)" from Jimi Hendrix' 1968 album "Electric Ladyland".

666 - The Number Of The Beast

This post was meant to be about fences, about looking down from a hill, about quiet summer mornings and such things. Of the two fence images that I shot Saturday morning, it was clear that I would take the vertical. The images were uploaded to SmugMug, and the only thing amiss was a title. Don't you feel that, due to the strong compression at 300mm, both images look like gentle, rolling waves? I contemplated "Waves" by the Hooverphonic as title, but neither could I find a video on YouTube, nor was the text exactly fitting. These images certainly don't evoke the feeling of sea waves in the night.

OK, I thought, let's look for "Morning" as a keyword. "New Morning" by Nick Cave? Wow, a song like a religious epiphany, an explosion of pathos, ... "The sky was a kingdom / All covered in blood" ... I couldn't. I have to save this song for the most impressive sunrise that I'll ever encounter.

"Fool On The Hill"? Probably, but whose version? I was ready to go with Aretha Franklin, but still, it didn't seem to fit. Maybe something different? Something like "Air" by The Incredible String Band? No way, already used for "128 - Rural Quietude". Still, this would have been the mood.

"Don't Fence Me In"? The David Byrne version? I must have used that, have I? No, I have not and there is even a video. Hmm ... Holly Cole would be even better, but as usual with her songs, no video, not even a sound sample on Amazon. Damn.

Having nothing really compelling, I went back to Aretha's "Fool On The Hill" (or probably really the original by The Beatles?), and just as I wrote the caption on SmugMug, I recognized the number!

Oh my, I could have saved a lot of time. Thankfully I had a fitting image, shot yesterday as well.

The Song of the Day is "Ride My Llama" from Neil Young's 1979 masterpiece "Rust Never Sleeps". Hear it on YouTube.

665 - With A Little Help From My Friends

Yesterday I have announced that you will see more squares, well, today you get them, and I freely admit: This is byrnesque! Actually not only the final result is (and then, maybe not: Ted might have had some enhancements up his sleeve ... I'd probably have as well, but not at 2:20am), no even the process is. I have done as I was told, loaded the image (4348x2964 pixels) in Photoshop, created a new image of size 2000x2000, moved the photo over as a layer and positioned it within the frame. Works like a charm.

In fact, what you see here are two views into the same image, one of them mirrored (lame question: which one :-?), and, interestingly enough, it does not even look obvious.

Shot today with my new Nikon 70-300 VR at 300mm. The air was humid and hot, thus the shimmering.

The Song of the Day is "With A Little Help From My Friends" from the classic 1967 Beatles album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band". Hear it on YouTube.