Why
Actually, there is more than one "why" question that might be asked: "Why take these pictures?" and "Why share them on this blog?" and "Why call them "found images" rather than just "photos" like everyone else?"
Actually, the answer to all these questions lies in the answer to the final question: Why do I call these photos "found images" rather than just "photos" like everyone else does? Well, I try to avoid using the words "picture" or "photo" when talking about my images because, while the images ARE digital photos, they are not really pictures "of something" the way we usually think of photographs. (Just what these are photos OF, exactly, will be discussed below, under "What.".) It is enough for now that the "entities" you will see in the images, whether animate or inanimate, man-made or natural, really were "found" or "discovered" or "chanced upon" rather than being sought out as one might set out to take pictures of natural scenes, flora or fauna, or landscapes or city scenes. During my outings I just start off in a random direction looking to get away from noise and "busy-ness" of the city where I live and turn random corners and by chance, really, come across the images such as those you see here.
Where
The majority of the images in the Galleries were found in central Taiwan, where I have made my home for almost 40 years. Images in Galleries 9-12 were found during a visit to Vietnam.
I find the small towns in Taiwan fertile grounds for such images. In many villages in Taiwan, you will still see many traditional houses dating back nearly 100 years. Most of these houses have been abandoned as succeeding generations moved to industrial or urban areas looking for work. In all of these villages, however, you will still find people in their 80s and 90s who continue on in their family dwellings, getting by as best they can by patching and jury-rigging the roofs, walls, and windows using materials they might have at hand among the old, broken flotsam and jetsam they have collected and kept for just this purpose. The resulting patchwork of a living environment provides the abundance of colors, textures, and shapes that you see in my images.
How
The images presented here are not constructed or posed or manipulated in any way. What you see here is exactly what I saw at the moment I took the photos. Before sharing them with you, however, I almost always did crop the images (so that you can see just what it was that drew me to what I was seeing) and for many of them I also tweaked the brightness and/or contrast using the rather rudimentary "Picture Manager" app that came packaged with my Microsoft Office software; no other apps or programs were used.
What
As mentioned above, where I talked about why I call these "found images" instead of photos, I said that the images, while created photographically, are not really pictures OF stuff. But if they are not pictures of STUFF, just what are they pictures of? The answer to this most important question is rather long, and I'm afraid I have to make up a new word right here at the beginning to make my explanation easier to understand..
A New Word
The images that you can view here on this blog can be seen in two ways, and to explain just how this works I would like to suggest a new word:psychocuspilenticular image. Yea, kind of a mouthful. But while it may be difficult so say, it's not that hard to understand if we take it apart and look at it piece by piece.
Let's start at the end .... lenticular ... If we look that up ("google it"), we find that it really is a word, meaning, " Adjective: lenticular. 1.1 shaped like a lentil, especially by being biconvex." We actually do see lenticular images in our daily lives, images that are created using a lenticular lens (a glass lens convex on either side, like a lentil) with the resulting image being able to change as it is viewed from different angles.
My earliest personal experience with lenticular images was a toy I got out of a box of Cracker Jack popcorn snack food when I was a kid. It was a card about one square inch in size and it had a picture of an open eye on it. When you held the card between thumb and forefinger and turned it slightly up or down (viewing it at different angles), the eye would wink at you (since there were actually two images printed on the card, one eye open and one eye closed).
OK. So much for the lenticular part of my new word.
The part just before that last part is cuspi ... a kind of a prefix I made up all by myself just for this purpose, meaning "of the cusp." Now a "cusp"of something is the edge of something just before it becomes something else, or, as Google tells us, "the point of transition between two different states." In our toy example, the cusp would be the point, as you tilt the card, when the image is not entirely of one or the other eye (open or closed), but an image in a kind of "in between" state; just a skosh more in one direction or the other and the eye is open or closed. So, cuspilenticular means right there on the edge between being seen as one thing or the other thing.
Finally, we have psycho, meaning, of course, "of the mind." Now, I created this word, psychocuspilenticuar, to describe, in contrast with physically being on the edge between A and B, being in a position mentally to go, with just the slightest nudge, from seeing one thing to seeing another.
One thing, the A thing, that my images contain, is an image of an entity or group of entities that we can identify as being part of our everyday lives.
The other thing, the B thing, is what is called in certain circles, "significant form."
Significant Form
This is NOT a word I made up, but one which was coined by the art critic Clive Bell in his 1913 book, Art. Even though this book was written more than one hundred years ago, the concept around which the book's discussion of art revolves, "significant form," is still discussed in academic circles (art, aesthetics, philosophy) today.
Bell starts his discussion by saying that "the starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion," and continues to tell us that, speaking from his own experience, there are certain works of art (though not all) which move him profoundly, works that "transport (him) from the world of man's activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation" where he is "shut off from human interests," where "anticipations and memories are arrested" and where he is "lifted above the stream of life" to "superb peaks of aesthetic exaltation" to a place of ecstasy, of "thrilling raptures," to a place "with an intense and peculiar significance of its own ...unrelated to the significance of life."
But if not all works of art affect him in this way, what is special about the ones that do? Bell's aesthetic emotion, he tells us, is provoked not by the "beauty" of a work of art - its images, its symbols, or the story it tells; nor is his aesthetic emotion prompted by the artist's skill at creating the work. What provokes this ecstatic response in Bell is what he calls the work's "significant form" - the combining by the artist of lines and colors "according to certain unknown and mysterious laws" in a particular way that "stirs our aesthetic emotions."
And a work of art that moves Bell so profoundly does so because it is the "business of the artist so to combine and arrange them that they shall move us."
With regard to the artist's own aesthetic experience (which inspires the art work), I quote Bell at length:
Are we to suppose, then, that the artist feels, or sometimes feels, for material beauty what we feel for a work of art? Can it be that sometimes for the artist material beauty is somehow significant--that is, capable of provoking aesthetic emotion? And if the form that provokes aesthetic emotion be form that expresses something, can it be that material beauty is to him expressive?
Does he feel something behind it as we imagine that we feel something behind the forms of a work of art? Are we to suppose that the emotion which the artist expresses is an aesthetic emotion felt for something the significance of which commonly escapes our coarser sensibilities?
Occasionally when an artist--a real artist--looks at objects (the contents of a room, for instance) he perceives them as pure forms in certain relations to each other, and feels emotion for them as such. These are his moments of inspiration: follows the desire to express what has been felt. The emotion that the artist felt in his moment of inspiration he did not feel for objects seen as means, but for objects seen as pure forms--that is, as ends in themselves.
He did not feel emotion for a chair as a means to physical well-being, nor as an object associated with the intimate life of a family, nor as the place where someone sat saying things unforgettable, nor yet as a thing bound to the lives of hundreds of men and women, dead or alive, by a hundred subtle ties; doubtless an artist does often feel emotions such as these for the things that he sees, but in the moment of aesthetic vision he sees objects, not as means shrouded in associations, but as pure forms. It is for, or at any rate through, pure form that he feels his inspired emotion.
Bell also tells us that it is not just artists who occasionally experience these "aesthetic moments," for "all of us, I imagine, do, from time to time, get a vision of material objects as pure forms. We see things as ends in themselves, that is to say; and at such moments it seems possible, and even probable, that we see them with the eye of an artist." He continues
Who has not, once at least in his life, had a sudden vision of landscape as pure form? For once, instead of seeing it as fields and cottages, he has felt it as lines and colours. In that moment has he not won from material beauty a thrill indistinguishable from that which art gives? And, if this be so, is it not clear that he has won from material beauty the thrill that, generally, art alone can give, because he has contrived to see it as a pure formal combination of lines and colours?
May we go on to say that, having seen it as pure form, having freed it from all casual and adventitious interest, from all that it may have acquired from its commerce with human beings, from all its significance as a means, he has felt its significance as an end in itself? What is the significance of anything as an end in itself?
What is that which is left when we have stripped a thing of all its associations, of all its significance as a means? What is left to provoke our emotion? What but that which philosophers used to call "the thing in itself" and now call "ultimate reality"?
This is what Bell calls his Metaphysical Hypothesis for how the artist is inspired by the pure form - the significant form - he sees in the physical environment around him, how he endeavors to share his aesthetic emotion with others through his art, and how his art provokes an aesthetic emotion in those who view it.
Finally, Bell says that through the viewing of the best art - the art in which significant form is observable to the sensitive viewer - we see the object or objects rendered there and
instead of recognising its accidental and conditioned importance, we become aware of its essential reality, of the God in everything, of the universal in the particular, of the all-pervading rhythm. Call it by what name you will, the thing that I am talking about is that which lies behind the appearance of all things--that which gives to all things their individual significance, the thing in itself, the ultimate reality.
Now this metaphysical hypothesis of an essential reality underlying all we perceive through our senses has a very long history in western philosophy. However, I think that this very difficult hypothesis is unnecessarily complicated.
I believe that when we, be it in our surroundings or in a work of art, see things as significant form rather than as things we are, indeed, as Bell relates, transported "from the world of man's activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation" where suddenly all is still and all thought stops - where we recognize none of the observed entities as having any relation to us, where what we are seeing prompts no recollection of past events or desires for an imagined future, where we are find ourselves in a place of "ecstasy and thrilling raptures," as Bell put it.
The simple (though not necessarily easy) reason for this is that to the extent that we see material objects NOT as significant (personally meaningful) entities but as pure form, as significant form, to that extent they are not truly objects that we observe and, to an equal extent, WE are not truly subjects observing them. That is, when we enter the rarefied atmosphere of pure form, we are no longer our Selves. And to the extent that we are no longer our Selves, to that extent are we Spirit; we do not become "aware of essential reality, of the God in everything, of the universal in the particular, of the all-pervading rhythm," but, rather, that at that moment when our objects become pure form, we stop being subject and become pure Spirit, sharing in that which pervades all things.
While some who are sensitive to significant form become artists, my personal aesthetic sensitivity goes hand-in-glove with my spiritual sensitivity, which has led me to write Life Stills: A Spiritual Calculus, which you can read online at this link.
To read my recommendations on how best to view the images on this site, please read the other article on psychocuspilenticuarity!
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