Hidden dreams or a faux facade?
Jörg M. Colberg has posted a fascinating conversation with Andrew Miksys, a Seattle-born photographer who is working on an upcoming book on Lithuanian Roma people (gypsies), BAXT. One of the main questions that arose in the conversation, was how to avoid the Borat-exposed stereotype of gypsies as emblematized subjects of xenophobia and to present them in a way that differs from the convention of "a woman holding a baby, barefoot children and wild dogs." Andrew took on an approach that could only be described as "fortuitous":
Somewhat out of frustration, I asked [a Roma girl] if she wanted to stand in a different pose. Right away she took on the seductive super model pose. It was totally unexpected. In the discos I often have similar experiences. Last summer I was photographing in a disco and there was a guy who kept asking me to photograph him. I really wasn't interested in photographing him, but finally agreed to take one picture of him. While I was setting up my lights he took off his shirt and got in a pose like a boxer. Again, I never could have imagined or set up a scene like that. In the past, I thought that this kind of posing was unnatural. Now I find it more revealing. The poses are sort of like the dreams and fantasies that most people keep hidden.
Once I read these words, it struck me that I have encountered a similar concern on a popular photo forum some time before. A photographer who was working "on a collection of portraits of bar girls in Mexico" had asked: "How to kill a smile?" In his own words, he was trying to "go beyond a collection of pictures of faux-happy hookers." That is to say, he was either trying to place his subjects into some kind of preconceived notion of how they should appear or to reveal something about the subjects that the casual smile was hiding. From his argument, we could guess that he wanted the latter, yet in his case, a case very different from that of Andrew Miksys, the pose that his subjects first took on did not "reveal" but instead "concealed."
I do not know how to reconcile these two different stories, but they certainly provide me with material for further thinking on this subject. Any comments are welcome...
Spam poetry
The spam mail we receive, the one that successfully avoids sophisticated Bayesian spam filters, can sometimes be quite poetic and include, in addition to the actual message written in a JPEG file, fill text such as the following:
Survival of the fittest. Read the tea leaves. Your barking up the wrong tree. What on earth? Sow much, reap much; sow little, reap little. To gild refined gold, to paint the lily. She's a nut. The sun will shine into our yard too. That's a real stem winder. Put off the scent. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Still waters run deep. Timing is everything. There is always next year. She's a nut. Waking up with the chickens.
Jay Parkinson on Conscientious
A conversation with Jay Parkinson has been posted on Conscientious, Jörg M. Colberg's weblog. Jay Parkinson is a Baltimore-based photographer whose subjects are mostly aspiring models. Jay's website is at darkshapesprowl.com, and his Flickr stream is here. The thing that amazes me about Jay Parkinson's project “Aspiring” is how he turned his own and his models' main weakness to his advantage. A quote:
I've heard one model say she looks “frumparrific” and like she has an extra twenty-first chromosome. But I think out of the twenty-five or so portraits I have for this project, maybe three or four models added my portrait to their portfolio. I definitely took no offense from this because I understand that these photos would doom many of them to modeling for the “before photos” in anti-depressants advertisements.
A comparison to Wegee is something one would expect the least, yet Mr. Parkinson does make a very strong point by referring to one of Wegee's photos presented at the end of the conversation.
Of phenomenology, cancer, web design, angiogenesis, and urban development
Molly E. Holzschlag had written an article on deconstructed design in a web development and design magazine A List Apart. In the article, she draws among other things on urban development, through a comparison of the concentric layout of London with the grid layout of Tucson, Arizona. While the comparison itself and the parallels she makes with the recent trends in web design are certainly interesting, her allegory has a few shortfalls. First, she calls the layout of London spontaneous. While her use of the word “spontaneous” as a functional opposite to “planned” or “designed” is well taken, the formation of London and most other old European cities has been anything but spontaneous. The word “spontaneous” suggests a quick, impulsive formation without perceptible outside causes, or a formation that is self-driven, with the causes rooted within the formation itself, such as the one we see in cancer tumors. In cancer tumors, the center cells die out from the lack of oxygen, and only the peripheral cells proliferate. In fact, it is the lack of oxygen (hypoxia) that is often the drive behind tumor growth and metastasis. In cancer, we have a situation where a cause—hypoxia—is seated inside the formation, while at the same time being one of its consequences. This positive feedback mechanism acts as an additional exponential factor on the tumor’s growth rate (the first one being the exponential nature of cell division). The relatively quick growth of tumors, compared to the very slow or stalled growth of surrounding tissues, is also one of the chief characteristics of their spontaneity. Phenomenologically, the spontaneity of cancer tumors consists of their self-causality (due to both hypoxia and cell division) and quick growth as its consequence, with the last feature being probably the most important one, since the notion of tumor as such would not exist if cancerous growth were as fast as that of the surrounding tissue. Throughout their long history, most old European cities had undergone several stages of careful planning aimed to incorporate or encapsulate the historic center within the newly-grown formations, with all their most important vessels and routes always passing through the center. In these cities, it is not the center that required life support, but the periphery. The center had never lacked oxygen. The second shortfall is that Ms. Holzschlag calls the layout of London deconstructed due to its supposed absence of long-term planning. She correctly observes that Tucson lacks what one would normally call a center, but there is no reason to believe that center is a hallmark of spontaneous formation. As we have just seen, spontaneously-formed tumors have a missing or dead center. To the opposite of being a hallmark of spontaneity, centers are a common feature of many hierarchical design patterns; and the formation of old European cities had often been very hierarchical, with a continuous displacement of periphery and enthronement of the center. To that extent, the layout of Tucson is properly decentered, while the layout of London is not at all properly deconstructed.
What all this has to do with web design, I will decline to say… For now.
Now Some Old News
I stumbled upon the web log of an author Richard Webster (who's written books such as A Brief History of Blasphemy, and Why Freud Was Wrong—no, I haven't read any of them). In a blog entry from half a year ago, he mentions that last year or so (even further back in time!) he was browsing through newspaper style guides for notes on capitalisation that he would adopt in his own book. In a style guide of the Guardian, he had found:
Mr, Ms, Mrs, Miss
use after first mention on news and comment (but not sport) pages, unless you are writing about an artist, author, journalist, musician, criminal or dead person; defendants keep their honorifics unless they are convicted.
Mr. Webster (heh) then goes on to say: I still haven't grasped what it is about artists, authors and journalists which seems to put them on a level with those who are dead. But it was the final phrase that I found most stark and most disturbing…
Witches and all
Halloween isn’t about being scary or spooky. It’s about putting on a mask.
Try searching for the above (title) phrase in Google. Should we conclude that anything worth saying has already been said and just friggin’ shut up? Here's one article I’ve always thought that should have already been written somewhere by someone (even by myself): Why I Hate Personal Weblogs. It’s not recent, but, still, it pretty much sums up everything a healthy pragmatist would think of on the subject of weblogs. That is why the phrenophage is not a weblog.
Then what is this? the phrenophage needs a manifesto, a justification. There will be one, sometime, don’t know when, if ever, don’t care. But no, you won’t find anything useful here. I repeat: you won’t find anything useful here. the phrenophage is not pragmatic; it is not idealistic, far from it. So, let’s think of the phrenophage as an interface to pictures. A picture guide, of sort. An experiment. I do not believe that a picture is worth a thousand words. That is one of the ugliest analogies one can come up with. Apart from being somewhat hairy, the analogy is just plain wrong, since it implies that words and pictures are substitutes of one another. They are not. They are complements.
A thought: Roles do not play relationships.