How Does One Post Photos For the Ladies?

[RonPrice]

How Does One Post Photos For the Ladies? Not seeing any mechanism for such an exercise for the ladies, I will post some thoughts on photography and photographs in general.
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A LIFE IN PHOTOGRAPHS
1908-1953 and 1953-2003

I always think photographs abominable and I don't like to have them around, particularly not those of persons I know and love.-Vincent van Gogh, "Letter of September 19th, 1889," The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh.

Due to the physical action of light and the chemical action of development there is a tangible link between what was photographed, through the developing process to the gaze of the viewer. It is a process involving something that has been, due to the photograph as an object, due to the action of light, due to radiations that ultimately touch me and due to the photograph being something for the gaze, the visual memory, of the viewer. The photograph of a missing being, Susan Sontag says, touches me like the delayed rays of a star.-Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977.
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At the age of sixty-two I now possess a dozen albums of photographs of various sizes and shapes. They could represent a significant aspect of any autobiography I might want to write. This essay, this part of a chapter of this book, tries to put all these photographs in perspective, tries to provide readers with my personal hermeneutics of the visual, at least that part of the visual that got packaged into these twelve albums in a culture which gives hegemony to the visual. More generally, too, I provide here in this part of my memoir a fragmented, an episodic, examination of the phenomenon of seeing. What the famous Italian film director Federico Fellini said about film could also apply to my photographs. "My films are not for understanding,” said Fellini, “They are for seeing." This essay, though, is about understanding.

The French sociologist and philosopher, Jean Baudrillard, said that "no matter which photographic technique is used, there is always one thing, and one thing only, that remains: the light. Photography is the writing of light and this light is the very imagination of the image. Baudrillard sees his photographs as making the world a little more enigmatic and unintelligible, as exposing the very unreality of the world of appearances. Any photograph is never of any “real” world, but rather, it is a record of the momentary appearances behind which the real hides. To him, the world is essentially illusion. I certainly sense this as I look back over nearly 100 years of photographs in my dozen albums.

Our contemporary culture of digitization and image-glut actually shrivels the ethical force of photographs of whatever type intended to elicit compassion, sensitivity or the milk of human kindness. In an age in which spectacle has usurped the place of reality, photographic images still have the power to evoke shock and sentiment. Photographs are the fragmentary emanations of reality, the punctual and discrete renderings of truth, rather than the uniform grammar of a consistently unfolding tale. I would hesitate, then, to draw on my collection of photographs, however numerous, however bright and shiny, colourful and clear, as evidence of the unfolding tale of my life. They relay and transmit diffuse assemblages of affect, without necessarily appealing to the coherent, narrative understanding of an interpretive, rational consciousness.

The photographic frame is not just a visual image awaiting its interpretation; it is itself actively interpreting, even forcibly making a statement. Sontag wrote that where "narratives make us understand, photographs do something else. They haunt us." Our age, she goes on, is one in which "to remember is more and more not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture." Given the sheer sweep of the visual image in contemporary culture and politics, I struggle to come to terms with the nature of memorialization in all its forms effected by photographs. I ponder as to what is the kind of affect relayed by photographic images as discrete and punctual fragments of reality. What, I ask myself, is the semiological universe that is being called into play by such dissociated transmissions of affectivity.

The culture of 'image-glut' gives us a harried and in fact beleaguered document of reality. I am on my guard that these words of mine do not turn into something that is little more than a frustrated rant against the inhuman multiplication not just of images, but of the sacrilegious settings in which we see them. The place of the image in an era of information-overload, and the capacity of the image in such a landscape to infinitely, and perhaps "irrationally," multiply its significations in relation to continuously mobile variations gives me cause to ponder. To photograph is to frame and to frame is to exclude. My dozen volumes of photos have indeed excluded most of my life.

This would be true a fortiori of the effigy. Of all the religious and artistic treasures which a visitor may see at Westminster Abbey, the collection of eighteen funeral effigies in the Museum is perhaps the most intriguing. Carved in wood or in wax, these full-sized representations of kings, queens and distinguished public figures, many of them in their own clothes and with their own accoutrements, constitute a gallery of astonishingly life-like portraits stretching over more than four centuries of British history. Can only the dead astonish us by seeming “life-like”? Is there something lifelike in this memoir? Perhaps even the living can induce the uncanny effect of an effigy from time to time—but in print. Modern celebrities, of course, do this all the time and a whole industry has been created to cater to these ‘life-like’ forms and antics.

This class of lively royal artefacts from merry and not-so-merry old England trouble the finality they serve to commemorate. English royal effigies are an historic prefiguration of modern celebrity. The funeral effigy did its work in part by materializing in death a well-known likeness, symbolizing, at a moment of high ritual expectancy the general image that all the subjects of a monarchy might reasonably be expected to hold in their minds’ eyes. I mention the above because I can not see any purpose at all not only to an effigy of myself but even photographs.

Kodak has closed its film laboratories and processing plants in Britain and the United States since the turn of the millennium. At this point in the twenty-first century, however, we can still look back on 150 years of a familiar and domestic photographic technology; and I can look back on 100 years of black-and-white prints, the little-changing record of my affinal and consanguineal family's life, my Bahá’í family or at least that part of it that got in front of a camera while I was around and a wide range of friends and associations beginning in 1947. The power of revelation due to photography is undeniable. My photos look back on a very small section of 99 years(1908-2007) of that century and a half within the confines of my family, friends and many of the landscapes where I have lived, moved and had my being.

I have been working on this essay on photography for nearly a decade now, since the late 1990s. It finally has a form that is useful and, although not entirely satisfactory, it is appropriate to include in this autobiography. Much more work on this essay is required, but its relevance to my autobiography has at last some clarity to me and so I include it in this fifth edition of Pioneering Over Four Epochs. I have found the content of this essay one of the most intricate and complex of all the sections of this autobiographical narrative but, because the ideas are important to me--and I hope to some readers--I want to include them. The ability of photography to record some of the types of the minutiae of social life makes it an ideal method for dealing with a number of aspects of the autobiographical process and some of the complexity and richness of the human situation. Many people see much more in photos than they even do in written text; for these people, my photographs and the commentary are indispensable. Of course, as Andre Malreau once said, “Images do not make up a life story; nor do events. It is the narrative illusion, the biographical work, that creates the life story.”

The human tendency to look at, to be drawn to, the pictures, the photos, before the print seems universal--at least in my experience. If I had the technological competence and the money, I'd include many of the photos. Sadly readers will find none in this work.

Vision and perception are active ingredients in the creation of understanding. When we observe something, then we reach for it; we move through space, touch things, feel their surfaces and contours. Our perception structures and orders the information given by things into determinable forms. We understand because this structuring and ordering is a part of our relationship with reality. Without order we couldn't understand at all. The world is not just raw material; it is already ordered merely by being observed. And photography helps in this ordering process; indeed, our very way of looking at so much of the world is now determined, in part at least, by photographs. Photography gives us an immense amount of experience that normally would be outside our range. The fragment is so often elevated from irrelevance to positions of some priviledge. We are able to see what we looked like as children for the first time in the last century and a half, since the birth of the Baha’i revelation. -That's all folks! Too much probably--but "such is life" as the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly said on the way to the gallows in 1880!

[rainbow]

Who the hell is going to read all that crap?!!! you must be out of your mind.
Maybe i am crazy.. if anyone actually is going to waste 15 mins of there time reading that, then just call me insane.

[peacock]

Hello - does no one come on this anymore - i've just found it - i like it.