Comments on: Cook Inlet panorama : pictures and numbers

By: doug

doug — Thu, 08 May 2008 10:03:10 +0000

Puitrar - thanks very much for the comment. “ask for the insight to see it differently” - if I have a job description I guess I’m in the “see it differently” business.

How did you arrive at my blog ?

Right at the moment I’m also getting ready for the Alaska project (packing brushes, etc etc.) but had a really interesting conversation over the weekend with someone who is writing a book about patterns. Given that he had worked with Keith Critchlow and met Buckminster Fuller I’m very excited to see how that develops. I’ll also report back on the challenge to draw in parallel .. More later - please keep in touch.

By: Piutrar

Piutrar — Thu, 08 May 2008 09:50:23 +0000

I love the vibrations of numbers and hence the textures they are, the semiotics can also be defined in terms of numbers as all energy vibrates and communicates with us.
Sinister only becomes sinister in your mind caused by a negative or positive take on the the vibration it makes for you. I’m a lefty too.
You can wire your mind to draw in parallel. You are living in a linear world where you have given yourself the limitation to limit yourself to those three dimensions. Take a quantum step and ask for the insight to see it differently.
Newton, Da Vinci, Einstein, Mozart, Beethoven, Eddison, Picasso all did…

By: doug

doug — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 09:25:16 +0000

I love the way you put religion and semiotics together to argue it out while the rest of us don’t have to listen. However, as a lefty I would like to take issue with your pejorative use of the word sinister. Ask Jimi and Leonardo (not diCaprio).

By: steve

steve — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 09:06:46 +0000

Maybe we ignore textures so much because we are pattern-seeking animals (hence the love affair with ’seeming’). We constantly try to make sense of the chaos of information around us. This makes us see faces in fires and animals in clouds and, at the sinister end of the spectrum, leads to religion and semiotics.

Our brains are hard-wired to extract meaning from confluences of lines & colours. We may only see surface when our normal processing is disrupted or yields insufficient data (eg, the image is too abstract) and the mind seeks additional information. Perhaps also when our normal information-gathering routines are disrupted, such as your vertical panoramas.

By: doug

doug — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 08:33:06 +0000

Surfaces and textures - that’s an interestingly counter intuitive place to start talking about photography.

Seems to me that photography and painting often share the same unrequited love affair with ’seeming’ which is a form of denial about the painted or photographic surface. I’d be really interested to be kept in touch with this work you are doing.

For me the starting point is lenses rather than the photographic emulsion. Lenses go back to Vermeer and beyond and have presented strong magnetic fields that have sometimes given dodgy readings on the painters own compass.

Anyway - I’ll report back on progress in Anchorage in the blog.

By: James Elkins

James Elkins — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 22:10:14 +0000

Hi,

Thanks for that. I’m working now on a companion book, “What Photography Is.” Of course it’s nothing about oil, but it is about textures, because photographs also have those. And photographs have surfaces, although most people ignore them…