Last summer, while I was living for a moment in Chelsea, Christian Erroi
had a show up at Michael Mazzeo. The pieces on display – from his series
“As Above” – were
both exquisitely light and unusually solid.
The photographs, at the simplest level, were composed of pieces of vegetation, fragments of vines, leaves, stalks,
tumbleweeds. Erroi had edited them down until only a slender element or two remained.
One weed rolling alone, two wisteria vines reaching toward each other.
He printed these on transparent media and mounted them on sheets of clear acrylic, perhaps an inch thick.
The resulting slabs rested upright on wooden bases, ethereal trophies for a fragmentary game.
By applying this process Erroi created objects that were pure in their abstraction, yet more concrete than the originals,
more solidly real than photographs typically have any claim to be.
Start with the moment that the image was captured by the camera.
In addition to a silhouetted trunk curving across the frame, there was background – other trees, grass,
vines, a fence, shadows, sky, the world in its usual complexity. All of this was there for capturing,
for reproducing, for enhancing, for displaying. Erroi chose to focus in, to remove everything that could be removed,
until one compositional element was left. This is a move from scene to object, a slide along the spectrum of abstraction
away from image and towards ideal; this is a removal of detail to increase the conceptual power of what’s left.
Next the printing of the image on a transparent medium. Instead of the artificial projected white
of the computer screen, and instead of the quiet reflected white of a usual print, the abstracted image
was now surrounded by clearness. In other words, by whatever actually happened to be behind it. This is a return
to the world. In place of the erased, forgotten, ignored context of the original physical trunk, we now have
our own context – the immediate context of the photograph. This is a move from object back to scene,
and this is a strengthening of the image, since it has now taken on physical form; but this is also an addition
of detail that increases the trunk’s conceptual power, and too a further slide along the spectrum of abstraction
towards ideal.
And then the transparent medium, mounted on a thick piece of acrylic, itself also transparent,
held vertically in the air by a small block of wood. The clarified image now took on weight.
It had substance. You could hold it as you never could the living tree. The simplified trunk was framed
by the clear edge of the plastic – an edge which was barely there. The transparency of the plastic
thus both included and excluded the world around it, defining the photograph’s context without imposing upon it.
This is a demarcation of limits. Not movement towards ideal or specific, but a chosen stopping point.
A captured moment made physical, tangible indefinitely, but precisely delimited in its abstract representational powers.
One small piece of the world, examined, truncated, clarified, and given new life, in a new form that captures the essence
of the old.
In Hannah Hinchman’s wonderful book on seeing the details of the world,
A Trail Through Leaves, she wrote:
Thoreau, with his insatiable appetite for phenomena, relished and reported on the unmeasurable as well as the measurable.
The twentieth century has produced no scientific literature about the way light and wind work on the surface of a pond,
for instance, unless the adherents of chaos theory are at work on it. There are no papers published about it,
no seminars, no grants given to study it. And because no named category exists for that and similar phenomena,
most of us don’t see them.
No scientific literature perhaps, but Edward Tufte has proposed a new type of
high resolution data flow graphic based precisely on
the way light
and wind work on the surface of a pond, called the wavefield.
As far as I can tell, wavefields have never been been used for data display – other than to display
the data of which they actually consist, which is to say what the surface of the pond behind Tufte’s house
in Connecticut looks like sometime in the early summer.
But perhaps, as Hinchman suggests, that data is enough. Perhaps capturing, displaying, understanding, representing
the way light and wind interact with the surface of a pond is a hard enough problem on its own. Perhaps we need
to study that.
This isn’t scientific literature, of course, and it’s not measurement either, nor chaotic theory.
This is careful observation of complex phenomena, presented clearly, accurately, and precisely, in a way that
removes distraction and concentrates the attention on the specific phenomenon at hand. This is, once again,
that point where abstraction and concrete detail are the same.
When I began taking photographs again, in 2005, one of my first subjects was sunlight through winter beech leaves.
Much of the Eastern forest consists of American Beech
(Fagus grandifolia), often in conjunction with
Sugar Maples, and so they form a central part of my formative landscape. And for years I have been fascinated
by their principle quirk: Marcescence.
The beech is
deciduous, they say, but in an odd fashion: Beech leaves are often marcescent – which is to say that
they die and brown and shrivel in the fall like proper deciduous leaves, but they don’t fall off.
Instead, they linger through the winter until new spring leaves take their place.
This habit – and its precise causes are unknown – makes the beech and its translucent leaves a defining
element of the Northeastern forest in winter.
The taxonomic family within which botanists place the beech, and to which it lends its name, is
Fagaceae. And a large and wonderful family it is, including the prolific oak and tanoak genera
(Quercus
and Lithocarpus), the chinkapins (Castanopsis and
Chrysolepis), and the chestnuts (Castanea).
Fagus even gives its name to its botanical order:
Fagales, whose members are distributed all over the world. But of
Fagus proper, only grandifolia
and mexicana are native to North America, and none are native west of Wisconsin.
Earlier this month I was again in New England, and found myself once more captivated by sunlight through beech leaves.
The light came through in drips and drops this time, revealing the lush yellow greenness of the young foliage.
Late last year, Fritz Horstman posted a new project
of his: Falling Leaf Diagrams. The concept is simple,
the execution is elegant, and the results are beautiful.
The concept:
Take a video of leaves falling. For each frame, trace the location of the leaf onto paper. Thereby accumulate a static
record of the leaf’s motion through space, on paper.
The execution:
Two drawings, one in color, one monochrome. The monochrome drawing – thin black lines on white paper –
appears to trace the patterns of five leaves, each beginning its fall from a separate point in space. The polychrome drawing –
thicker lines, each its own color – traces eighteen leaf paths, each beginning from the same point and diverging almost immediately.
The results:
Intricate twisting diagrams, revealing shifting leaf aspects, the depth of the landscape, the complexity of motion of a simple object.
Insight into a seasonal pattern, an evolved survival mechanism, a mundane event.
These drawings look like choreographic plans, seen from above, somewhat abstractly marking out the movements of a company
of dancers. Starting from one end of the stage, they shimmy most of the way across, passing each other lightly.
The speed of their motion is implied by the spacing of the lines, and certain moments of line–crossing chaos hint at
complexities of motion hidden by the transfer of their movements to paper.
Like a plan, but Fritz’s word “map” is more accurate, since this is a diagram of what actually is,
not what is intended. There is no choreography. The dance exists only so long as the leaves are falling;
as soon as they reach the ground the dance is over and the dancers are gone.
This is a map of what actually was. By focusing on two elements only – the aspect of each leaf and
its position in space and time – and abstracting away all others, Fritz has revealed much about the scene
that would not otherwise have been visible.
There is no air here, on these pieces of paper, but you can see it implicitly,
even almost feel it in places, as you trace your eyes down the leaf paths, observing how the turning of each successive line
happens in consort with the arcing and curving of the entire path. There is no ground, yet each leaf line ends at a different place
within the unstated perspective. There is no time, no minutes and seconds, though the paper itself has been transformed
into time’s axis, a flattening of all four dimensions into two, with no loss of information. There is no time in the larger
sense either, no months and years, no seasons, no weather, no climate, no life, no growth, no transformation.
And there is, in fact, no leaf – but your mind comes alive with curled, browned, dried out leaves,
dropped mid–fall, the changing lengths of day, the changing temperatures, the fading chlorophyll,
and the resulting hormonal changes within the tree itself all working towards the moment of abscission,
when the cells of the stem part and the leaf falls, to twist and turn through the air, spinning down towards the ground.
The sky was clouded over and lit poorly by moonlight and light pollution from New Haven. The trees around the pond
were so dark as to be almost indistinguishable. The ice itself, covered by a thin layer of snow, glowed uniformly pale white.
My camera was mounted on a tall lightweight tripod. I set the tripod on the ice in front of me, lined up
the camera with the pond horizon, and began skating.
The result was a series of photographs that capture something of the abstract beauty of a winter pond at night.
Above is
the first of that series.
More will be forthcoming, with any luck.
Ice, in Maine.
A little more than a month later, R. and I traveled to Maine, to spend a weekend winter camping with
Alexandra & Garrett Conover.
On our way back to Brooklyn we stopped at
Moosehead Lake
and spent part of a morning wandering around its vastness and dodging snow machines.
Earlier that month, on a drive from Brooklyn to New Castle Pennsylvania, I began a series of abstractions –
attempts to capture certain facets of the experience of traveling across the land. On the far right is
the first of these.
The first ice picture, from the Albers Foundation, is an abstraction of light by virtue of collecting it over time,
while the vantage point is in motion. These photographs can be described in exactly the same way, but are nonetheless quite distinct.
Both these photographs – taken from a moving car – and the ice photograph –
taken while being propelled by a moving skater – are the product of linear motion along the surface of the earth.
The path of motion is relatively steady and straight, in all cases, but the important difference
is that the trade route photographs capture the world at a right angle to the motion and
the ice photograph captures it directly in front.
In both cases, the result is an accumulation of light. In that sense, then, these photographs are more precise
than snapshots would have been. However, that accumulation of light, through its accumulation of detail,
produces also a certain abstraction. More precision yields a broader perspective, images of, respectively,
a place over time, and motion through time.
In May, R. and I left Brooklyn, and in June we left New York. In July we left the northeast entirely,
and spent the summer and fall traveling. Now we are in southern Oregon, and I’m catching up
on old photographs and other postponed work.
Over the next few months Hypsography will continue to expand and shift. I have a tremendous backlog
of projects to finish, and I'm starting new ones all the time.
Keep your dial locked here.