neighborhood watch

Clearly, the economic crisis in Los Angeles is biting hard (state workers were on furlough yesterday), and surveillance and local policing work is now being done by hawks.   Hawks are a regular presence around here, lunching on pigeons (we found an eviscerated heart in the back terrace area this summer), but this one seems to have been recruited for the neighborhood watch scheme as well.

Only - I didn't realize that when I took the picture.   Understandably

enough, I was concentrating on the bird's very handsome presence: it was only when I downloaded the photograph that I realized quite how apt the signage in the bottom left hand corner proved to be.

rain on melrose

rain on Melrose

Believe me, it's quite a challenge taking photographs when it's very, very wet.   Having eliminated the blurred-view-of-orange-tree seen through window covered in raindrops; various pictures of people huddled under umbrellas in shop doorways, rather forlorn street signs reflected in half flooded streets, and predictable view of cars looming up through the damp murk seen through windshield, complete with the blur of rapid wipers, I'm left with the raindrops-keep-falling view of Melrose, outside Lucques, as we ourselves skulked under an extra large umbrella waiting for valet parking to come back with the car.   Would one know from this picture that it was Los Angeles?   probably not - and certainly not with the rain.   A US city? - the yellow cab is a give away.   But the dark and blur and wetness - that, for me, makes it very deliberately anonymous: an archetype of an urban American street at night.

ewr

Newark Airport station

Another airport shot - this one coming under the heading of Altered Images, since it's an image of one side of the structure, flipped over: a photograph taken straight ahead is also symmetrical, like a Renaissance architectural diagram.

And these may well be the only shots I ever take of EWR station, since a transport policeman came and stopped me, in no uncertain terms: our class reading next week is about privacy and rights and paparazzi and street photography - but I don't think it mentions the perils of taking photographs of inanimate things... 

Since I was in an airport, the logical deduction is that I most likely caught a plane: now in a very wet Los Angeles, and it's very late.

chionophilous

Greek sofa

It would have been very hard indeed not to take postcard-pretty pictures on campus today, 

 

since it was looking so unlike itself in the snow - but the problem's a familiar one: what to do with prettiness when it's readily available, like a tourist spot - how to make it in any way one's own.

I'm starting to suspect that my solution to this conundrum - at least when on the Rutgers campus - is to think hmmmmm - I wonder what's been tossed out at the back of a frat house/sorority today?   My fascination with these strange social groupings with their Greek letters comes, I'm sure, from the complete and utter absence of them in England (had we had such a thing, I would either have been desperately anxious to have been admitted or irritatingly supercilious about the whole thing - happily I never had to find out which).   Nonetheless, here's a Greek sofa.

Which made me start wondering what to call the posting - what was the ancient Greek word for snow, for a start?   And that's not at all an easy one to answer - chion, most likely (I can't manage Greek letters on Blogger, it would seem, so I'm transliterating), according to Liddell and Scott, the standard stand-by lexicon.   but maybe niphostves, which sounds much more like a very light whispery snowfall.   Chion is what forms the root of words that I've never thought of using before, like "chionophilus" - thriving in snow-covered surroundings, or "chionomania" - loving snow (which I always have done, maybe because I was born (indoors) during a snowstorm, or "chionophobia" - fearing the stuff - and this includes the apocalyptic fear, in some cultures, that the end of the world will occur in winter, preceded by a heavy snowstorm.

And Chione, the nymph, daughter of Boreas (god of the north wind, whose name I used to invoke out of the window on summer nights when I was about thirteen, for the hell of it) and Oreithyia, goddess of mountain gales - Chione was the goddess of snow.   She got pregnant by the sea god Poseidon (I can't work out how - there's not a lot of snow that actually falls on the Mediterranean), had a child with the unpleasantly lumpy name of Eumolpous, didn't dare tell her father, threw him into the sea, whereupon he was rescued by Poseidon who took him off to Ethiopia - thereby saving him, I'd have thought, from all future danger of blizzards.   I have no idea if the late C19th Italian artist Segantini knew this legend or not, but he executed some very strange pictures indeed of infanticidal mothers hanging around in snowy Alpine landscapes.

murray hall, snow, and an umbrella 34/365/09

murray hall, snow, and a red and white umbrella

Despite today's class discussion, this is not a digitally altered photograph... apart from the fact that I tweaked the white/dark levels in Photoshop, and - following our discussion about the difference a frame makes - cropped it in  way that emphasizes the artificiality of the shape 

that is, this isn't a conventional straight-out-of-the-box photo shape.  

The original, as you can see, just has more snow, more trees ... and it's much harder (unless you click on it, and make it much larger) to see the umbrella.   So it's a case of the format being chosen to suit the (web) medium.

What's more to the point is that this is exactly the kind of image that, to be at all interesting, might have called for a little digital intervention - even cut-and-pasting in a bit of color - someone carrying a bright umbrella, say - or coloring brightly a very dead silver grey helium balloon that's been wedged up in one of the trees for weeks now.   I'd taken a couple of o.k. but relatively boring shots that didn't do much more than assert how pretty CAC can look in fresh snow - and then, most fortuitously, this person walked across with an umbrella.   I just wish that I had some of Sandy Skoglund's radioactive cats to scatter around the foreground.

counting the vases 33/365/09

counting the vases

I did know perfectly well that I hadn't seen a ghost this morning, or even the visual whisper of an intruder slipping past - but standing at the kitchen sink there was a definite sense of something moving, almost seen one moment, and then gone the next.   It only took another instant to realize that what had happened involved a thick transparent glass vase: as I moved my head, so a sense of movement somewhere in my right field of vision was created, as two sides of the glass, and the glass of the window, all came into a kind of slippery dialog with one another.

How to photograph this sensation?   It would be easy enough to have taken a little video of the phenomenon, but instead I opted for something closer to the subject of the reading for tomorrow's class, involving digital manipulation, creating what was never there in more ways than one.   For of course my own optical experience was a momentary illusion.   But there was only ever one vase.   In this image there are - how many?   Three?  But then there's a spectral presence of part of a fourth (between the two on the left hand side).   This is a composite image: I fed five images, taken sequentially, right to left - it could have been the other way round - into Photoshop's sophisticated Merge feature.   It spat out one of them as superfluous, or unnecessary, or just plain unmergeable, and pieced the others together almost seamlessly (I had to do a little cosmetic work with the blur tool to get rid of some obvious patching on the window ledge), using the building in the background as its touchstone for what needed joining together.   But I left the ghost vase bottom: it signaled both my original experience of thinking that I had seen something that was in fact illusory, and deliberately points to the artificiality of the digital construction.   It's an image that's based on the "real", obviously, but equally obviously refuses to behave like documentary evidence.

fetish and feline 32/365/09

fetish and feline

At one level, this is, of course, nothing more than a picture of a Chinese China Cat, looking very smug in her flowery pyjamas, caught at the moment when some morning sun was falling on her.  At another level - at least according to Sarah Kember's definition of the word in her essay on "Photography and Realism," this is a fetish object: that is, the photograph stands in for what is not there (even if I were to walk downstairs right now, the sunlight has gone; even if the sunlight is back tomorrow morning, the moment at which I took this picture is no more) - but I can carry it around, safe (yes, it's backed up) and portable on this computer, a miniaturized piece of my life, like all the other images jostling around on the hard drive.   

But in fact the photograph stands for a lot more not-there than the absence of a china cat when one's not in a room with it.   What the definition of a photograph as a fetish object under-estimates is the degree to which an inanimate object may be a fetish object in its own right: its role then being doubled by the photograph.   Most obviously, Pyjama Cat is a stand-in - like all other china, wooden, etched, and indeed photographic cats in various corners of the house - for the Four Real Cats in Los Angeles, and hence she's a very basic type of fetish.   But she's also the repository of memory: of previous houses that I've lived in, and where she sat in them - an embodiment, therefore, of what is no more.  And she stand, too, for the more difficult fact that she was a gift from someone - Julia Briggs, the Woolf scholar and Victorian critic - with whom I came to have a very vexed relationship (that's academic speak for many a long story), and with whom I never had any chance of reconciling anything before she died, a year and a half ago, of a brain tumor.   Kember's assessment of the photograph as fetish object doesn't, to my mind, cope with the awkward, regretful emotions that can get stirred up by them (and/or by what they represent).    What (and this is a question we'll be discussing, I know, later in the semester) we don't like the affect produced by the resurrection of memory?   What's so ironic, in this particular case, is that I've happily lived with Pyjama Cat for years without thinking about her origins.   But taking this photograph - prompted only by the light falling on her - and then thinking how to write about it in relation to our reading has stimulated a whole lot of emotions I hadn't particularly been expecting to encounter (that doesn't, I think - reading on in Kember - make this photograph a "transformational object" - I'll get on to that one tomorrow) - since nothing has remotely been transformed in my consciousness - it's simply been stirred up, like some rather toxic sediment.