THE ARCHITECTURE OF SILENCE

Like so much that ends up as significant, this started out as serendipitous.  I was wandering through a bookshop, noticed a book, flipped through it and then bought it.  Back home, as I read through it I wasn’t much impressed.  But it did contain a photograph I really liked and so I tracked that back and ended up with another book that I then realised was going to be important for me.  It’s funny how this happens but sometimes I think all you need to do is follow your nose and world will supply the rest.

Anyway, taking things chronologically, here is the photo.

Entrance to the South Aisle, Le Thoronet, 1986 © David Heald

 I think it is fabulous – right up my street.  It seems to take light, structure and texture and to place them into a delicate balance which makes silence almost palpable.

The image comes from The Architecture of Silence by David Heald (Parabola Books, New York, 2000) - a collection of his photographs of Cistercian Abbeys in France taken over a decade or so from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s with a very informative accompanying text by medieval architectural historian, Terryl L.Kinder.   What attracts me about it is that, in the here-today, gone-tomorrow world of modern photography this book has a truly lasting quality.  I can’t find Parabola Publishing on the internet but I am assuming that it is connected to Parabola Magazine the mythology/spiritual traditions quarterly.

You can find more images from the book at this page of his website. 

David Heald is the Director of Photographic Services and Chief Photographer at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and you can find an interesting short clip of him here  talking about his work over the last forty years – a large part of which has been photographing the Museum building itself.  He sees that building as the most important work of art in the Guggenheim collection.

The unique quality of photography is that it is a direct representation of the world around us.  It is therefore singularly well-placed to let the world speak for itself without interference.  This is a truth generally obscured by much modern photography which seems to reflect only the restlessness of the age.

To have photographed the same building for forty years and still to find something new in it is a bit of a lesson for us all.

FLAT

Nothing is absolutely flat.   Less flat and more flat are out there, of course. Plus flat enough and not flat enough.  All of those, plus flatter, flatter than that and then flatter still.  Almost flat, too, and not quite flat.  Ultra flat and simply not flat.  And let’s not forget the flattest and the least flat.  We can qualify flat endlessly and compare flatnesses infinitely.  But still nothing is absolutely flat.

Just how is it that there can be so many variations of that which does not exist?

(Photo taken by me on the Hasselblad 500CM with Ilford FP4+ @ 200 and developed in ID11)

THE DEVIL IS IN THE DIGITAL

Photo from Daily Telegraph 29/10/22; © Jamie Marshall/Marcel Jurian De Jong

Well, it looks just like a standard photo, doesn’t it?  It appeared in a newspaper article about campervans.  The casual observer might have glanced at it and noticed nothing out of the ordinary.  But there is in fact something out of the ordinary.  Have another look at it.  The scene is obviously staged but that’s not what I mean. It’s the chap on the right in the pink shirt.  Look at his foot.  It’s completely out of proportion to the rest of his body. 

Now look at the front tyre of the van, or more specifically the wheel rim.  It’s not quite round, it’s more oval.  You’d get a very bumpy ride off that.  The van itself looks pretty long to me and the woman in the middle with the dog looks on the small side compared to the chap in the pink shirt – who seems to have a very big head compared to the woman’s. How has all of this happened?

These effects are the result of using a very wide-angle lens.  Just as a telephoto  lens will compress the distance between an object and something behind it, so a wide angle tends to do the opposite.  It’s not so much the effect of the lens in itself but of using it close to the subject.  There is a kind of ellipsoidal distortion so that objects nearer to the lens seem disproportionately big – especially when they are closer to the edge of the image as the wheel and the foot are in this one.   Naturally, the photographer needs to get the whole scene in and may not have much room for manoeuvre so a wide-angle lens is the solution.

I’m seeing more and more of these minor distortions.  There were quite a few when the Queen was lying in state a few weeks ago.  Like this one. 

Taken from The Guardian website. photographer unknown

 The three military figures on the left with the plumed hats are about twice the size of the two religious figures in the middle at the foot of the steps. The effect is less obvious than in the picnic scene because the photographer is farther away but it is still there. If you take a ruler to the image the soldiers are about 4 cms (on my screen - even knocking off a bit for the tall hats) while the priests are about half that.

The effect seems to be exacerbated with shots that are not head-on but you can still see how a wide-angle lens distorts close to, by taking a photo of someone’s face with your phone’s wide-angle lens from near to and then from farther away.  The former will not be flattering - just as most selfies are not flattering if you look carefully.

The most famous example of this effect recently was this one of President and Mrs Biden with President and Mrs Carter.  It’s obviously a very small room and the photographer was stuck with it but the effect of the lens is now comical.  The Bidens are closer to the camera and the edges of the shot (as are President Carter’s feet) and they look like giants.

Photo © Carter Centre

Does all of this matter?  Well, if I may quote Winston Churchill: the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.  If you want your view of the world to remain unskewed then it is best to keep an eye on the digital demons because they will distort it so easily and eventually you will stop noticing.  You will then be on the receiving end of someone else’s world rather than your own. Just as I expect news reporting to be a reasonable reflection of the facts so I expect documentary photography to be a reasonable reflection of a scene.  Come on you picture editors!

Watch out for these photos.  I’m sure we will be seeing more and more of them.