artwork
HUMILITAS
De-framing
experiments in seeing
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“[T]he question stands in the most intrinsic connection to the task of overcoming aesthetics, i.e. overcoming a particular conception of beings – as objects of representation”
Heidegger (Contributions to Philosophy)
De-framing: experiments in seeing interrogates the elements of the visual field as it is experienced by the gaze and configured by the photographic image. Positioned at the centre of the Humilitas project, this series considers the possibility of a humble image, an image that invites attentive viewing, seeking to expand our seeing beyond the frame. This is an open image, one where the subject's presence is loosened or softened in a muddying of foregrounds, midgrounds and backgrounds intended to delay the viewer's concrete reading. In a play of focal planes and limit states of visibility, the imaged subjects stand, diffuse or fall away.
De-framing employs the 250 mm f/ 5.6 Hasselblad Sonnar lens model used by Nasa in the pioneering 1968 photographs of the earth rising over the moon. The reason I chose this lens was not so as to bring the subject closer to the eye, but for the play with depth-of-field offered by its optics (4 elements in 3 groups). For example, images # 5 and 6 of the series aim to achieve a pictorial effect that, inspired by Claude Monet's renditions of light as it falls fleetingly on trees and prairies, invites a seeing that approximates an impression. *
Can the humble be drawn out through imaging?
What is the style of humility, of restraint, of ascesis?
Is there room for intervention in the humble image?
How can I open up the frame?
What elements can be loosened or undone?
Seeing afresh the illegible, the unintelligible, the formless
The events of nature are sudden and fleeting - one must be ready
Actuality, question, synthesis
I need to still - before I can see
To spend time with the world before me, before it forms into an image
For the image to reflect that formative experience back to the viewer
What does the humble leave behind? The question of intention
The act of showing
Short Bibliography
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Benjamin, Andrew. “Doubt and Indifference: threshold conditions within the work of art”. Aisthesis 12(1) : 123-133, 2019.
Bromwich, David. “Natural Piety and Human Responsibility”. Nature and Value, ed. Akeel Bilgrami, Columbia University Press, 2020, 261-276.
Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensation. Éditions du Seuil, 2002.
Demos, T. J. Against the Anthropocene: visual culture and environment today. Berlin: Stenberg Press, 2017.
Heidegger, Martin. “The Age of the World Picture”. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row, 1977, 115-154.
Heidegger, Martin. Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event). Trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu, IndianaUniversity Press, 2012.
Heidegger, Martin. “Positionality” and “The Danger”. Bremen and Freiburg Lectures. Ed. John Sallis, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012 b, 23-43; 44-63.
Richter, Gerhard. Panorama. Eds. Mark Godfrey and Nicholas Serota. Tate, 2021.
Toadvine, Ted. Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy of Nature, Northwestern University Press, 2009.
Twombly, Cy. Making Past Present. Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Eds. Christine Kondoleon, 2020.
Wood, David. Deep Time - Dark Times: on Being Geologically Human, Fordham University Press, 2019.