Photography Essays Monstrous Imagery

Photography Essays Monstrous ImageryChasing the Dragon Capturing the Signifi raisece of the MonstrousChapter hotshot What is a freak? There atomic get 18 perhaps deuce patient ofs of whale the nut that sprung from our own hands and changed into some(prenominal)thing irrepressible, and the monster that is experienced as extraterrestrial being, preternatural, in general an unfathomable creature, and sc be because of its mystery. It is impossible to decide which is more than(prenominal) frightening, since both arouse an contrary, something resistant to hu cosmos magnate, and while the graduation exercise mental draws attention to man builds mortal lays and potential for self-destruction, the second highlights the end of homo ignorance and insignificance in relation to external forces. Both kinds of monster, however, sh atomic consequence 18 an cleverness to induce preposterous idolatry, and both keep up a solid foundation in mythology, since man has ever so fe atomic number 18d what he could not explain and has translated his fears into metaphorical shapes of shocking creatures since cartridge holder began. Both man-made and alien monsters, too, sh be a self-referential semiotic expression in literature, art, psychology and mythology. In the history of the human subconscious, fears stupefy al centerings preceded monsters.Monsters are re investative. They are representative of altogether the things we are unable to control, and the uncontrollable fear that is generated by these things. They are representative, thence, on more than unmatchable level, as they are simultaneously our fear and the endeavor of our fear. All (bad) monsters are synonymous with fear our fearand as such the fiend we perceive in eve external beasts exchangeable aliens, dragons, sea monsters and circus freaks, is something generated by us, the beholder. They are also representative of anything threatening, as Robert Thomas definition in The conceit of F ear, explains not scarcely what is samely to threaten feeling, injure our bodies, cause carnal pain, which is forgathern as dangerous or threatening.The monster retains an al or so unique agent to represent, subjectively, something different to whoever beholds it. But its representative ability operates on a habitual level too in Judith Halberstams book Skin Shows (1995) she bes to kick up that the semiology of a monsters meaning should maintain a certain fluidity, as its interpretation is so unstable, and contingent upon social, political and spectral climates. Halberstam expounds on the role of literary and cinematic texts in channelling our fear of monsters, since the employment of fear in a literary text (as opposed to a cinematic text) emanates from a vertiginous excess of meaning While unrivaled might expect to find that cinema multiplies the possibilities for monstrosity, the nature of the visual al sorts, in fact, operates a kind of self censorship, whereby o ur visual register reaches a limit of visibility surprisingly fast. It is our imaginations that make the invisible nature of monsters, the very content of their unknown-ness, so enduringly frightening. As Paul Yoder eloquently expresses it,What we cannot run across frightens us roughly. Reason competes with imagination to establish boundaries around the external stimuli and, consequently, cl primeval establishes a means of remaining separated from that which harms us. But reason will eventually prove ineffective without a frame of reference grounded in a context of physical reallyity to establish a solidified limit surrounded by the real and the unreal, the natural and the supernatural. Without this definitive context, reason is unable to grass the dissolution mingled with twain modes of perception, so as an audience or a reader, we are forced to hesitate, resulting in a moment of suspense, the first stage in externalizing the feeling and producing an externally construc ted emotion of fear.The monster walks the trend between life and death, and the most terrifying monsters transform some opposites into fearful beings too, removing their essence, or anything they cherished. Medusa, for example, had no natural animation herself, just wriggling snakes that performed a fanciful impersonation of the natural and winsome effects of wind through hair. In some ways she epitomises grotesqueness, as her fearful bureau was an extension of her fearful select her deathly appeaseness. Medusa, of course, used petrification to turn others to stone, and inadvertently brought most her own end through the reflection of her enemys shield. therefrom Medusa is a warning to all monsters eventually, the supernatural force of the dementedly stillness will be turned onto itself by the superior power of animated defences of the natural.My aim in this study is to juxtapose the metaphorical monsters that have permeated our language and mythologies with the visual interpretations of the senseless, as it has been translated into photography and the assumptions of pop culture. The ultimate design in this study is to arrive at some definition of monster based on a societal interpretation of the outsider and hear how fear of the Other is internalized. It is the manner that we, as a society, perceive our Other, which will ultimately control the paths our visual authoritys of monsters take, as mythical archetypes inside the horrors of our minds.Chapter Two Creating and defining the false the codes of photographyMonsters have long been obeisant to a certain visual code, albeit a very difficult one to make. sometimes they are brightly coloured, sometimes scaled up or down, humanoid, hairy, toothy, slimey, legless, millipedal, whatever they run into like, they look exaggerated, surprising, startling, unexpected. If we read astir(predicate) them, the mental go steady is a perplexingly blurry one if we see them in horror movies, their most fri ghtening moment is forever just before they appear. Monsters vary so wildly in their representation because the visual properties of the monster are actually sequential to its fear-producing power. The monster can look like anything, the more surprising the breach a chair a beachball the Prime Minister because the fear is our fear, and the fear created the monster it was there first, deep inside us. The visual arrangement of the monster is merely a trigger to that primal fear.It seems to me that the writer with the most monstrous pen is Herman Melville, and the photographer with the most monstrous midriff is Ansel Adams. Both logical argument light and dark incessantly for Melville with his extraordinary colour whale, pallor is something to be afraid or suspicious of, perhaps even suggesting the diabolical. Whiteness is both, the most meaningful symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian deity, and the intensify agent in things the most appalling to man kind. In a world controlled by Christian orthodoxy, the whiteness of purity, the shroud, and death, lead to life everlasting. On the sea, however, white represents a loss of hope, for it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation.A photograph remains an abstraction, even in its most primitive state as a secern of document or record and Adamss skill lies in his ability to conceal his role as contriver, abstracter, imaginist, within the rhetorical apparatus of scientifically objective reality. He shuttles, perpetually, between the reality of texture and the affectation of emphasised texture his is a statement most the difference between something living and something being noticed, which pickly accounts for his famous privileging of downhearted and white. When unnecessary distractions arise from ranges of colour are removed, the impact of an depict can be multiplied.In efforts to define- or p erhaps contain it, the practice of photography has been laboriously distinguished from other visual forms and practices, in particular photo and film. Adams is fire because he refuses the forces of classification, not placid enough for photography, too theatrical and contrived for regular representational convention. In the article Looking at Photographs, Victor Burgin writesThe signifying system of photography, like that of mere painting, at once depicted a scene and the gaze of the spectator, an object and a viewing subject. Whatever the object depicted, the manner of its depiction accords with laws of geometric projection which imply a unique superman of view. It is the position of channelize-of-view, busy in fact by the camera, which is bestowed upon the spectator.Even more emphatically than painting, photography maps an animated, infinitely subjective and ever changing world into a two dimensional, static image of a finite moment. Classical and highly interpret black and white images, such as those that have made Adams most famous, take the abstraction one step further by removing all colour from our inescapably multicoloured world. What remains is one of two things which really amount to the analogous an alien monstrous decorate, or our own grace from an Others point of view.The use of colour in photography has been shunned repeatedly by some purists croaking to a realist agenda. Compared to black and white it is considered more superficial, crassly realistic, mundane, less abstract, ultimately less esthetical. Altering light and whole tone in the darkroom enables a degree of operativeic dishonesty. The camera may not lie, but the photographer very frequently does, especially the photographer with an mechanicic agenda. Whe neer he dodges shadow detail and fires up highlights, increasing business or altering tone, Adams exercises and demonstrates a contrivance that amounts to a sort of visual poetry. Adams is on record confessing to severe manipulationof Moonrise over Hernandez, but more significant still is probably his interest in striking, unusual, dehumanised scenes and subjects which lend themselves so healthful to monochrome representation. These subjects I would characterise as monstrous their stillness the only when feature protecting us from terror the brink of fear unplowed just out of reach by the amazing stationary quality of the images. Monsters are frightening when they are animated, but this is also when they are at their weakest, as we have seen. Adams ricks have the frozen, petrified, feel of a final examination visual imprint of a paralysed, dying beast.The night scene is extraordinarily affecting, partly because, as a genre, it is most famous for high contrast monochrome. It is the only time in our world really does seem black and white, so the image is almost an accurate representation, but not quite. It is the around alienating quality of this image, the slight lack of fit between rep resentation and mental expectation, which makes it so beautiful. Many of Adamss images are arresting because they are tuned to the timing of our mental calculations they are ready to predict and confound our expectations by subtle acts of artifice and they play constantly, and good-naturedly, on the moment of our realisation. The monochrome of Adams is not a symptom of self-aggrandising pride in his iconic artist status, but a device to play with emphasis and expectation, a way of forcing us to look at the world in different ways.The British scientist and psychology pioneer, Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911), was responsible for many studies we might now tie with monstrous photography in a different sense. Galton generated controversy in many ways even in his own time as an early eugenicist he was the first to study the nature-nurture debate through the use of real pairs of twins.Galtons Eugenics experiments in the 1870s had the ostensible aim of improving the human lean by selecting individuals with desirable traits and encouraging them to breed, while simultaneously to check the birth-rate of the Unfit. peradventure his most famous means of studying behavioural traits across different social demographics was photography.Galton aimed to surpass individual behavioural idiosyncrasies and arrive at generalisations almost human behaviour, through a crudely arranging a number of photographs into a abstruse. His most famous study of this sort aspired to investigating miserable behaviour and this was the study which most clearly demonstrated both a fear of and damaging assumptions made some Victorian societys Other the monstrous convict. Galton took a number of face-shots of men convicted of murder, manslaughter and other stark crimes, then cautiously printed them all to the same dimensions. By photographing a number of them, then carefully aligning the images onto the same photographic plate, a composite photograph was assembled.Rather than Galtons enabling h im to produce a clear image of a criminal face, Galtons results produced pictures that of men with a generic kind of working class look. Galtons monster seemed to be created from the false trust of new technologies and that afforded by the new shamanism surrounding his science. His results seemed to supply that any member of the lower classes was a potential criminal and counsel that selective breeding could be used to replace the lower classes by those from superior stock. An extension of the same reasoning and method, and extraordinary bias towards the visual, could pick out to the conclusion that some racial groups were inherently superior to others, and indeed this was what happened, as Eugenics, while starting as an attempt to scientifically improve the human condition was of course later used to support Nazi policies of experimental extinction of Jews, gypsies and others.Photography theory has succeedd something undeniably monstrous integral to the abstract, literary si tuation of the photograph. After his fathers death, Paul Auster was compelled to sort through the dramatics full of the objects left behind. Despite the fact that all his fathers artefacts, everything from an electric razor, to tools and cancelled chequesbore a kind of ghostly trace of their owner, Auster prefers to focus on the photographs he finds stored in a cupboard in the bedroom. It is as if he hopes they might reveal some information about his father that unusually real, through their power to capture his image. Roland Barthess work Camera Lucida affords Austers grim quest with some context. After a determined effort to define photography in itself, the second one-half of his book sees Barthes turning to a kind of personal dialogue with a photograph of his recently deceased mother. While sorting a destiny of photographs of his mother, Barthes notices that none of them seemed to me really rightthat is, although he recognized a character of her face, a certain relation of he r nose and forehead, the movement of her arms, her hands Barthes cant find his mothers essential being in any of her pictures. Barthess task then changes from sorting photos to looking for the rectitude of the face I had spotd in the stack of images. There is something per se alien about the meaning of photographs, and to this end they are monsters to us, and our memories.Auster, too, seems to be want truth in the photographs of his lost parent. He writes, It seemed that they could tell me things I had never known before, reveal some previously hidden truth unlike Barthes, who is looking for something he knows about his mother but cant find in her images, Auster hopes that his fathers photographs will betray some evidence of a private man, some part of his father that had been carefully concealed from the world. The very essence of photography, according to Barthes, is that it shows what has been.Chapter three Reacting to monstrous imageryMany spaces are terrifying to us, and soon become populated by monsters of the cosmic psyche. The arctic wasteland is crawling with notwithstandingis, every dark ecological niche has a ghost, and every surrender is thick with monstrous mirages, terrifying to the extent that they represent a void, a postcodeness, at best, the fear of the unknown. They are alien landscapes- mammals struggle to survive, and the plants we do find in deserts barely seem designed to aid our survival. There is a certain security about filling the void with sign-posts, even if, in the ultimate post-modern irony, those signs only point to themselves. In this sense the iconography of the desert shares a metaphorical shape with Barthes self-reflexive definition of photography it is as if the horrors of the desert, the horrors of the self-created metaphor, and the fearful void constructed by the photograph that signifies nothing are all connected and perhaps even the same. Auges actors line explain the problem of imaging the desert,If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concern with identity then a space which cannot be defined as relational, historical or bear on with identity is a non place.The spaces which negate are unbearable and must be somehow psychically redeemed. Laura Cinti attempts this by attaching hair to the spineless cactus, for the cactus itself has of course beco me yet another iconographic space of complicated nothingness. Cintis work, if it demonstrates or states anything, demonstrates or states the extent to which the desert symbolism has been anxiously harvested from the plant. What looks like nothingness is mere misunderstanding, and what looks like improvement and liberation is nave, appalling, abuse.Yet we are all finable of some of this. None of us can bear the silence of the desert or make sense of the mute perpendicular. Michael hot ups work in Realism, Writing, Disfiguration makes much of the damaging and paradoxical symmetry that exists between the hand and the eye. That is, the way we see the world is affected by the way we recreate it, but the way we reproduce it damages the way we see it. The whole theory operates on a larger metaphor controlled by erect/horizontal semiotics. The desert cactus image is always a vertical formation on a horizontal axis the opposition of life and death is present visually and immediately. But the desert is unique, as a horizontal space. We would normally expect a great expanse of tight ground to be bursting with life and promise, to oppose and define the sky. The desert, however, rejects life. Those who think cacti flagitious must perceive them as canker sores, signifiers only of scorched earth. The desert space is an inversion of all that we, as animals, have come to associate with health and life. The cacti in the vista, then, can be interpreted in two almost completely op present ways. Either they are the anti-tree, the anti-life, or they are vegetation and weewee, albeit in a different form- and consequentl y just as alienated from the sandy plains as we are.Despite the obvious oppositions, the desert is more like the sea than it appears. While the water reflects light, the desert reflects heat- and the art historian Michael Fried cites reflections as the connection between the inner and the outer. To the extent that they are concerned with reflections, indoor and outdoor scenes are treated as having the same character and affect. I feel sure the notion can evenly be applied to a pair of iconographically opposing images. Interior and outside(prenominal) scenes are, to Fried, clear metaphors for the inside and outside of the body, so perhaps the external distaste of the desert might set alongside the internal of the humane well-vegetated landscape. peradventure the images represent a horizontality that reflect along a flat axis. The reflection must always be slightly imperfect for the object to be seen at all- and it is interference on the vertical axis that disrupts the reflection and reveals the illusion. In the desert, this interference is embodied by cacti, which are surely the most unquestionable part of the landscape.ConclusionsWe have seen how monsters can be created and destroyed, and discovered that it is more provoke to explore their legacy as metaphorical forces in our language and psyches. In closing, I would like to look briefly at the example of Narcissus, whose monstrous version into a flower is richly representative and relevant, and resonates with much of the talk surrounding art and spectatorship today. Turning to ancient mythology, we often find a wealth of instances where change itself is the terrifying aspect of the monstrous. Ovids metamorphoses provide a catalogue of such stories, and, more interestingly, represent the different ways that the metaphors of monstrosity are used to generate fear and alienation.Narcissus and environ is a particularly rich example, among several in Ovids Metamorphoses, of a beautiful offspring who died as a result of spurning sex. In Ovids retelling of the myth, Narcissus is the son of Cephissus, the river god and the nymph Liriope. The seer Tiresias foretold that the child would live to an old age if it did not look at itself. While many nymphs and girls fell in love with him, he rejected them all. wholeness such nymphs, Echo, became so distraught that she withdrew to a alone(p) spot and faded until all that was left was a plaintive whisper. stave the rejected girls prayers for vengeance reached the goddess Nemesis, who caused Narcissus to fall in love with his own reflection. He remained transfixed by his reflection until he died. It is possible that the connection between Echo and Narcissus was an invention of Ovid, since there do not seem to be any earlier instances of the Narcissus myth which incorporate Echo.This myth lends itself to extensive and courageous literary interpretation. When Narcissus eliminated the distance between his image and its reflection by touch mo dality the water with his face, the distance disappeared and took the image with it, as the water rippled and bust the reflected into pieces. The desire, however, remained, not disappearing with any distance covered by his attempts to evasion it, and his difficulty with his passion for himself was not solved. The story is compelling to artists because it is about the power of sight, its dangers and its rewards. For Narcissus, salvation is possible as extension of distance, not as liquidation of it. If he can cease to see his own image he will be saved but is precisely the need to see his face that is compelling and destroying him. As Angel Angelov writes,Narcissus face is a metonymy of integrity, enraptured by its reflected self. The general paradox upon which the story is built comprises various enlarge in this case, the simultaneity of shapelessness and fixed contour Narcissus image on the water surface was cut like chiseled Paros marble. Certainly, we can think about Alexan drinian influence (getting petrified because of amazement) but also about the Roman practice of sculpting, creating bulletproof outlines. However, the presence in a definite social environment considered eternal, is a characteristic that is contrary to the out-social transience of Narcissus reflection.In Narcissus the mirror of the text. Philip Hardie explores various ideas around Narcissus as a post-modern signifier. The surface of water, that fragile barrier, becomes a Lacanian mirror and operates as an interface between Self and Other, dividing reality and illusion, as Narcissus, just like the reader, confronts an image that can never be real, but representative only of the viewers unfulfilled desire. Hardie argues that the story of Narcissus and Echo is Ovids contraceptive treatise on the dangerously deluding, deceptively subjective property of sight and sound. Narcissus as Lucretian fool and Lucretian lover will be the victim of simulacral delusions, a foil lover situated ir onically in a bountiful, pastoral landscape filled with false promise inappropriately wistful even afterward his acknowledgement that the Other can only ever be a hollow reflection of the Self. According to this reading, all hope of something extraneous to the self, something objective, to love and life, is prohibited by this tales morality. The story is essentially tragical and ontologically didactic indeed Ovids Theban histories are infused with the theme of abandon signifiers and the dangers of useless introspection. Indeed the storys equation of the bewitching power of sight with the sight of oneself has inspired recent writers to construct a kind of literary psychosis to describe the subjective subject,The eye would be about the I, the subject, part of a monocular system perpetuating an illusion of wholeness, an Imaginary dyad, a tradition of the eye/I that would move through Kant, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty, while the ear would be aline with the other, with a fragmentary e xistence cut across by the Symbolic, by having subjectivity determined by and through an other,It has been said that the product of every metamorphosis is an absent presence, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the Narcissus/Echo episode, a story irresistible to artists transfixed with the metaphysical paradoxes and word games.One artist well known for his precocious interest in semiotics was Nicholas Poussin. Poussins Echo and Narcissus depicts, unusually, a trio of figures in a angular formation. Narcissus lies prone across the base, limp but muscular, his face a masquerade party of sadness, his eyes empty. Echo behind him resembles a Greek statue, History, perhaps, again posing strangely in a balleric semaphor of sorrow. In fact, for all the storys appeal Echo and Narcissus poses an obvious challenge to artists Echo is said to have wasted away until only her piece was left. But a voice is rather difficult to represent in painting. From the outset, then, the story demands that mimetic in composing(p) realism must be suspended. The story gives artists like Poussin free freedom to create symbolic, literary pieces, with figures whose bodies are sculpted and whose faces are masks. We have seen how the image lends itself to ontological paradoxes, and it could be argued that the putti, the third figure in this image, is a kind of representation of the artists presence inside his own celluloid world. The putti carries a flaming torch, and stands next to a spear, clear indicators, Michael Fried would argue, of the artists palette and paintbrush.The art historian Michael Frieds writing synchronises very well with the Echo and Narcissus myth, as it could well be characterized as the doomed ambition to structure impossible desire. Poussins works present a displaced metaphor for the mental and physical effort of painting. Thus Frieds theory takes the anti-mimetic definition of realism one step further- although painting does not have to assort to what it d epicts, it will resist immediacy, but relate in specific indirect ways to the person who depicts it. For Poussin, the impossible, yet desired, conjugation is one of inscriber and inscribed for Ovid it is one of reader and listener. An erotics of the word and image is then as inevitable as one of ear and eye, and we find the transformation that characterizes the monster has as much to do with desire as it has to do with fear.This notion is borne out by Kristevas definition of the base. The Concise Oxford vocabulary defines abject as Brought low, miserable craven, degraded, despicable, self abasing, describing degradation as a state of misery or degradation, definitions which can be understood more fully through their expression religious hatred, incest, womens bodies, human sacrifice, bodily waste, death, cannibalism, murder, decay, and sexual perversion are aspects of humanity that society considers abject. As Barbara Creed sees it,The place of the abject is where meaning colla pses, the place where I am not. The abject threatens life, it must be radically excluded from the place of the living subject, propelled away from the body and deposited on the other side of an complex quantity border which separates the self from that which threatens the self.Hence the abject is something we purposely exclude to preserve our illusion of a meaningful world.In Powers Of execrationAn Essay On Abjection, Kristeva identifies that we first experience abjection at the point of separation from the mother. This idea is drawn from Lacans psychoanalytical theory as she identifies abjection as symptomatic of a revolt against that which gave us our own existence. As Samantha Pentony explains it,At this point the child enters the symbolic realm, or law of the father. Thus, when we as adults confront the abject we simultaneously fear and identify with it. It provokes us into recalling a state of being prior to signification (or the law of the father) where we feel a sense of hel plessness. The self is threatened by something that is not part of us in terms of identity and non-identity, human and non-human.Kristeva definition of the abject aligns it to what I have described as the Other,The abject has only one quality of the object and that is being opposed to I. There will always be a connection between the abject and the subject they define one another. When we find ourselves flailing in the world of the abject, we lose our sense of subjectivity, our imaginary borders disintegrate, and the abject becomes a real threat because there is no alterior no sense of reality or self to neutralise the threat or remind us of its illusory nature. So Kristevas theory of abjection is concerned with those suspended realms, changing forms, states of transition or transformation,The abject is located in a liminal state that is on the margins of two positions. This state is particularly interesting to Kristeva because of the link between psychoanalysis and the subconsciou s mind.Like Narcissus facing his reflection, or Medusa facing hers, we are attracted and repelled simultaneously by the abject. It induces nausea in our bodies and fear in our hearts. For Kristeva, these feelings arise from memories, specifically the first memory of separation from our mother. There is a thrill about horror and the macabre, and monsters represent ourselves in a state of change when Kristeva describes one aspect of the abject as jouissance she suggests that through exciting in the abject,One thus understands why so many victims of the abject are its fascinated victims if not its submissive and unbidden ones. And furthermore, The abject is perverse because it neither gives up nor assumes a prohibition, a rule, or law but turns them aside, misleads, corrupts uses them, takes advantage of them, the better to deny them, The abject, then, the monstrous, is metaphorically sinewy as a force of manipulation, even more sinister in its unknowable nature, because we suspect it is up to no good. Yet for all its subversion, perversion and fear, we are excited by the abject, drawn to the monstrous, and we always will be because it comes from inside us.BibliographyAngelov, Angel Images Transformation/Disappearance online here http//www3.unibo.it/parol/articles/angelov.htmThe Original/The fool/The Copy Installations Of Nadezhda Lyahova Auge, Marc, From Places to Non-Places in Non-places Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity UK Verso Books, 1995. Auster, The Invention of Solitude, UK Faber and Faber Ltd, 1989. Bann, Stephen (ed) Frankenstein, Creation and addict USReaktion Books Ltd, 1994. 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