The Online Photographer

The picture I showed you the other day, called "Car Wash," got picked for the "Explore" feature on Flickr. They're very good to me.

I'd post it again here but it's better if you go to the link and look at it full-sized. Or as full-sized as it gets. Study it for a minute. It actually isn't the greatest pick for Explore, because it doesn't attract the eye at a small size. You can't see the "eyes," which make it interesting.

Several people, there and here, have complimented me on the nice "abstract" shot. It's true that if you look at it carefully, the shapes seem to resemble a bunch of eyes; and, if they were eyes they would seem to have an alien, or inscrutable, "uncanny valley" kind of expression; and the brain struggles to pick out faces in the murk and confusion. An evolutionary psychologist, AKA sociobiologist, would say that's because we're descended from a long line of ancient ancestors who survived better because they were able to pick out hidden faces in a confusing visual field. If Ogg was waiting in the bushes to brain you with his club, or a sabre-toothed tiger were crouched in the grass intending to pounce, the earlier you could see them the better chance you would have of living to have offspring. That tug or interplay between "I know it's just droplets falling on a windshield" and "it looks like a bunch of eyes" is probably what makes the picture fascinating, if it is.

But the picture isn't abstract at all. David Vestal, one of my favorite writers on photography, used to love to start discussions with dictionary definitions. But a dictionary definition doesn't really help us here, because there are so many meanings of the word "abstract." Cambridge has a nice one, though: "existing as an idea, feeling, or quality, not as a material object." The opposite they propose is "concrete"...but you'd have to define that too, because they don't mean a building material made by combining cement, sand, small stones and water. Concrete, per Cambridge*: "clear and certain, or real and existing in a form that can be seen or felt." Some other dictionaries are not as helpful.

I'm not sure where that gets us, though, because "Car Wash" is a perfectly realistic photograph. In fact the title is intended to make what you're seeing snap into that reality—I'm inside the car going through a car wash, taking a picture of the windshield, with the lens's focus on the windshield; there's some out-of-focus blur at the top because the top of the picture is closer to me, not farther away. It's heavily cropped. Here's the whole frame:

Original image showing area of crop

...But other than that, as well as some slight motion blur on the falling droplets you can see on the left-hand side of the cropped version at Flickr, it's a perfectly realistic photograph of what it is, presented just as it came out of the camera, without alteration.

So what's "abstract" about it? Just the fact that it's a "detail" (the art-critical term) or extract of a larger work?

I almost don't believe "abstract photographs" are even a real thing. With two nagging caveats: first, I can find a few if I really try. An example: I hauled my single-digit-age son to an audio store (remember those?) once, and, bored as usual, he amused himself by playing with my early digital camera, sitting in a swivel chair and exposing pictures as he spun himself around. One of the pictures, highly blurred, darker on the bottom and lighter at the top, looked for all the world like some sort of uncanny dream landscape. I suppose that was an "abstract photograph." You could also say that highly manipulated or AI-enhanced photographs are pictures abstracted from, er, photographs. But a lot of photographs with the "abstract" category label just don't seem to fit the bill for me. You might say that the photographer zooms in on the shapes, colors, textures, or details so far that the objects, light, or atmosphere doesn't readily reveal what those things were, and that's okay I suppose, if that's your opinion. But if that's the case, aren't all (or almost all) photographs "abstracted" from their broader surroundings by the simple act of framing?

The second nagging caveat is that maybe I just don't get it. Shoving pride aside, it's wise to keep in mind that that's always possible.

Joan Miro, Sculptures (M.950), 1974, lithograph

Now that's abstract.

Mike

*I'm coming to like the Cambridge Dictionary more and more.

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Featured Comments from:

Peter Conway: "The Wikipedia entry for Abstract art starts with the following Rudolph Arnheim quote, from his book Visual Thinking (1969): 'Abstract art uses visual language of shape, form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world.' I think that's an excellent definition of abstraction, as it applies to art. It certainly allows for different levels of abstraction, and nothing in the definition would preclude photographs from being considered abstract—even yours!"

Hugh Crawford (partial comment): "There is literally no such thing as nonrepresentational art. Everything represents something, even art. There are even entire schools of art centered on that idea. Robert Rauschenberg’s 'Erased de Kooning Drawing' for example is literally an almost blank piece of paper, yet there are hundreds of thousands of words written about what it represents. There’s a running art world joke that I think I heard from John Baldessari, 'what does Jackson Pollock's "Blue Poles" represent? Oh, (long pause) about 23 million dollars.' Joke needs adjustment for inflation; I think 23 was just a funny number."

Richard G: "I like MikeK’s comment about black and white itself already being a degree of abstraction. I look for abstract compositions everywhere, certain patterns and resonances of geometry. I’ve done this for years and can remember the first photograph I took that started this. There was some ambiguity in the pattern of the shapes of the blocks of the stone plinth and shadows of a nearby monument, but it is neither ambiguity nor obscurity which is required. I see it more and more as I’ve developed this interest. A collection of rooftops, the pattern of passersby, a series of circles. I was stunned when I first looked through Ernst Haas’s New York in Color. He saw these abstractions everywhere. Was it him, or is it me? It was him. Have a look at the Abstract thread on rangefinderforum. Or photographs of Lucien Hervé, composing with the shapes of shadows.

"Following your evolutionary lead, I would say that there may have been survival advantage in recognizing patterns. If I find something, the hairs are up on the back of my neck and I am in an almost ecstatic zone. Now with digital I can take 20 shots of some inconsequential piece of street architecture. So often the first shot was the best. It’s like music. Mathematical. The geometry is like jazz, or Bach. But it may not be everyone’s thing. I was so surprised in reading Nabokov’s autobiography, a stunningly beautiful book, that despite his poetic prose and the brilliance of his ideas, he has no interest or love or even understanding of music."

ChrisC: "Isn’t abstract simply the opposite of the definition you gave for figurative a few days ago?"

Mike replies: That's an interesting thought.