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Recycled Garbage

October 17, 2012.  This is a straight photo of something noticed by chance.

If you click on the image to zoom it, its raison d'être will be more apparent.  Though it couldn't have been taken of anything else, anywhere else, or even ten minutes earlier or later, what it was taken of doesn't matter to the image.  It is my humble offering to the Graphics of Phôs, a sort of graphic imagery that only a camera, whether pinhole or film or digital, can make, created by educating the visual capabilities and associative tendencies of the human brain.  The camera doesn't create anything, any more than a lithographic stone or prepared canvas or pigments and oil and varnish do.  As for the hands-on part of visual imagery, that now comes with what one does with post-processing rather than with fingers in the developing pan and so on.

Back to the images that Bill Brandt took with the camera that he found, probably originally designed for espionage or some such hole-in-the-wall purpose: its lens could record, for example, a whole room full of nudes interacting such as to cause a real scandal on YouTube.  Brandt used it for extreme but quite 'innocent' studies of nudes (primarily nudes; not exclusively).  These are the Brandt images that are best represented on the internet, to which I refer you.  When I call his nude studies 'innocent', I don't mean that they aren't appreciative of the female body (far from it) but that they are not meretricious or even pornographic (in the primary meanings of those two words).

On the other hand, Brandt's nudes are richly suggestive: we bring our own minds to that task.  So, to me, my little light study is suggestive.  When you look at it zoomed to full screen, and your monitor isn't TOO bad, its little edges and translucencies and curious patches of red color and texture not unlike that of pre-modern underlinens, might make you think of passages of Bouchers or Fragnonards.  Of course, that depends on your having had the privilege of meditating on some of their best paintings, whether in New York or Paris or London, just to name three.  And those red patches, considering the tendencies of current television drama, may suggest violence or one of the disturbing sides of Nature, just as some of the curves and contrasts of Brandt's nudes can evoke ghosts of sexual anxiety as well as romantic daydreams.

I would emphasize, too, that as the light event caught my eye, sending me for the little camera (always kept handy for this reason), I didn't see what I'd get, only the graphic potential of the light event.  In fact, once I was using the camera I had to walk around to look north, into the room, to get the above, since the contrast was too strong, I realized already, looking west—and I could do without a record of that screen door this time.  I wasn't even trying to conceive of frames for pictures.  I just used the monitor and the zooming function to search and suggest.  I mean, to repeat, it is the image that is (literally) graphic, rather than the record of somewhat bohemian housekeeping.

If you are curious, you can find the four images from two exposures at the head of the current Picasa album: current Picasa album.  They are annotated, and you can get the metadata by clicking at right for full info.