In 1956 Guy Debord put forward the “Theory of Dérive,” which he defined as an experimental mode of behaviour linked to the behaviour of urban society. It was a technique in which the individual in an unplanned journey through a landscape, often urban, and “let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” The goal of a Dérive is to study the psychogeographical terrain of the landscape, leading to the potential creation of “Situations.”

Situations were to result in liberation from the pervasive alienation of modern life. In other words, it allowed the individual to experience their surroundings without being the impact of the psychological commercial veneer that often obscures our reality. Although the concepts were developed for political purposes, they were widely used in the art world. It also broadened the use of Flâneuring that artists had adapted like Virginia Woolf at the turn of the last century. It leads to interdisciplinary art events and “art happenings” around 1959, the forerunner of performance art. Performance art in the 1970s emerged in Vancouver, making photography and video arts key to making a record of these interdisciplinary performances done by one or a small number of people.

The Birks Building Funeral is an example of performance art at this time. It was a collaboration between the group of Architectural and Fine Arts Students, among many others. It began with a funeral procession lead by Evelyn Roth’s Video creatures and followed by caskets carried by architecture students with black tears on their cheeks; it began at the Vancouver Art Gallery at Georgia and Thurlow. As the police escorted the group up Georgia Street, the funeral band played a sombre dirge.

When the group reached the building, which was now under demolition, Reverend Jake Kent began his officiating; as the wreaths were laid at the building, the band played. The video creatures began putting hexes on the new buildings across the building street. Angus McIntyre recorded the performance.

When you look at the experience of Martha Cooper, who turned down corporate work to follow street art and graffiti in a Dérive fashion, these Dérives lead to situationism where she became part of the street performances and artwork she was photographing. It became a lifelong passion that had a large influence on city cultures around the world.

She like many other artist and photographers have used either consciously or unconsciously this method to make photographs, to develop their style and create shows. This is exactly how Fred Herzog created his canon of work, which like Cooper, allowed him to develop a unique style of photography.

Personally, the process is important, as it allows me to merge into my surroundings with the camera and leads me towards a subject matter I might not have considered or understood without this process. This process allows the interplay between an instinctive part of my mind to react to my psychogeographical surroundings and leads me toward new ideas and acts of creation.

References:

• Experience and conceptualisation of Installation Art
• The History of Situational Art,
• Martha Cooper: Urban Nation Museum for Urban Contemporary Art
• Every Place has a Story, Eve Lazarus
• Martha Cooper Talks to Zoey Grossman About the Art of Photographing Street Art
• Derive “urban exploration app” video overview
• Derive App for iPhone.
• Derive App for Google
• Society of the Spectacle: WTF? Guy Debord, Situationism and the Spectacle Explained | Tom Nicholas

Artist in Early 70’s at UBC and Western Front

Founding Members of the Western Front

Photographer: Vivian Maier

Vivian Maier is a US photographer who worked as a nanny for 40 years and pursued photography in her spare time. In her lifetime she was unknown and unpublished. Here prints, prints and films were auctioned off shortly before her death and a large amount of them were purchased by John Maloof who now owns 90% of her work. Unable to locate the photographer before her death Maloof set about exploring her work the quickly became an international sensation. Artist and photography critic has compared her work to that of Robert Frank, Diane Arbus and Helen Levitt.

Baudelaire’s Idea and Virginia Woolf’s Creative Method

Charles Baudelaire first put forward the idea of a flâneur, someone who silently wandered the city, observing, but this term has been redefined in our modern era to take on a more artist sense. Virginia Woolf discovered this method of walking around lead her to great creativity, she had the idea for “To the Lighthouse” one afternoon while walking in Tavistock Square. In a letter to Ethel Smyth in 1930, she wrote: “I cannot get my sense of unity and coherency and all that makes me wish to write the Lighthouse etc. unless I am perpetually stimulated.” This comes from engaging with the world, from “plung[ing] into London, between tea and dinner, and walk[ing] and walk[ing], reviving my fires, in the city, in some wretched slum, where I peep in at the doors of public houses.” ( A tribute to female flâneurs: the women who reclaimed our city streets, The Guardian)

Street Photography and the Modern Day Flâneur

In modern times, we might call a flâneur a loner or an artist and the methods of many street photographers resemble those of a flâneur. Vivian Maier is a good example of such a photographer. She was a very private person who took more than 100,000 pictures in her lifetime, it is clear very few ever saw them while she was alive. Born in New York in 1926 she then travelled to live with her mother in the French Alps but in 1951 see returned to Chicago where she took a job as a nanny. She roamed the city with a Rolleiflex camera photographic whatever stuck her interest people, situations, scapes, and events all were recorded in her camera. Her archive was bought as a chance purchase at an auction and through the efforts of the new owner, her images have become recognized as among the best street photography of the 20th century.

References

A digital photograph is a two-dimensional representation of a “representation of presence,” as Roland Barthes suggests in “Camera Lucida.” It is a result of an optical and electrical process that creates a bit map that is first revealed on a backlit computer screen. This initial process of rendering the image is handled by a fixed algorithm written first by the engineers that created the camera and second by the engineers who wrote the software for the post-processing software. In other words, the image is not therefore an accurate representation of a place, person or event it has been manipulated extensively as it travelled from the camera into the computer or iPhone screen. Every camera and post-processing software will create a different result some with subtle differences and others with significant differences. What is most important to an artist is that the image truly captures the experience of being present when they were drawn into framing the scene with their camera. When one uses a photograph to create an artistic representation of one’s presence it is important how this image is rendered, and in many cases what the camera and viewing software initially produce is not an accurate reflection of the experience.

Barthes suggests that a photograph in Latin would be expressed as imago (image revealed), lucis (extracted), opera (mounted) and expressa (expressed). I think this is a useful taxonomy, of the four stages involved in photography if not all art forms. First the capturing of this image, second the rendering of the image, third the presentation of the image and finally the venue in which it is viewed. During all four stages, consideration has to be given to how the image will be finally expressed.

These stages or process applies to most artistic processes, take for example the paintings of E. J. Hughes, a contemporary of Emily Carr and the group of Seven. You can see from the process he follows that he begins with capturing and framing the scene which is done by eye, and a pencil sketch. In the pencil sketch, he records the shapes and colours of the scene before him. However the colours he notes relate to the palette he will use when rendering the image, rather than the actual colours he is seeing. So he is already in the process of translating the colours into the media he is going to use to render the image.

You can see from the paint how he renders the colours and shapes into the finished painting to recreate a record of his presence in this scene into its final presentation. In photographic terms, he has sharpened the shadows, contrasted the colour tones, altered the pallette to remove conflicting colours and altered the dynamic range of the image.

The second sketch is more complex recording a lot more information about how to translate the colours and details in the scene.

Again he takes the information from the sketch and renders the image into its final presentation.

In photography you would start at the same point that Hughes did by finding and framing an image but instead of sketching it, and making a notation of the colours, the digital camera records a facsimile of the scene with an RGB representation of the colours. The resulting photograph is the photographer’s sketch. A photographer may also take numerous captures, in a different light. Like Hughes, once the photographer has returned to his studio and opened the sketch in post-processing software the process of trying to reconcile the photographic sketch with their experience begins.

The following chart illustrates the limitations of a camera’s ability to record colour in RGB, the three colours it uses to create all colours, and how it differs from what the eye sees. As you can see from the diagram the range of colours in RGB is not what the eye is seeing. So like Hughes and his oil pigment paints, the photograph has to consider the palette available in order to render the scene as they had experienced it. In addition to this problem, the photographer also has to consider presentation, when the image is printed it will be in CMYK, which has a wider but different range of colours.

The RAW RGB photograph now has to be rendered in post-processing software. This can be a simple process or highly complex depending on the photographer. The two images below illustrate the simple rendering of an image. The image was captured during a warm spring afternoon with the sun streaming through various areas of the park. What drew me to the image was the light and the contrast between the large trees and the people in the park.

In the RAW image you can see the algorithm struggle unsuccessfully with the dynamic range of the images causing the trees to go far to dark and the light and colour in the scene was muted.

The rendered image below is a much more accurate rendering of the scene I experience. In order to do this I had to correct the highlights to bring back the blueness of the sky seen through the trees canopy, that had been lost. Also the shadows needed to be adjusted to bring back the textures in the trunks tree trunks. A simple adjustment to the whites brought back the light falling in the scene beyond the trees. In addition to these adjustments the colours had been muted or dulled down by the camera’s software, so colour had to brought back as well balanced. The effect of this was to restore the relationship between the trees in the foreground with the individuals in the middle ground that had been lost. Finally the framing was altered as the camera has a fixed aspect ratio that needed to be adjusted.

These are very simple adjustments, perhaps not as great as some photographers might make and certainly not a great as Hughes made to the paintings above. A good illustration of a more dynamically rendered image is Jim Friesen’s Pitt River I. Here the photographer has rendered the image to bring out the dynamic nature of the clouds and there reflect that drew him to capture this image. He has achieved this by reducing the impact of the colours in the forest and foreground foliage and enhancing the refections.

Jim was kind enough to share the capture he began with (below) and tells me this is the out of camera shot with just some basic processing applied to it. You can see the experience it expresses is quite different.

So like Hughes the sketching and rendering process are both important to artists like him and photographers whose artistry is to bring back the sense of presence that was felt in the scene they were capturing.

References:

Barthes, Roland. (1981) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (translated by Richard Howard) Hill and Wang: New York.

Amos, Robert. (2019) E. J. Hughes: Paints British Columbia. Touchwood: Victoria, BC.

Friesen, Jim, Pitt River I, www.little-eye-studio.com

Challenge Assignment for the week of May 11th

This week lets try some evening or night long exposures into which we introduce some artificial light. The image below is one example of using a long exposure to capture a room lit by night light from the exterior, and light from the interior is introduced to create a ghost-like image.

How I Exposed My Sample Image

To create this image, I opened the curtains of the room, introducing a little bit of night light into the room. I place the camera on a bookshelf (a tripod would be best, but anything firm will do), the camera indicated a one-minute exposure would work. I set the camera to one minute. I put the camera timer on so that when I depressed the shutter button, there would be time for the camera to be perfectly still when the shutter went off. When the shutter opened, I momentarily turned a lamp in the room on and stepped into the shot. I held a pose for the count of five, then stepped out of the shot and turned the lamp off. I did this several times until I was happy with how long to stand with the lamp on and the positioning of everything in the frame. Make sure you do a lot of experimenting with your capture to explore the possibilities thoroughly. 

If you are a little rusty on long exposures, don’t worry you can review the material found on this site at the following link:  https://photography.edwardpeck.com/1-intro-setup-triad-and-practice/5-2/

My method is just one of many ways of approaching this challenge. For example, instead of a lamp, you could use flashlights or other sources of light. You could introduce candles into the image to see what that source of light might do during a long exposure. Don’t be afraid to experiment even if it goes wrong; mistakes often lead to unique and creative images. This challenge should be a lot of fun. If you feel like setting up outside this works as well.

In Roland Barthes “Camera Lucida” he deconstructs the word photograph in Latin suggesting it would be translated “imago lucis opera expressa;” “which is to say: image revealed, extracted, mounted, expressed… by the action of light.” In other words, the process of photography does not stop after the shutter has closed, once it is revealed either as a negative or a positive in a computer the photographer is engaged in how to extract the image. How will it be developed? Which image from a session best captures what the photographer wants to express? Does the image trigger an idea that suggests a new session or does it suggest a new direction of expression?

Once an image is selected then the extraction process begins, here again at any point in the process of developing the image a photographer may circle back or change directions. Once an image is finally developed, then the process of mounting or creating the presentation format for the image begins. What medium should be used to print the image? What sort of framing process will best express what the photograph is communicating? Then finally where will the image be expressed? Is it to be part of a series? The same process goes on I believe whether or not it is expressed virtually or in a formal gallery setting.

In the case of Sally Mann, this process is very tactile and in her archives, both the finished negatives and the discarded negatives are kept. So you can physically see the process through which she has travelled to arrive at a final piece. But with everyone, the process is different, in the case of Albert Watson some of this process may be internalized. However, like Henri Cartier-Bresson, the decisive moment is not about a single capture but more about spending a great deal of time capturing different images in the same place or around the same idea until the decisive moment emerges.