Prompt #4

My first answer to this prompt went something along the lines of "a discrete collection of photons as experienced by the visual cortex." I thought about this answer for a while without moving from it. It seemed like the right answer. Every time i tried to tease it apart, look at it from different angles (mental image, photography, etc.) I came back to the conclusion that, although the representations may have differed, their core identities traced back to the idea of an image being taken from an instance of physical reality. This is I think my science and photography background speaking. But for some reason, this answer didn't feel sufficient. I felt like it was an answer that satisfied the prompt but did not satisfy me. So I decided to start talking about the prompt with some of my coworkers.

I honestly expected them to blow me off after the first few times I asked them what an image is. Following the initial and expected answers, like 'yes a collection of light is a good answer, why are you still asking', and getting a few more of those answers as I continued to prod, we eventually began to move past our first impression. I was delighted to find that, not only did my coworkers move past their own hesitation to think about the concept of 'image' differently, but that as I walked with them through the concept in conversation, it enabled me to stop thinking about photographs. It occurred to me following the conversation that, had I recorded it, a transcript would have been the perfect blog response. But lacking that, I'll do a quick summary.

We discussed the idea of an image's relationship to physical reality. There were two approached we explored, the first being that an image is the physical impression onto the mental faculties, and the second of course being that our conception of image is a mental construct imposed on the physical reality. The second perspective was mine, as I had the opportunity to speak with a pair of artists (twins) this past summer who had an interesting take on perspective. They had designed what they referred to as their 'easel', which was an odd device that basically holds the artist's head in place while a rotating 'canvas' allows the artist to overlay what they see from one eye directly onto the canvas. If you hold a piece of paper up a few inches away from your eye, there is a part of the paper that appears 'transparent'. The device they uses essentially holds the head and canvas still while allowing the artist to look at a scene and literally trace it onto the 'translucent' strip of canvas. Then they rotate the canvas (as that translucent strip is narrow) and continue with the scene. The interesting thing about these is that it produces images in curvilinear perspective. The 'proper' way to view their paintings was in a curved frame, and the perspective only properly resolved when the viewer placed their head at the point where the artist was painting from in relation to the canvas.

This made me think about the idea of "Art is a lie that makes us realize truth" that I still don't fully understand. A photograph, which is something that I think of as an exact replica of the way I see the world, is really a lie. We have engineered cameras to produce these flat images. But seeing the way these artists worked, and listening to their presentation on their work, they talked a lot about painting the world as they truly saw it - curved. Our visual sensors are curved, light comes at us from any and all directions. A flat representation is a tool of our predefined visual lexicon. It is part of a pictorial language. In a story I once heard, a European explorer, well versed in the ways of perspective drawing, came across a Native American who was painting. As he watched the Native paint, he saw the painted make a blue circle as a pond. The European told him that he should make it into an oval, so it would look more like what he saw. The painter replied, "But I know that the pond is round. Why should I paint the lie my eyes are telling me?"

After discussing these concepts for some time, my coworkers and I settled on a definition that at least feels much more satisfying to me than my initial one. An image is a frozen moment of perception. We decided that an image, to us, feels static. Movement it the streaming together of endless images. And, both physically and mentally, we decided that it is never possible to truly see something identically more than once. A photograph is a frozen moment of the perception of the film of the camera behind the lens. The image the photographer saw in the viewfinder was a different one, but he can easily connect the two because he has been equipped to handle such translation. I, upon viewing the photograph, will receive a similar, but still slightly different image. Images can be similar, but not identical, as each really is an absolutely unique and frozen moment of perception - a slice of the state of the perceiver being acted on by that which they perceive.