Monkeying around with intentionality

An interesting question from Geoff Powell.

Summarising a larger two way email conversation, he asks whether this picture (Today 080831) "was meant to be interrelated by the viewer" and seen as The Great Monkey God? Gayle Reynolds, in an entirely separate observation, made the same specific "interrelation", referring to it as a monkey deity.

The making of that image went something like this.

1. My eye is caught by the pink stone lurking inside the plastic centre hole of a café brolly support.
2. My attention is held by the contrast with the bluish off white of the plastic.
3. I look closer.
4. I am further attracted by the surface stressing lines ("crazing" in Gayle's words) around the hole and support moulding.
5. The combination of colour and texture decides me to stop idly looking and positively explore the image possibilities.
6. I get down on hands and knees (to the usual curiosity of other customers and amused resignation of my ever patient partner) and examine the object from all sides, watching what happens as clouds scud across the sun, experimenting with different degrees of reflected light into the hole and onto that pink stone, doing that framing thing that we photographers and cinematographers do with our hands.
7. I finally decide what I want, so bring the camera up and look through it.
8. I've already decided how the dark and light masses will be related and framed so I adjust the position, height, attitude and angle of the camera to capture that.
9. I get the viewfinder frame aligned exactly right. All the abstract elements fall into place ... and suddenly a baboon is looking back at me through the lens.
10. I squeeze the shutter release at exactly the same moment that delight at this gift floods though me.

So ... here is why the question is so interesting to me.

Where does intentionality begin?

At the start of this process, I clearly did not have any intention of the viewer seeing a monkey god – because I didn't know it was there. There was no intention of interrelation in the creation of the image, then: only chance or, perhaps, at the very most, subconscious recognition.

After the event, having seen a baboon (not a monkey deity) after everything is already decided, I am choosing which one out of the day's several hundred images to post as my Today picture. The baboon who made itself known just as I squeezed the shutter release almost certainly figures in this choice – even more so than if I had planned it in deliberately – so I suppose the assumption that others will also see it probably, at some level, influences my choice. Is that intentionality?

I'd be interested to know how it looks from outside. What is the answer to Geoff's question? Was the monkey deity "meant to be interrelated by the viewer"? How does my head work?

Answers on a postcard, please...

Fairies, intentional and otherwise

I've muttered about intentionality before, but here it is again. In opening a recent Photo.Net thread, Fred Goldsmith asked about "our consciousness of taking photos". I replied that both conscious intent and instinctive response were inevitable components in the taking of any photograph, however planned or unexpected. While I still think that, I'm realising as I ponder over it that perhaps things are less simple.

This morning I've been struggling to deal with an unprecedented response to a Today picture, yesterday's Today 090613. Thinking about the various comments and questions has made me think about how the Today pictures happen, and what they represent. My header blurb on the archive says "it's not photography, as such: it's a series of fragmentary moments which stuck to me", but I've only just started to think seriously about what that glib throwaway description means.

Today photographs are, very explicitly, not photographs that I set out to take. They are snapshots: pictures which just happened to present themselves to me. I haven't ever thought it through in those words, before, but that's the truth of it. Yesterday's Today 090613 is a particularly clear example of this, and its genesis is illustrative.

We, my partner and I, were in town together (I never, ever, go with conscious intent to take photographs in company; its an inherently antisocial activity; I do it alone.) I had only a small pocket digital compact with me (a Today machine; for a deliberate photography outing it would be an SLR). We were on a mission to buy the new vacuum cleaner which, at last, after several years of hesitation, she had finally agreed that we needed (I certainly would not combine deliberate intent to photograph with an afternoon of cost and feature comparisons destined to culminate in the carrying home of a large box).

As we proceeded up the high street in a northerly direction, between the T J Hughes and Argos stores, we passed The Shop Formerly Known As Weirdy Nook, now refurbished and reopened as Bewitched. This is a shop which combines a variety of Indian prints and other neohippy fashions with a range of merchandise from inexpensive jewellery to household ornaments – most of it pure tat, but with the occasional pearl hiding amongst it. So, we stopped to see what the refurbishment and reopening had wrought.

Inside were, amongst other things, a range of small figurines depicting winged fairies. These were not the usual childlike fairies, nor the Ramboesque "kick ass" fairies of Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl stories, but a new (to me, at any rate) variety: post pubescent fairies, all female, in preRaphaelite mood and various states of undress. It immediately struck me that these were close cousins of the fantasy women on old SF paper back covers such as Podkayne of Mars. A vague idea (conscious intentionality enters the picture here) drifted into my head of extending the intermittent "lurid covers" discussion between Dr C, JSBlog, Unreal Nature, and myself. So, the interior being small, crowded, and lit to evoke a grotto, I wandered outside to see if there was an example in the window.

I found my example (that's it, on the left) – a mild and decorous one, compared to those inside, but it illustrates the point.

Because I was photographing through glass, I had to jiggle about a bit to get a view which both made my point and simultaneously avoided reflections. In the process, I was confronted with the image which became Today 090613 and, without any conscious intent of which I am aware, my shutter finger twitched.

Does the conscious intent to record the photograph shown here transfer to the other one which appeared as Today 090613? Or Not? Does it invalidate or support my assertion that conscious intent always plays some part in the making of a photograph? I'm not, immediately, sure. I wonder what Fred Goldsmith would say.

Tell me where is a photo bred?

Tell me where is fancy bred,
Or in the heart or in the head?
How begot, how nourished?

Reply, reply.^*

Unreal Nature, introducing a larger and thought provoking piece on the definition (or otherwise) of action, asks where in the chain of intentionality a photograph is made. I'm going to blatantly chicken out on the larger question (I couldn't possibly do more than frill around the edges of Ms Heywood's own thorough treatment) and pick, instead, on that smaller part.

My first reaction was that, for me though not for everyone, the photograph is made at the moment when I previsualise ... whether I actually release the shutter or not. But, while true, that's not the whole truth.

For a start, I vary. Sometimes I do need to see the print ... and while I don't need to see the photograph through the viewfinder, I do very much want to.

More than that, though, I only learned previsualisation through seeing prints and peering though viewfinders. The arrival of a Brownie's bright prism finders changed the way I see the world; and so did the arrival of the resulting prints. Without them, years of them, there would be no previsualised moment to now identify as the genesis of the photograph. For me, at least, Lange is right: the camera taught me to see without a camera.

By the time I was sixteen, I no longer needed the print; but I still revelled in the viewfinder ... and it was still the print which I was previsualising. And, to be honest, I do (deep down) feel my previsualisation to be provisional, fragile and fugitive until I hear the click of the shutter...

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* William Shakespeare, The comical history of the merchant of Venice, Act III, Sc.2

More monkeying around

I'm delighted by Ray Girvan's response to my "Monkeying around with intentionality" ... I, too, see seething demons in burled wood grain (and, for that matter, more solitary ones in ordinary pine knots), though I confess that the evil mice in a plughole escape me.

Geoff Powell, whose question sparked my post (and who, in a comment, points out other faces), adds by email that he sees (to my further delight) the face of an angry bull even in a minimal line across sand.

And, for the hat trick, Julie Heyward pokes gentle fun at me in her Unreal Nature post, "Swatch from an infinite fabric". I plead guilty to her charge of betraying Magic Circle conventions by revealing the steps in a trick (perhaps I should ask for another similar offence to be taken into consideration). As I commented recently, I think too much. I cede her point that when asked to explain ourselves we almost always lie – though I must add that my enjoyment of Red Line and Sky Stones (and many others of her work) are analysis free and uncorruptedly visceral.

Like Julie Heyward, and like me in situ as the picture happened, Gayle Reynolds (by email again) didn't immediately see the monkey or baboon: "When I first saw that photo I was drawn in by the crazing and contrast of colors. It was only as I sat back and looked at the entire picture that the "monkey deity" made his (it does look male to me) appearance." And Anatol Nedelko (new comment left as I am writing this) sees something else again – a "Brechtian machine slaughterer", which sounds like a relative of Ray's evil mice ... but I see that Ray has, also as I write this, responded with his own and very different comparison – I think I'd better finish up and post before I get trapped in an endless loop!

A Barthesian shoe-in

I am a devout disciple of Barthes' tenet that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author”. Not that I am always, necessarily, uninterested in either the author or her/his intent; but neither can have any connection with the text being read. Or with the image being viewed.

Faced with those who are not so convinced, however, I am often at a loss to find a demonstration of the principle which doesn't immediately skitter away off their disagreement like water off a duck's back. I don't kid myself that this is about to change, but I do have a nice graphic reminder that I should practice what I preach and not expect my own intentionality to be any sort of exception to the Barthesian rule.

At the time of writing, I have had 143 responses to the Today 100602 image ... every one of which focusses on the shoes. Clearly, most viewers "read" the image as one in which footwear dominates. The semisillhouetted figure makes no appearance whatsoever. in any of these responses.

I (author) wouldn't actually go so far as to admit that I had an intention when I clicked the shutter button; but my instinctive response was to the figure, contextualised by the objects (that they are shoes hardly occurred to me at the time) surrounding him.

Insofar as I can reconstruct it, my own "reading" of the image involves:

1. The (apparently) thoughtful pose.
2. The (apparent) incongruity of an (apparently) unaccompanied male figure (apparently) contemplating with such (apparent) attention what is (as I understand it) commercially intended to be a feminine space.
3. The way the visual structure of that space (apparently) orients to emphasise his presence at its hollow centre.
4. The illusion that his left foot rests supported by a displayed object.

There is nothing "correct" about my reading. It is of no greater value (arguably, on democratic grounds, less) than that of my 144 (another has come in since I started typing this) correspondents. In fact, since I already had my reading whereas the other 144 come as gifts, I place little value on mine while the others delight me. The Barthesian lesson, however, is simple: my view of what I saw is utterly irrelevant to anyone else's reading of the result..

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Note: "Shoe-in" (before a blizzard of correspondents write in to correct me) is here a deliberately punning use of what is, as I learned recently from Ray Girvan at JSBlog, called an "eggcorn".

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• Roland Barthes, "The death of the author". Originally Aspen, 5-6, 1967. Anthologised in Image, music, text, 1977, London: Fontana, 0006348807 (pbk) and subsequently. Web copy available at the Athenaeum library of philosophy (accessed 2010/06/09)