The Game of Images

© Fabio Moscatelli

Listening to a good friend and professional like the photographer Dario De Dominicis present his new course at Officine Fotografiche is always a pleasure.

I was curious to understand how he set up the course and because, in any case, I have great esteem for him, and in fact, he gave me a way to think.

Answering a question about the importance of editing in photography, Dario mentioned the beginnings of photography, the first experiments with moving images that marked the boundary between the previous world of painting and what will later come with cinema: the radical change of our way of conceiving visuality.

Although the history of cinema is marked by the pioneering works of Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope and the cinema of the Lumière Brothers, or George Méliès' famous “Journey to the Moon” in 1902, there was a whole previous creative ferment made of experiments that came called “Precinema”, in which – thanks to Photography – they tried to set in motion what was previously only an exhibition of single painted pictures hanging on a museum wall.

It should be remembered, in 1872, the businessman and governor of California Leland Stanford asked Eadweard Muybridge to confirm a hypothesis of him, namely that during the gallop of a horse there was a moment in which all the legs were raised on the earth. On June 19, 1873, Muybridge successfully photographed a racehorse named “Sallie Gardner” using 24 cameras, placed parallel along the track, and each individual machine was operated by a wire struck by the horse's hooves every 21 centimeters to cover 20 meters of extension of the track, and the photos were taken in a thousandth of a second.

That galloping horse was one of the first “visual tales” in motion.

From there then the famous train of the Lumière brothers that made the audience of the first cinema flee in terror, as if the moving images were the ancestral fire of primitive men.

 

 

Dario talked about cinema because he linked photographic editing to the script of a film, citing a book that had impressed him a lot, Vincent Amiel's “Aesthetics of Editing”.

Underlining how we are conditioned, from birth, by a certain type of chronological reading of what we see.

In practice, we reason as the Gestalt had theorized in the 1920s in Germany, a circle is associated with another circle as well as a rectangle with a rectangle and so on, as anyone who has studied the Psychology of Perception knows.

And this is where he gives an interesting example.

Precisely on the subject of how to do editing in photography, saying how it is obvious for us to think in a certain way by observing a series of images on a widely codified theme such as a wedding day.

If there is the image of the bride and groom in the church and that of the woman in a bathrobe, it is assumed that if we put them in sequence, the woman in a bathrobe will certainly not come after the scene of the bride and groom in the church, because obviously, it is the scene of the morning in which she prepares to wear the dress and her photoshoot.

This is where something awakens in me, advancing from the mists of a mental past that never leaves me. A dáimōn that whispers in my ear from time to time.

And why? Couldn't that sequence be right? Couldn't she be the one who gets out of the shower at the end of the wedding day after the first night?

And the demon assumes – slowly – the appearance of the face of Ludwig Wittgenstein, my alter ego since the time of my degree thesis.

 

I still remember when my professor of Aesthetics at the university, dear Di Giacomo, to explain the “Philosophical Research” drew a straight diagonal line on a blackboard on which a little stylized man was placed.

 

“What is he doing?”

And all of us, in chorus: “He is climbing the ridge of a mountain!”

“And who says that?” replied the professor, “Couldn't he be sliding backward on that ridge instead?”

I had at that time what the Greeks called agnizione, acknowledgment, the revelation of the true identity of someone or something. Wittgenstein would have entered my blood by then, and few have been the intense joys in my life like the lecture I gave to over three hundred young Malay language students at the University where I taught for two years in Penang, Malaysia, on the importance of Wittgenstein in the Philosophy of Language.

And who would have only dreamed of such a scene...

 

You may say, but what does this have to do with Photography?

What does editing have to do with someone who saw a hare's head or a duck in a drawing?

But it's precisely here that the difficulty of editing emerges, of putting a series of distinct images in a sequence: because photography is closely linked to language, being itself a (visual) language.

Therefore it carries with it the same problems and shadows that the Austrian philosopher ruthlessly revealed in our everyday language.

 

The problem of putting the images in a sequence is that, unlike the cinema which unites those images, without spaces, in a single dynamic and continuous act, the photographs instead remain interspersed with spaces of emptiness and silence. And it's precisely there that Wittgenstein drastically overturned all his philosophical thought from the first Tractatus logico-philosophicus to Philosophical Research, revolutionizing the entire history of linguistics.

Because if before the vision was clear and radical: the world is in our language, the meaning is in the signifier of the words, and everything we cannot talk about we must be silent, it does not exist.

Thus every single photograph has its own clear meaning and the logic of language imposes an order that cannot be otherwise, otherwise, it falls out of the “meaning” and ceases to exist.

But then he took a step forward, revising everything he had theorized.

Affirming that our understanding of language – and therefore of reality – does not happen so much in words but in the use, we make of it.

Language is a “game” in which culture, emotions, experience, private history take over. And where do all these additions fall?

In the empty spaces, in fact, in the silences between one word and another.

The meaning of a sentence lies precisely in those spaces that we fill with our senses. Because mathematical logic is not possible to apply to language, just as it is impossible for photography.

The little man on the mountain ridge is always going up as well as down.

 

Indeed, it's precisely in its ambiguity that the fascination of languages ​lies, in our ability to endow them with meaning.

Because nothing is taken as definitive and categorical; and this is also the reason for our misunderstandings, on the other hand.

So it is how we make “use” of images that determines their meaning, not the images themselves, just like words in a language.

It's the game we play with it.

This is evident, of course, for images of a more symbolic and allegorical nature.

Like this photograph of my friend Fabio Moscatelli which could be a mirror image of mine.

 

© Fabio Moscatelli

© Stefano Romano

Two-color dots on a dark background.

A flying white butterfly and a little girl with an orange balloon.

It's possible to read them as a sign of hope, a tip of light in flight fleeing from the darkness, whether it is sadness or a generic evil. A visual way to breathe and give hope to those who observe it.

But it could also be the moment before that black magma closes on them, swallows them, and makes them disappear forever. Also because the dark part is predominant, it is saturated, compact – we are able to see that little butterfly and the orange balloon thanks to the thick texture of black and darkness.

But this is not only true for such symbolic images. It can be applied to any type of photography.

Let's take for example some iconic and well-known photographs.

Let's start with the famous “Pietà of the Twentieth Century”, the iconic image of Eugene Smith, taken in the village of Minamata in the early seventies.

© W. Eugene Smith

 

Everyone knows that in it the little girl Tomoko is portrayed as she takes a bath in the arms of her mother, deformed by the toxic discharges of mercury poured into the sea by the Chisso Corporation.

We know it because it was Smith himself who told it, and thanks to his shots he managed to let close the factory.

But let's try to forget his words, let's look at the photograph.

There is the mother who gently washes the body of her daughter.

But it could also be that her mother is letting her die, delicately, drowning her so as not to see the daughter reduced to those conditions, as in compassionate euthanasia.

 

Or this other well-known photo by Steve McCurry, taken in 1996. Father and daughter on Dal Lake in Srinagar, Kashmir.

And what if it were instead that in the lost gaze and in the hands joined as if begging for help, there was an attempt on the part of the child to make us understand that she was kidnapped by the man behind her?

 

© Steve McCurry

We conclude with a photographer that I love intensely, as many of you know by reading my articles: Ferdinando Scianna.

His famous divers in Sant'Elia from 1982.

But we don't see them on the cliff, couldn't they instead, in that position, fall from above, dive from a helicopter into the sea?

Who can deny it?

Does the little man go up or down the ridge of the mountain?

© Ferdinando Scianna

Obviously, these are hypotheses that could be applied to hundreds of photographs. By abstracting from all the information and captions that cloak them.

Take, for example, the cave paintings found in prehistoric caves. Here, those are perfect.

Because we in those stylized men see hunters, bows and arrows, but it is our perception, our Gestalt vision that completes those essential traits that we will never know for sure what they wanted to mean at the time, in the mind of those who engraved them.

And all this talk was about single images, let alone their succession in editing!

 

It's a way of saying how complicated it is to edit in photography, how much competence and aesthetic taste you need. But this is also true in the construction of a short story or novel. We continually disassemble and reassemble our narrative chronologies, and even if we come to an end, that will always be the right story at that moment but that may change after a couple of years.

It will always be one of the many possible readings.

 

But this shouldn't discourage us. On the contrary.

Photography can become an interpretive game but – by playing – it helps us to understand ourselves better.

 

Thanks again to Dario De Dominicis for giving the start to my long reflection.

Italian version