The Perseverance of Photographic Seeing

When I irst came to China with a group of photographers in the year 2000 we used only ilm stock, there were no portable, digital cameras available at that time able to provide images of equivalent or better quality than professional level ilm cameras.

Very recently I was photographing in a six hundred-year old Chinese village, Puning,in Guangdong Province within the compound of a beautifully kept ancient temple. We were being entertained by an extremely good school orchestra, directed by an authoritative, interesting and intelligent young man, an albino Chinese person.

Suddenly, a drone appeared in the sky, high above. I calculated that I could try to guide the vehicle into the temple in order to photograph it better. A more precise photographic selie, machine to machine. Signaling by waving my hand and calling to the drone in my rudimentary Mandarin “Lái, lái, lái ba”（“Come, come, come on” ）.

David Cubby 2017 ‘Drone in Puning, Guangdong, China

It descended into the temple, then “Zài yòu biān”（“to the right”）and “Wǎng zuǒ biān”（“to the left” ）.

It felt strange to be communicating with a drone as though it were an alien from the void, and in such a beautiful, venerated temple. It responded exactly to my rogue commands,descending as though from a futuristic time zone into an ancestral temple and an immediate present where everyone is a photographer and cameras surround us all, in complex global surveillance of self, the web.

For myself as a practicing artist and photographer it has always been the oddness of the “photographic image”, a strange thing, a weird object, seen-as-though-seen-for-the-irsttime. And, it is the most beautiful, direct way of seeing and describing the world, without the prejudice of labels, that I believe conditions Susan Sontag the author of On Photography implies when she reveals, inspirationally, the most “surreal” aspect of photography being the photograph itself.

The sheer magic of seeing a print develop in a clear bath of chemicals, or the beauty of a miniaturized, focused and detailed image upon a ground glass screen never leaves the excited imagination of my peers and our forebears. Digital Imaging technology proceeds in photography as an electronic parody of its origins in light sensitive material and chemistry,whilst steadily fulilling its own potential（s）as, for example, mirrorless cameras.

Yet, even now, for myself and despite life-long research no-one ever explained completely satisfactorily what a photograph is and what it is this thing before us that we use industrially, chemically and now electronically that it is so universal and remains the most ubiquitous and used means of depiction.

This “modernist medium for modernized times” was the way America claimed it for its own and in that context made a lot of powerful images. How is it that photography meaningfully afected thinking, language and communication? How it can be justiied as art other than simply accepting it accredited as art just because it is hung in a gallery? What is art anyway and how many formations of art exist for whichever photography to comply? Endless questions requiring answers, whatever precious paradigms simply vanish before our eyes.

Thus, I am sorting through some of the philosophical underpinnings of the power and limits of photography as a dominant form of description that busily replaced and determined modern forms of written and spoken language shifting text to context as well as other forms of representation, in its minute, partial and brilliant trace of the real.

My method of analysis is shaped here by the idea, histories and presence of art un-ashamedly as a kind of observational laboratory with a notion of “sculpture” supplanting“art” in the western world as a tool for seeing and understanding so similar to if not informed by the method of existential phenomenology.

And, by “sculpture” I do not mean elevating “photograph” to a plinth as revered object but in the way Marcel Duchamp’s notion of “ready-made” cleverly shifts context by nature of its placement, in this case, the viewing paradigm of gallery from that of “traditional museum setting” to something like an “experimental, observational laboratory”. For example,in the act of seeing a displaced urinal with its misnomer “fountain” and bawdy signature,“R. MUTT 1917”, prejudice may be stripped bare to reveal object as an object in itself. This radical artwork from 1917 is the primary key to understanding contemporary western art.

Given that experience, one either rejects Duchampās original ready-made as an abomination within a place intended for viewing the desirable ideal, or, emphatically accommodates a whole new way of seeing that first formed what we recognize as western contemporary art. From this point on it can be shown that artwork itself begins to think or rather, wonder.Thus, I see sculpture and therefore art not in traditional terms of idealized art object, ‘beautyābut simply another technique for seeing: setting aside naming or titling, without preconception, “wonder”’.

Thatās the fundamental shift from traditional to contemporary art.

Similar to the honourable traditions of both conventional western art and time honoured Chinese art subject matter retains an emphasis on landscape, nature and iguration combined with a notable preservation of sentimentality, beauty and the ideal. Traditionally art both in the west and the east were and still are understood in terms of status, as achievements conirming or qualifying a civilised person - all these notions being shunned though not obliterated by western modernism.

Across the four traditional skills comprising traditional Chinese art; painting, calligraphy, music and chess, there is potent crossover of meaningful sensation called synaesthesia.So that, music corresponds to shape, volume and line in nature as does painting to tonality,color and song. So, for example, calligraphic line and trajectory may be employed to structure photographic pictorial composition echoing through all formations of Chinese art.

I believe that western contemporary art as we have known it will not return wholly to traditional practices but must fade now early into the new millennia and there shall soon be a grand shift from western contemporary art practice to a new formation of global art based upon art and science not in terms of appearance, but on deep and hard-won thinking no longer deined by capitalist commodiication of art and/or artists. It seems the shift in context will likely be electronic.

This view of art/sculpture as a potent trope positions me to see, directly and without language becoming a kind of veil, a ixed and customary ilter. Instead I am experiencing,seeing and wondering,

According to Van Alphen:

“Art is a laboratory where experiments are conducted that shape thought into visual and imaginative ways of framing the pain points of culture.”（Van Alphen, 2005: xii）.

When Van Alphen characterizes art as a laboratory, he is not only relaying that insight to art practitioners, but also reprimanding “art critics and scholars” for continuing to see art and the museum as historical product and not historical agency - that is to say, art in action and as process. The museum converts into studio and an extension of studio practice, thereafter studio becomes location, all alongside but not at the expense of, the institutionās archiving aegis.

Furthermore, the descriptiveness of the phenomenological method - economic, careful - and persistent description of that which is present and observed, returning again and again to the experience seems so similar to the process of drawing which, according to Ihde,（1986:34）is in Wittgensteinian form: “describe, don’t explain”. At this point it seems that description splits amoeba-like and new meaning, insight, like new life, is conceived. It is conscientious relection that splits open description through correlation and as intentionality, an exponential shaping of experience making the noetic process, or insight, philosophical and,indeed, art.

Witnessing photograph as a phenomenon, its essential “thingness” and affect takes speculation beyond our modern, peremptorily optically dominant, sensorium. This draws on the photograph in synaesthetic relex into sublimating illusion so that it remains structurally undisturbed and hidden, it becomes a “habit of mind” or subconscious in the conceptual formation of illusion leaving image-content in faux unison with its referent. And, this digs deeply into the terms of the photographic object as a whole, its materiality being subsumed,becoming transparent and unspoken, to the point where we need reminding that a photograph is a three-dimensional object, not a mere two-dimensional image, photographs have “…volume, opacity, tactility and a physical presence in the world”（Batchen, 1997: 2）.

So, what has been the afect on thinking and understanding of the world with the arrival of photography? What follows is a partial list, a set of preliminary notes that deine the edges of a persistent:

Within the quadrilateral frame of the photograph, space is compressed from three into two dimensions and the fourth dimension fixed so that time appears interrupted, paused or still. Unlike other forms of depiction, such as painting, the photograph carries a second compositional “space ”, that of time. Note, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s acknowledgment of the condition of time within the photograph as “the decisive moment”. That means that photography maps closer to chaos then other types of representation, such as drawing, and it is essential for a photographer to work in harmony with time and chance to properly it or compose that temporal space ixed in complete augmentation of a still photograph.

Within the camera obscura it was the actual compression of dimensions from three to two that generated the idea of perspective. Mathematics made the idea more portable and industrially operational, but, before the camera-obscura there was no single or multiple point perspective.

And, prior to the lens nothing was out of focus, everything depicted was always in focus.Figures larger or smaller than other iguration within an image had nothing to do with distance, but everything concerned with social status.

Before the camera, between nature and illustration, space and time spread out endlessly in heavenly continuum.

Before the arrival of the photographic apparatus, that is to say the camera, lens and light sensitive plate, western depiction（painting）was only ever framed as an ersatz arched,window, as church altar decoration.

The camera-obscura image projected onto a transparent frame in a darkened, box-like room determined the edge and portability of the photograph, that literally re-modelled the construction of theatre, invented perspectival realism and lives on in spectacular, ubiquitous rectilinear screens, photographs movies, television, print publication amongst digital parodies of analogue visions, technology, knowledge and imaginations.

The global network is a suiciently large, beautiful and complex construction now to seem rich with possibilities, a playground of time-travel vanishing over the framed horizon to another and another reality, another culture.

Increasingly so, an old biological world threatened with imminent ecological collapse,makes a further artiicial condition - a novel electro-digital reality - appear attractive, across which we can happily share data, images, narratives, concepts, music, and possibly eternal life in a bio-machinistic paradise. So, for the rest of my life may I photograph ordinary people doing ordinary things, armed with the knowledge that can only prove a singular truth that no-one is ordinary and everything we always do is extraordinary.References Batchen, G.（1997）. Burning with Desire, The Conception of Photography, Cambridge,

Mass: Massachusetts Institute of Technology（MIT）Press.Sontag, S.（1997）. On Photography, London UK: Penguin Books.Van Alphen, E.（2005）. Art in Mind, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.