With all these bad things going on, I keep looking for a moment’s peace and quietude.  And I found it recently in a really beautiful large format (4″ x 5″) image by Alan McConnell entitled “Amish Harvest, 2012” that he posted on the Facebook “Large Format Photography” SIG.

This image is gorgeous and perfect in so many ways.  Look at the lines all trailing off in convergence into a murky fog.  The first corn tower is sharp, but then they get progressively less distinct.  The sense of infinity is everywhere.  Fog is a tough light to photograph.  McConnell does it masterfully. And the fog is not so much foreboding as mysterious.

That is what the picture holds for me – a profound sense of geometric static with an anticipation that something is about to happen.  What precisely?  I have concluded that I may be the only person in the world who thinks that M. Night Shyamalan‘s movie “The Village,” with all its wonderful mythological symbolism is a great movie.  And that’s what I’m expecting in “Amish Harvest, 2012”  – not that some evil creature will emerge from the fog, but rather that there will be enlightenment of the sort that only the blind can see.

Somewhere buried in a corrugated cardboard box in my closet is the red metal steam shovel that gave me so much delight as a child.  It was given to me by my grandparents, I think when I was about five.  Long gone now is the yellow Tonka dump truck which accompanied my steam shovel to the imaginary construction sites on the living room carpet.

Such artifacts of long gone youth are common to little boys, and I remain fascinated by big construction vehicles, that could, well, build the pyramids.  So today’s blog is for everyone who remains little at heart.  I found this marvelous photoessay by Metropolitan Transit Authority photographers Rehema Trimiew and Patrick Cashin of the construction of New York City’s Second Avenue subway.  It is difficult in a confined underground space to achieve the appropriate sense of hugeness and these images are masterful in achieving that.  And of course, a hundred years from now they will remain as a testament to what it took to build something that people take for granted.

Just when I thought that we had put the Turkish woman in red behind us, reader Megan has treated me to another mace in the face image – this one from Brazil.  Following and feeding on the women in red, it too has gone internet viral.

I really don’t want to get into the politics here.  So maybe I had better let  Victor Caivano the Associated Press photographer, who took the picture tell the story: “the woman, who appeared to be a normal, middle-class university student, was standing completely alone at around 11:20 p.m. yesterday on a deserted corner after the police had cleared the area. The protest was over, riots included.  Three riot officers approached the woman and told her to leave. When she resisted — the woman either questioned the order or insisted that she wasn’t doing anything wrong, she was pepper-sprayed. This policeman just didn’t think twice.”

OK.  So from the point of view of this blog the picture is interesting because it represents a microcosmic change or evolution of the Turkish woman in red meme.  The woman has changed.  The red dress is gone.  The menacing crowd is gone.  The attack is if anything more direct!  Hmm, so the meme of the woman in red no longer requires the woman in red?

Requires her to do what?  To evoke the emotion of empathy for the victim.  The act is vicious and unnecessary.  If you look at the other images from these demonstrations, you can even start to sympathize with the policemen – fright, reflex, the end of a long day?  The point is that it is mean and an over reaction.  Yes, it could be worse.  They could have shot her in the face.  But to me the excessive degree and essential meanness and dehumanization of the victim are the keys here.  To me the point of this picture is that we would be a lot better off if there were more projection of ourselves into other people’s shoes, more empathizing and understanding, less pepper spray.  I apologize if I appear to have gone too far off topic.  But the point is that this image is meant to evoke a powerful and strong reaction, and it certainly has done so in me.

We have discussed at considerable length the concept of memes or if you prefer the connotations of images.  The most obvious lesson in all of this is that we cannot escape our biology.  It’s all in our genes – with the wonderful paradoxical caveat that the closer you look towards identifying those genes, the more the very concept becomes fuzzy and the gene disappears.  Still we are certainly very complex, and our ability to relate with an image and to associate it with a reality is deeply imbedded in a intertwined network of biology, physics, chemist, neurology, and ultimately psychology. 

It is never-the-less not a contradiction or paradox to believe that we can understand ourselves and in the present case understand the meaning of photography.  The fact that we are using the very computer that we are trying to understand, namely our brains, presents no real obstacles.

So let’s consider a very simple question, namely, why we can relate to a black and white image as expressing reality, even though we see in color?  And I should say from the start that I am conjecturing here – although I am fairly certain that there is a huge body of scientific literature on this very topic.

You will remember the image of Albert Einstein in our discussion of memes and the curious question of why he is wearing his wife’s coat.  Is the picture in your mind as Albert Einstein, your meme, in color or in black and white?  We had no problem recognizing this black and white image of Einstein as Einstein.  Similarly we would have no problem recognizing a color picture of Einstein as Einstein.  It is even the case that if we were to Photoshop an Einstein picture with weird, say psychedelic, colors that we would still associate this image with our meme entitled “Albert Einstein.”  So we conclude that the essential information that codes our meme is structural and black and white.  Color is unnecessary and in the case of the weirdly colored image can be a bit distracting, perhaps requiring a few more fractions of a second to gain recognition.

So in a sense we can argue that black and white is capable of carrying all of the necessary form information.  You might even argue that it is the fundamental form and for that reason we see in a black and white photograph some kind of purity.  This, perhaps, arises from the way in which vision evolved.  At the very least color can be quite confounding.  Working with modern digital cameras gives you the binary option of shall I stay in black and white, thereby focusing on form, light, and contrast or shall I add the very profoundly dominant element of color.  With an intensely colored image it’s often quite difficult to get your mind to focus on anything else.

That said, our eyes can crave color.  And certainly color can provide a very beautiful and dominant component to a photograph.  This is perhaps illustrated by the fact that quite often when one is working on a black and white image, we have the sense that something is missing and we can add that something by miserly adding just a bit of color, the fine subtle shades of toning.  In this process one often has the sense that the image is “meant” to be toned sepia or green or blue.  Of course, that is a very subjective sense.

So in this small bit of conjecture, we perhaps have the roots of a theory of why black and white photography is so appealing.  We see it as an art form that is essentially pure and unconfounded by color.  We see that it codes all the information about forms to appeal to our societal memes, that is to take on meaning and emotion.

I was discussing the work of Narinder Nanu with a colleague, and he suggested that I should really take a look at the photographic work of Raghu Rai.  This proved to be excellent advice and a wonderful adventure.  There is a very unique quality and vision to Rai’s work.  He was born in 1942 and became a photographer in 1965.  He joined the staff of the New Delhi publication “The Statesman” in 1966.  Ten years later he became a freelance photographer and in 1977 became a protégé of Henri Cartier-Bresson, who appointed Rai to “Magnum Photos.”  Rai was also Director of Photography for “India Today,” from 1982-1992.  He has published several books, most famously “Reflections in Colour“ and “Reflections in Black and White.”

You can see some of Raghu Rai’s stunning work at Aicon Gallery on the web.  Probably his most famous image is that of an unknown child victim being buried after the Bhopal gas disaster.  In researching Rai’s images, I have found quite a few that I find wonderful and would call favorites.  The first is “The Day Before – Ayodhya, 6 Dec. 1992.”  The picture is perfect technically.  The density is exact, and the morning fog adds just a bit of mystery.  And then there is the subject matter, a sadhu giving an offering to a passerby and then, of course, there is the baboon.  It’s just so magical.  And then there is “Cloud Series 7, 2010.”  I have to say that I have never seen a picture quite like thisand never quite seen light like this, which divides a picture both horizontally and vertically into light and dark.  This truly speaks to a master’s vision.