Scott Conarroe
Average Pictures is my MFA thesis project from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Each of these images depicts the duration of twilight. When photographing in the morning I would open the shutter in darkness and expose my film until the streetlamps went out. In the evening exposures would last from sunset until all the streetlights in the scene came on. In addition to the commonplace types of scenes in this series, there is a type of chromatic averaging that occurs when the spectrum of dramatic twilight hues is condensed into the tonality of a single photographic "instant". I like how these pictures are defined as much by the sun's natural illumination as by electricity, by both the vast poetry of sunset and pragmatic municipal decisions regarding civic illumination. Below is a far more elaborate explanation of this series.
Stereoscapes is a companion piece to Average Pictures. Its vignettes are scenes I enjoyed while the film camera stared dutifully into the distance. Each are constructed from two separate time frames, two different locations joined at the horizon as a way of overcoming the limitations of the video camera's light metering system. They indicate the narrative arcs of events the still photographs couldn't capture and feature my ukulele hotlicks. Link to Stereoscapes
Average Pictures, Halifax NS, 2005
Introduction
At the time of writing, The New Yorker on the newsstands (issue
February 28, 2005) concludes with a full page cartoon. It has no
caption; just an anonymous art gallery. Displayed upon its walls with
appropriate pomp is a suite of austere monochromes; a series of flat
shades steadily getting lighter to the right. Black is separated from
white by a number of intermediary steps. The exhibition is a glorified
grey scale, a beginner’s painting lesson writ large. Of course there are
a number of possible readings, but the general tone suggests that art
is an academic exercise no matter how it is framed. Both art making
and making it in art, the cartoon suggests, are about understanding
established conventions and conforming to them.
The imagery in Average Pictures is somewhat like the grey scale, a
conservative formalist enterprise. In a different era, a similar project
might have chosen to concentrate its rhetoric on the apparent subject
matter. It may have passed itself off as sounding the alarm for the
plight of a region in peril from out migration or ill-conceived rampant
development or any number of situations requiring activism. It could
have contrived an aesthetic trend to transform the depiction of banal
spaces into visions of sculptural gardens. Artists are creative; they
conjure compelling justifications for many activities that amount, at
the end of the day, to onanistic noodling. Average Pictures was
hatched into a climate where neurosis is the new reflexivity: it is a
valid pursuit to consider the parts that make up one’s own parts. This
photo project is about the fundamentals of photography; it is a
meditation on time and space and light as they occur in this body of
work. This thesis statement has three sections that concentrate on
examining these key photographic concepts.
The term average informs the imagery on several levels. It alludes to
middle grey, the safe norm that photos typically aspire to. Recognized
as the orientating principle for photographic exposures, middle grey
also provides the benchmark for this project. Average Pictures are
made according to a comparable ideal, but one whose influence has
been extended to dictate terms beyond tonality. Each image in this
series is exposed, composed, and lit in the same manner. A template
ensuring uniformity of spatial orchestration, duration, and lighting
governs each shot. Average refers both to a mean value and
adherence to an archetypical model. The standardization ratio of sky
to earth (4/5ths beneath the horizon and 1/5th above) approximates
the 18% reflectance value of middle grey. A notion of temporal
averaging is established by photographing twilight, the indeterminate
period that is neither day nor night and yet both of them
simultaneously. The luminance of Average Pictures is affected by
combining a shifting solar glow with static electric streetlamps. Aside
from the duality of conflicting light sources, there are further
ideological connotations of freedom and regulation inherent in this
dichotomy. The term average becomes increasingly fraught as more of
its facets become acknowledged.
The potency of satire is that it simplifies complex situations into a few
telling elements. In the case of The New Yorker cartoon, a gallery,
empty except for a grey scale, reveals the fine balance that art strikes
between convention and invention. Average Pictures addresses a
similar tension, but they do so from inside the topic. They are less
black and white. The photographs of this series are perspectivally
defined by a number of conflicting values; irony and sincerity,
description and occlusion, submission and subversion. Average
Pictures document the convergences that give depth to what are, at
first glance, flat images.
Time
In 1826, the first photograph was made. It required most of a day to
register the view from a window onto a metal plate1. Its exposure was
long enough for the sun to travel across the sky, to illuminate the
picture with both morning and afternoon light. Whatever moved within
the frame, anything that was not completely immobile, was not
recorded by the primitive bitumen solution that served to approximate
the likeness of a farm. Before the turn of the next century, however,
the science of light sensitivity had advanced. The point had been
reached that, with a mechanical shutter, a recognizable person could
be suspended mid step.
Photography has since come to be typified by those fractions of
seconds that preserve instants as pictures. “[T]he Photograph
immobilizes a rapid scene in its decisive instant.”2 Reflections on time
and the medium have tended to fixate on this crisp articulation, on
photography’s brand of extraction that “isolates, preserves, and
presents a moment taken from a continuum.”3 In the nineteenthirties,
Henri Cartier-Bresson’s notion of the decisive moment4
championed the camera as such an instrument of rupture, and began
its rise to eminence among photographic applications. With his book
and accompanying essay (1952), and traveling retrospective, all
entitled The Decisive Moment, this highly influential practitioner
portrayed photographic time as fractured, episodic, and minute. In the
seventies Gary Winogrand echoed his adherence to the fleeting; he
famously answered the question of how long it took to make a picture
with “I think it was a hundred and twenty-fifth of a second.”5
Both Cartier-Bresson and Winogrand have been inducted into the
canon of contemporary photography, yet neither one identified himself
as an artist. Cartier-Bresson was the first photographer ever to exhibit
his work at the Louvre, but he maintained that he was operating as a
photojournalist. Winogrand actively cultivated artlessness despite the
fact that he taught at a number of different art schools6. If there is
some correlation between the speed of their vision and reticence to
commit to an art establishment, the last decades of the twentieth
century saw an inversion of the phenomenon. By the mid eighties,
cerebral deliberate photographers had begun to craft works of visual
rhetoric that achieved primacy in the art world. Jeff Wall described his
elaborate photographic constructions in terms of historical painting
strategies and cinema. Responding to an appetite for their Anonymous
Sculptures photos, Bernd and Hilla Becher published expanded
chapters of seemingly timeless industrial typologies in 1989, 1990,
and 19917. Their students Thomas Struth and Candida Hoffer followed
suit to become stars with highly considered formal work. The Japanese
photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto incorporated temporality into the logic
of his Movie Theatres.
“The sense of what photography is today, where its art lies and what it
might be best at doing has shifted almost beyond recognition. Where
art-reportage aimed for the arrested instant, contemporary
photography has in general tended toward a slower engagement.”8
Compared to anything since its earliest days, photography now
produced in the idiom of art is characteristically glacial in pace. The
longest photographic exposure ever undertaken was recently credited
to the German artist Michael Wesley who, in the summer of 2001,
mounted four cameras in midtown Manhattan. In June 2004 he
retrieved from them the last of three successful images bearing
witness to the deconstruction and rebuilding of The Museum of Modern
Art. Although three years is excessive by any standard, Open Shutter9
is significant on two fronts: it treats temporality as a crucial conceptual
aspect of photo theory, and it alludes to a position of prominence that
photography currently enjoys within the art establishment. The
complete overhaul of perhaps the most important art institution in
existence can be seen here as a photographic undertaking.
Wesley’s practice quotes abundantly from the work of Hiroshi
Sugimoto, particularly his signature Movie Theaters. Sugimoto’s
photographic series of cinema interiors are lit by the films they show;
focused light projected onto the screen reflects off to reveal the
ambience of the theatre itself and “visual facts that emerge only
through long exposure time”10. The durations of his exposures equal
the running lengths of each movie. By expanding time’s relevance
beyond the service of lighting, Sugimoto has turned a conventional
equation for determining exposure into a conceptual model for
contemporary art photography. The camera is now seen as more than
a creator of visual anecdotes. It is a medium engaged in the very core
of being. Photography makes tangible time, space, and light.
Average Pictures also accepts Sugimoto’s influence unabashedly. The
dawns and dusks it depicts are events that last for dozens of minutes,
and they are recorded in their entireties. In the morning, an exposure
beginning in darkness lasts until each streetlamp in the scene goes
out. In the evening, the camera’s shutter opens when the sun drops
beneath the horizon and closes only when all of the lamps are relit.
These pictures show the passage of time distilled into a static
photographic unit of constancy. They are like Theaters and Open
Shutter in that the temporal parameters of each shot are defined
within the frame, within the scene depicted. Time in each instance is at
least as important as the visual subject; it is as descriptive as light.
Duration in each of these projects has much in common with notions
of perspective. Sugimoto and Wesley have succeeded in creating one
point temporalities around singular events. While their fidelity to the
fixed vantage of photographic logic is elegant and effective, it exposes
the motives of Average Pictures as somewhat apart. Its durations are
not simply the time that has lapsed while the camera was open, they
are functions of two separate phenomena; the course of the sun and
the schedule of the streetlamps. This subtle but significant distinction
allows for possible readings that are only incidental in Theaters and
Open Shutter. It suggests that the time of Average Pictures is
comprised of differential velocities with their own related but
independent trajectories. The sun sets and rises each day at a slightly
different time and location while the electric streetlamps remain fixed.
One responds somewhat abruptly to the other’s gradual cycle. By
structuring this project among layers of difference, there is incentive
to implicate other time frames in its scope. The occasional hints of a
traffic flow, the insistent crawl of urban sprawl, and even the still
silence of the photograph itself become accomplices in the production
of each image.
Visually, Average Pictures conform to a fixed point perspective, but
temporally they are constructed according to several migrating
polarities. This dimensionality may seem, at first, to negate the notion
of an averaging effect that the project is based upon. Although it
displays a slightly more sophisticated idea of time than the standard
linear/cyclical dichotomy, Average Pictures remains true to this version
of the term’s many definitions; “Average and medium apply to what is
midway between extremes and imply both sufficiency and lack of
distinction11”. Existing as it does between the parameters of day and
night, clock and earth time, this body of work remains modestly within
their limits. The diffusion of a temporal perspective through many
points of orientation, its lack of distinction, is another way that the
time frame of Average Pictures is consistent with its title. Time in
these photographs is generalized rather than acute.
Light
"Space, measurement, action (history), identity, all are submerged
within the play of light." -John Berger12
A very basic description of photography would indicate that the
luminous properties of a given situation act upon a photosensitive
surface. It begins as an emanation of the world’s brightness and ends
interpreted within the eye of a beholder. Photography behaves as a
bridge connecting an exterior’s illuminated aspects to their proverbial
interior counterparts. The camera, the film, and the print can all be
seen as bricks in the service of such a structure.
The eminent landscape architect Andre LeNotre (1613-1700) described
life as a bridge, and it hung suspended between two ideal gardens13.
In his work, he recreated highly formalized models of these
perfections; although the metaphysical gardens of Eden and Heaven
do not exist in the same manner as his designs at Versailles and
Fontainbleu, the idea of each utopia informed the process of his task
and was made present by it. They are untouchable absolutes rendered
tangible by his constructions of idealized space.
The unseeable termini of vision are opaque darkness and
overwhelming bright. Sight occurs within a space bounded by black
and white. Between light’s utter absence and the commingling of every
chrominant hue, the notion of optimal photographic exposure is a
neutral tone that civilizes these extremes into an average of their
combined intensity. A camera’s light meter “is calibrated for an ideal
subject and its pointer is fixed on middle grey”14. Typical exposures
espouse this median value which moderates the gulf between shadows
and highlights; this produces the full range of mid tones that define a
conventionally good print.
Twilight is a rhetorical analog of middle grey. The visible
spectra of this time link the blinding intensity of a sun at eyelevel with
the inky impenetrability of night. The imagery of Average Pictures
adheres to a photographic logic that insists on depicting intermediate
latitudes of light. The system of metering devised for this project
considers the full range of twilight’s luminance and evokes a mean
brightness for presentation. Each negative is exposed for the entire
duration buffering darkness from broad daylight. The camera’s lens
remains open throughout these events, and all is recorded.
Like LeNotre’s gardens, the works in Average Pictures describe neither
alpha nor omega, but symbolic models of their midst. As expressions
of medial luminance, they profess a relation to absolutes of vision
while allowing access that the extremes of sight do not. The semblance
of totality seen in these pictures approximates LeNotre’s ambition to
reference Edenic and Heavenly perfection through an earthbound
exercise. In displaying the combined influence of an entire spectrum of
light within each frame, Average Pictures exercise a notion of
whiteness. They reference blackness in that at no point do any of the
locations appear as they exist photographically; they are without
referent and as such invisible. Visually and theoretically the sum of
these photographs amounts to a version of middle grey.
This system for exposing film relies upon a vision of photography that
tends to negotiate a settlement between binaries. Aside from notions
of tonality, there are two distinct categories of luminance defining this
project; the sun’s light and the city’s. One is fluid and ubiquitous and
contingent upon infinite atmospheric variations, while the other can be
characterized as finite and abrupt. The shape, colour, and nuances of a
sunset can be observed but never orchestrated; in contrast, the
manner and moment at which a streetlamp activates is a calculated
discretion that usually goes unnoticed. In spite of the oppositional
stance that these two modes of lighting signify, the purpose of the
latter is not to undermine but to supplement the former. Average
Pictures employs each, in their particular capacities, to inform the
collaboration inherent in its method.
The lingering ambience of an indirect sun accounts for most of the
physical description. Its soft shifting light continues to coax open
shadowy areas throughout an exposure. Electricity’s pragmatism, on
the other hand, operates the shutter; it decides when the romance is
over by switching on or off the lights. Although the electric lamps cast
very little illumination upon the visible landscape, their inclusion in this
project is significant. The presence of small punctuating hotspots is a
type of watermark ensuring the authenticity of an exposure. Both
naturally occurring and artificial illumination are vital to the
construction of this imagery.
The photographs almost give the impression of having been taken on
an overcast day except for the even discoloration of their skies.
Smooth bands ranging from dull yellow to washed-out rusty hues
suggest chromatic neutrality that further maintains an allegiance to
the principle of middle grey. In March of 2002 astronomers at The
Johns Hopkins University’s Krieger School of Arts and Sciences
determined the average colour of light in the universe to be a tint
similar to skies of this series. They calculated that to “the perceptions
of an observer looking at the light in a darkened environment, the
color of the universe was beige15. When the viewing environment was
adjusted to daylight, the color was a faint red.”
Space
The vast physical dimensions of the universe are measured abstractly
in light years. A photographic exposure is determined through
balancing an amount of time with luminous intensity. Hypothetical
models of space are commonly represented as functions of time and
light. The world observed in photos is like space explored through the
lens of a telescope; the aura of some past glow is experienced as
present information. This is paradoxical. Close scrutiny of details is
possible as spatial depth is reduced to illusion on a flat surface, but it
abstracts them into design motifs far removed from their original
context. Photographs exist between these poles of specificity and
anonymity; they are both of the world at large and within the confines
of a single lens. They often have more to do with principles of ordering
than the actual physical matter they represent.
Average Pictures is a typological exercise demonstrating a relationship
between particular details and general rules. Like the Bechers’
Anonymous Sculptures, the compositional template directing this
project overlays notions of the intimate upon the infinite. Where their
oeuvre compares the structural minutiae in legions of roughly identical
objects, the unifying factor in Average Pictures is each scene’s
treatment. Disparity among the sites is rendered somewhat moot
when the images are regarded primarily as photographic compositions.
The details normally describing a locale’s identity get reconsidered
here as visual elements whose first loyalties are the design of the
image. Consistency in the use of pictorial devices such as horizon,
sight lines, and depth of field define the work as a cohesive statement
even as the sites vary in purpose. The vantage that characterizes the
series is particularly important to this end; each vista is shot from
above and at such a distance that seldom does a single element seem
of greater significance than any another. “[A] picture tends toward the
generic category of landscape as our physical viewpoint moves further
away from its primary motifs.”16
Thierry de Duve asserts the possibility that the landscape itself has
come to function as a motif in painting, and by connotation for art in
general. Discussing Cezanne’s work, he suggests that when artists
began using landscape imagery to explore more theoretical concerns it
“was no longer one genre among others. It stood for painting in
general, a pure pretext for pure painting.”17 This sentiment is slightly
less applicable to photography. The vast majority of photographic
applications maintain an allegiance to the literal recognizable world
while mainstream painting has charted a steady course into
increasingly esoteric areas. It is difficult to imagine a photographic
project that concerns itself completely with the abstract components of
its medium at the expense of all indexical implications. Description,
perhaps, is close to the pure pretext for pure photography.
Typology is a valuable strategy to employ when attempting to bridge
the gap between an art of depiction and one that is more conceptually
inclined. It is fashionable for contemporary photographers to create
archives of like things. The Bechers’ industrial structures, Rineke
Dijkstra’s bathers, Joel Meyerowitz’s Golden Gate Bridge, and Rodney
Graham’s Welsh Oaks are all cases where a very literal approach to
similitude is masterfully executed. The subject matter of Average
Pictures seems incidental when first attempting to find the thread that
connects the imagery. The consistency of their temperament,
however, is what encourages the viewer to develop a unified reading.
The sites described are of minor relevance; none of them are overtly
significant in cultural, geographic, or sociological terms. They are
liminal spaces that, like the lighting, demonstrate the notion of a
threshold. These images illustrate buffers separating areas of distinct
meaning. Spatially, they tend to depict only the transition from
foreground to background explicitly. The sites, while composed of
detailed parts, amount to wholes with diffuse motives. They lack
distinction. Anne Hyde describes the model for spatial arrangement in
Average Pictures:
“The picturesque [does] not describe raw nature: it mean[s] nature
artfully designed so that it [can] be read like a picture. A picturesque
scene offer[s] the clear compositional elements, present in a proper
painting: carefully defined near, middle and far distances and a
balance of light and shade to harmonize the scene. The picturesque
permit[s] nothing startling, surprising, or wild; its purpose [is] to
charm the viewer”18.
Neither abject nor sublime, the Average Pictures project is a collection
of average places. They could be classified generally as veneers of
settlement upon a base of generic landscape. Planned with little more
pretense than the task of moderate living demands, the sites
portrayed in this series inspire neither awe nor derision. As a type they
are ubiquitous. As photographs they resemble each other mainly
through a common structuring of visual space. There is one height for
all the horizons and a comparable volume of ground beneath. There is
a singular sensibility that has rendered various objects into a collective
vocabulary of lines and shapes. The stylistic archetype that Average
Pictures best describes is that of the picturesque. It is an ordering
principle as much as it is an aesthetic; as such it fulfills the mandate of
the project as a whole. It provides a structural model that is widely
applicable and sufficiently beautiful.
1“The first to fix the camera’s image in permanent form was Joseph
Nicephore Niepce. In 1826, using a pewter plate made with light
sensitive bitumen, he made a picture through a window of farm
buildings.”
Newhall, Beaumont: Photography: Essays & Images (page 17);
Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1980
2 Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida, (page 33), Hill & Wang, New York,
1980
3 Berger, John. Understanding a Photograph, The Look of Things (page
180),Viking Press, New York, 1971
4“The decisive moment, as Cartier-Bresson tersely defined it, it “the
simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance
of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives
that event its proper expression.” http://www.photoseminars.
com/Fame/bresson.htm
5 At one slide show a distinguished curator, distressed by what
seemed to him the unconsidered casualness of the pictures… asked
“How long did it take you to make that picture, Mr. Winogrand?”
Winogrand turned to the screen, pretended to consider the question,
and then replied, “I think it was a hundred and twenty-fifth of a
second.”
Szarkowski, John. Winogrand: Figments from the Real World. (page
31)
6 “Winogrand did not quite trust either the motives or the competence
of art school, and perhaps did not altogether trust himself for
accepting their support..” page 31
7 Water Towers, Blast Furnaces, and Pennsylvania Coalmine Tipples
respectively
8 Campany, David, Still Standing, Still, Contemporary 21, Art 21
Publishing, London, 2004
9 The photographs are on display at the MoMA until mid 2005. The
exhibit is titled Open Shutter.
10 Bryson, Norman; “Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Metabolic Photographic
Photography”, Parkett #46 (121)
11 Babcock-Grove, Phillip: Webster’s Third New International
Dictionary of the English Language (150)
12 Berger, John: “They Eyes of Claude Monet.” The White Bird. (192)
13 “Gardens of Illusion.” Ideas. CBC Radio 1. April 14, 200
14 Davis, Phil: Beyond the Zone System 2nd edition; Focal Press,
Boston & London, 1988 ( page 53)
15 According to the Johns Hopkins University website, study was
conducted by Ivan Baldry and Karl Glazebrook using a “comprehensive
survey of the spectra of 200,000 galaxies… The cosmic spectrum
initially took the standard form of a graph, but researchers then
transformed it into an array of colors, replacing each wavelength with
the color the human eye sees at that wavelength, and varying the
intensity of the color in proportion to that wavelength’s intensity in the
universe.” Calculations were then made “to determine, in essence,
what color the universe would appear to be to someone ‘standing’
outside it and seeing all its light.”
The original answer suggested “a color a few percent greener than
pale turquoise”. Upon further reflection, it became obvious that the
data had been misread. Baldry recanted his previous testimony
halfheartedly; “As it turns out, if you look at all the light in the
universe from a room that has a neon red light, then it may appear
turquoise.”
The perspectives for accurate universe viewing have been agreed upon
as from in the dark, in the daylight, and in a room with the light on;
the average universal light as seen by humans from these vantages
are beige, faint red, and blue respectively.
http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/home02/mar02/color.html
16 Jeff Wall. “About Making Landscapes” Jeff Wall. (144)
17 De Duve, Thierry. “The Mainstream and the Crooked Path”
de Duve, Pelenc, & Grois (eds). Jeff Wall. London, Phaidon, 1996
18 Anne Hyde, An American Vision: Far Western Landscape and
National Culture, 1820-1920, (14)