Proliferation of Images
“Optics, developing in us through study, teach us to see” – Paul Cezanne, French Post-Impressionist Painter, (1839–1906)
[Preface: The city is, if you will, a colossal light processing optical mechanism, that, through a myriad apertures, processes millions of images, at all times of the day, every day. In fact, the city is a chimeric camera and a projector simultaneously, capturing and casting all sorts of images on a plethora of surfaces that we simply ignore in the process of chasing our own tails that we call living. These ubiquitous images sprout randomly like weeds, planted by the light across the soil of a million angular, plane and curved surfaces behind the apertures. I call them Optical Weeds – and, they are no less delectable aesthetically, than our conjurations, as art.]
Extract from my Journal: August 15, 2011 – I and my boys, nine and seven, wandered early morning around the train-tracks by our house, a veritable laboratory for evolving plants on either side, interspersed by materials in decay. I could discern at least three distinct types of amaranth growing there. One was a deep purple with wide triangular leaves, one was green, with leaves identical to the purple one, but the one with narrow leaves and thicker stems spread closer to the ground like crabgrass, instead of a vertical form, its aroma was the giveaway. I had wondered why this form – a wide ranging weed that covers much of Asia as well as the west. The latter version was an adaptation to the frost line. The weed is so hardy that it’s seed, a tiny black pip, smaller than a poppy seed, would sprout in the dirt between your fingernail and finger if you stayed still long enough. It is a feral, fecund and an invincible weed. So much so that it was recommended by the US Marine Corps Survival Manual as an alternative source of nutrition in the dense jungles of Vietnam. And today, it’s available in almost all grocery stores for around $2.99/lb. Well, not long after we had our fun, I saw their voila-aha moment, correlating: the weed study > to the farm-stand > to feeding sequence – “We are having weeds for lunch!” Postscript: Laughter.
Weeds. What correlation can they possibly have with my boys, photography no less? Well, they grow fast, in the same manner, the prior to proliferate, the latter with ideas and questions. Before we dig further, let’s understand the 16th century English noun “Correlation” in this old logic: – Pearson correlation coefficient: a value between –1 and +1 that represents the relationship between two variables. Other synonyms: Parallelism, equivalence or correspondence. This equivalence of my boys and weeds to images is an accidental solecism. However, the essence of the word was best captured by the master of horror, H. P. Lovecraft: ‘The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents –’ Of course, it may not apply to our aesthetic pursuits, but, beauty’s brief glow obscured the horror of the ephemeral universe, and, what I call a direct commentary on our lives. For the curious, there are great insights in Erna Fiorentini’s essay on Aesthetic epistemology.
The faculty and the ability to correlate distinct and variable ideas or concepts, material and immaterial doesn’t have to be the sole domain of thinkers and scientists, in deriving paradigm shifts. This faculty must to be inculcated and nurtured by serious aesthetes, and invariably photographers, in the pursuit of yet unknown aesthetic quarries. Correlating ideas, information or concepts to images feral or abstracted, conscious and subconscious, represents a quantum search for untapped and unknown aesthetic variances with critical information, regardless of their salubrious or sinister revelations.
Present day: November 1, 2023 – After stumbling across my old journal entry, a strange similitude abruptly sprouted in me. Feral weeds? Yes! But Feral images? Why not? I am not entirely privy to the mysterious process of correlating, whether it’s simply neural or a deep psycho-scientific morphology. Nevertheless, to add to our photographic tools, we must study it for a better understanding of our lighted world. Images sprout like weeds all over the place. How many times do we see the pesky dandelions in spring, and yet, we do not correlate it to a fancy entree of a $45 salad at a two-star Michelin rated French restaurant. Similarly, optical weeds are images that were not contrived by a photographer’s sleight of hand, but, sprout by the sleight and flight of light throughout the day, and are no less charged with that infinite spectrum of beauty.
It’s a deliberate practice. In my walks around the city, I try to collect such images in various configurations and degrees of resolutions, before they move on, abruptly expire or slowly vanish with that parabolic flight of the light. These images, sketched by light through various forms of apertures on a variety of surfaces form a strobic-diorama on our narrow retinal focus of about 15 degrees, while we chase life at the rate of 24 frames a second, unaware of them. What if they were printed and exhibited like our contrivances? I am certain that they would be far more fascinating and alluring, and there would ensue a paroxysmal fawning over them by the critics, like their salivation over the fine art of a $45 dandelion salad.
It’s rather astonishing at how, despite quantum progress in technologies shaping our societies, we remain fundamentally and psychologically primitive, even with the addition of new challenges emanating from technologies, besides our preexisting ones. What would Aristotle, Pythagoras or Newton think or feel in our contemporary reflective and translucent environments? We forget that right up until the invention of sheet glass, buildings were made of stone with wooden windows under the grates. There were no expansive glass facades to refract, fragment, project or reflect images to distract the walking public into thought, ideas or inducements. Folks like Aristotle didn’t have to contend with distractions, therefore, concentrated on the content within.
I am sure if he had been subjected to such rapid contemporary dioramas, his fertile mind wouldn’t have resisted in conjuring up theories that would be analyzed and contended over at the Sorbonne, Johns Hopkins or at Oxford. But unfortunately, in the 21st century, despite all our technologies, most of us walk like Aristotle (not that we are), as if walking by walls of stone, not in Platonic thought, but muddling befuddled through existence with our eyes ricocheting up-down in distraction for a quick escape, like a cat that pursues a ball of string like an unleashed spring as if it’s alive, or chase it’s own tail away.
The million mirrors magic is actually million mirrors messaging our condition to us, every second of the day – as fragmented, distracted, divided, spastic and convulsive. Whereas stone structures reflected nothing, and I hazard to assert, induced one’s inner stability, concentration, and fundamental reliance on self without gadget crutches. Is there an epistemologist who is the product of our contemporary translucent environment, and is he or she addressing the nebulous issue of ethics oozing from rapidly multiplying imaging technologies? I think it stems from this fact that in our terrible density of distractions, we become incapable of looking, let alone seeing or observing. Direct life experiences have been obfuscated by statistical data and algorithmic constructs. We live inside those data grids and quick escape circuits, therefore we behave like AI-bots that are leashed to data than our senses. I have managed to stay unaffected by such desensitizing data-metric incarceration that serve donuts to diabetics.
The correlation instinct manifests because of my predisposition towards all sorts of visual variances. I swing to my peripheral cues quite often, whether it be macro vistas composed and not composed, or the micro: excruciating detail on a petri dish. For a photographer to elevate his craft, there has to be this absorption and comprehension of the psycho-retinal-neural process that connects and transmutes our psychological experiences to information that falls on that very narrow angle of retinal induction, and therefore, correspondence made by our neural calculus. In other words: fast growing weeds > present, fast growing boys and feral urban images > the neural calculus derives correlation in all experiences. It’s in how we look, retain, and retrieve to correlate.
Photographic lexicon: There three are entirely distinct concepts that we misuse. A. To Look is merely a physical act, it’s just physics, moving your line of sight to the subject. B. To See is to register the subject in focus, and C. to Observe is to study in detail. Therefore, to look: move line of sight to see a human being coming. To See: Oh! It’s Jean! To Observe: Jean is wearing gray slacks and a black sweater, he looks happy like a groom! It’s Look > See > Observe >retrieve/Correlate. We have a tendency to just look, not generally see or observe, let alone correlate (unless it serves an objective purpose in science) – and that’s exactly why we don’t see these random images that are everywhere in plain sight. I often marvel at the binary dichotomy of direct and indirect images, irrespective of their origin, they demand far more visual acuity on our part than the images we create in the name of art.
Images sprout in conditions dictated by apertures, textures, surfaces, angles and conditions of light. Not all perspectives have been cataloged, no taxonomy exists. However, there are types of optical weeds we will come across that light orchestrates every minute of every day: A. Recurring images, B. Vanishing images, C. Static images, D. Transient images, E. Cyclical images, F. Created incandescent or LED images, F. Moving images, G. Reflective composite images, H. Rapidly rotating images, I. Distorted images and others not categorized. It’s the complex optical physics of naturally occurring images, nevertheless, replete with quantum probabilities and possibilities in yielding aesthetic. All of such optical weeds do indeed temporarily narrate our every condition, in an astounding variety.
Every image is the progeny of The Angle of Incidence, referred to as the Illumination Angle in geometric optics under physics. It is simply the angle between the ray (can be optical, which is light, acoustic, microwave or an x-ray) and the imaginary line at 90 degrees on a surface. The bounce on that surface of any such a ray is the Critical Angle – light within light, as opposed to the angle of reflection or refraction, sub-surface, like under water or glass. Those who are curious for insights must look into the optical physics of A. Illumination Angle, B. Phase Angle, C. Plane of Incidence, D. Reflection and Refraction Physics, E. Scattering Vector (mainly surfaces), and F. TIR: Total Internal Reflection. Well, please pardon me, for putting you to sleep, which was never my intention – this is only to upend our pretension or presumption as photographers, because, optical physics is that primordial ooze where images have been coming to life long before we found a way to observe, capture and process them.
A photograph is different from an image in this context, one is farmed, the other sprouts wild in the right conditions. Photography is either a chemical or a digital alchemy to procure an image that we compose and capture for any number of purposes, with the common mechanism of controlling the light through an aperture on to to a surface or an algorithm. While photography is a deliberate activity, images can be random, everywhere and anywhere. I would like to propose that some optical weeds are organically supreme because of their intrinsic beauty. Healthy organic weeds for health, just like great wild images as nutrition for our senses. The accidental & incidental aesthetic is a rush, I am thrilled at finding inexplicable images, just like finding a wild mango tree or wild berries, better than their GMO counterparts.
Examples of findings: Photo No.4: An ethereal drama of light unfolded before me. I had stared at an image that I had stumbled onto, looking at it through the porthole, through my digital camera lens on my screen. The drama lasted 30 plus minutes, I had timed my observation every 30 seconds. A subtle change started to manifest on both sides of the image, like slowly drawing a curtain on an act where the spot light (end of the source of the light) slowly moved to the right. The effect: the left side of the image got progressively darker and richer as if depth of field was increased, while the right side got misty first, milky later and faded out. This played out for over half an hour till the acute-oblique angle of the light wiped out the porthole show. I was fortunate to have had the presence of mind to capture some images at the optimal angle of incidence, under the moving light.
Photo No. 13: Another is the water reflection – as I watch a very still body of water with mirror image of a bright building, it went imperceptibly gray, few minutes hence back to color, then a slight breeze rendered the reflection into a painting by Van Gogh. Photo No. 5: few images as reflections on stained brown paper through a window pane that appear as abstract paintings. Photo No. 10: After rain, every puddle became a shard of a mirror on the ground. Puddles yield sharp abrupt images on the rough ground or asphalt, at usually 120 degrees angles of incidence. Which means that when we look at a puddle, it’s around a 60 degree angle, and the image reflected in exactly 60 degrees on the other side. It’s so embarrassingly common place, yet astonishing, if, that is if, you can grasp such mundane profundity.
Did I mention Primordial ooze? The effect of that serendipitous alchemy is life – I venture: what water is to life, so is light to images. In our pursuit of progress, it seems, we have encased ourselves within data-AI scaffolds that is drawing us away from our fundamentally mysterious and protean faculty of being aware of organic aesthetic – a faculty that makes us very human, superior to other organisms. Nevertheless, the induction and reflection within is the learning instinct in us, and ultimately, it is not what’s out there, it’s what is in us that makes us absorbent and aware – that to see and observe is not only a study, but more so, creating.
Copyrighted by Raju Peddada, November 1, 2023 / All Rights Reserved on all text and images.
Note: 2. Title-top image: roof of a house reflection on 2CM deep water, shot at a very shallow angle, almost 160 degrees
- Image found through a small porthole in the Chicago harbor, over exposed for detail
Photographs analysis:
All photographs are what I refer to ‘Optical Weeds,’ because, they exist without our awareness or knowledge, and would disappear in time. It’s just a matter of becoming aware of them, composing and photographing them, that yield intriguing aesthetic.
- Rue de Rivoli, and 16. Montmartre, Paris: defaced posters offered great distress aesthetic. I composed and framed many of them.
- Photos 2, 8, 10, 13, and 19 where shot at a very shallow angle to get images that were floating on no more than 2cm of water.
- Photos 3, 5, 7 and 17, were reflections of off windows backed with clocking paper or paint.
- Photos 6, and 18 were of kinetic reflections that were behind plates of glass.
- Photo 11 is through heavy rain from a car window.
- Photo 12 I accidentally caught off of a glass table top
- Photo 14 was a club parking lot resulting from a camera shake – it was an experiment in filtration.
- Photo 15 was window that I was passing and the display was that like a stage.
