OF FAST AND SLOW PAGES: MOVEMENT IN THE PHOTOBOOK

Abstract

In this essay, movement is grasped as something that not only exists in front of or in the camera, but also consciously works with the properties of the photobook and the recipient. Phenomenologically prepared by thinkers from Husserl to Gombrich, current perceptual psychological concepts such as Predictive Coding Theory (PCT) support the assumption that expectations and experiences interact as top-down processes with the bottom-up experiences of image perception. I examine this interaction on four levels using two photobooks by Gerry Johansson and Lars Tunbjörk: the level of the image object, the level of the image vehicle, the level of the photographer and the level of the photobook. Based on a brief historical classification, movement is examined in its reception-aesthetic relevance on the basis of photographic features such as the flash in order to show that movement, more than almost any other aspect in photography, can organise space and time, variance and redundancy, as well as the visible and the invisible, and endow them with meaning.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Frizot, “Geschwindigkeit in der Fotografie,” 244.

2. Literary scholars differentiate between ‘narration time’ and ‘narrated time’. Narration time equals the time required for viewing the artefact, and narrated time consists of the time represented within an artefact. See Müller, Bedeutung der Zeit.

3. See Shore, Das Wesen der Fotografie, 60–5.

4. See Gombrich, “Moment and Movement,” 298.

5. See Boehm, “Bild und Zeit,“ 3.

6. Movement as a holistic and less mechanical term is distinguished from speed in this essay. For more information on speed and especially on exposure time in photography, see Toister, “The Ideosyncrasies of Speed,” 235–56.

7. For a broader context of the photobook’s media self-understanding and its performative and narrative presuppositions, see: Lockemann, “The Photobook,” 196–205.

8. See Dickel, “Fotobücher und Künstlerbücher,” 31–8.

9. Unlike the photographic series or the single image, research on the photobook as a medium is still in its early stages, with recent US-American research in particular providing informative approaches. Keith A. Smith deserves credit for being the first to link the visual sequence with the principle of montage (see Smith, Structure of the Visual Book). This ‘narrative montage’ was taken up by Andrea Nelson, where it is achieved through the interweaving of movement and stasis, of diachronic and synchronic time (see Nelson, Reading Photobooks, 13). The viewer is stimulated to interact with the work through implicit gaps in time and information by constructing meaningful transitions and connections. Those considerations, which she develops primarily on the basis of László Moholy-Nagy’s book Painting, Photography, Film (1927), form a basic terminological assumption that José Neves also extends theoretically when he makes a narrative-theoretical concept fruitful not only for a specific photobook but across all works. He chooses Roland Barthes’ essay Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives to take concepts such as cardinal functions or catalyses seriously as visual phenomena as well (see Neves, Faces of the Photobook, 245). However, both approaches avoid establishing elementary narrative instances such as the photographer or the codex.

10. See Wolf, “Problem der Narrativität,” 43.

11. Of course, there would be countless photobooks for a basic topic like movement. I use the ones mentioned because — and this is rare — they offer a comparability that is motivic and thematic, while being stylistically so different that they might mark ends of a scale (of movement).

12. Camera-less photography — as in the photograms of László Moholy-Nagy — which would correspond most closely to the gestural approach of abstract painting, are omitted here. For further information, see Schönegg, Fotografiegeschichte der Abstraktion and Kunze, Opake Fotografien.

13. Frizot, “Geschwindigkeit in der Fotografie,” 248.

14. See Marey, “Chronofotografische Kamera [1882],” 65.

15. ‘Vogliamo rendere, graficamente, il moto perpetuo nella perpetuità di un gesto reso’, Bragaglia, “Fotodinamismo Futurista [1911],” 130.

16. See Frizot, “Geschwindigkeit in der Fotografie,” 254.

17. See Eskildsen, “Photographs in Books,” 20. The English title of the book was chosen by publisher Dick Simon and refers to the concept of the ‘pregnant moment’ coined by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in 1766 in his book Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie. The term and the underlying concept of a selective, harmoniously composed present, which can refer to both the past and the future, is, however, much older in terms of art theory: Shaftesbury’s punctum temporis theory was already a central model for Lessing’s Laokoon. Likewise before Lessing, the concept was pre-formulated as a ‘favourable moment’ by Moses Mendelssohn in his 1757 Betrachtungen über die Quellen und die Verbindungen der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften. See Oschmann, “Augenblick,” 54–5.

18. Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment.

19. See Ibid.

20. Bair, “The Decisive Network,” 148.

21. Nevertheless, it should not be forgotten that his iconic pictures were often part of larger commissioned series. This was most recently pointed out in a valuable essay by Nadya Bair, which refers above all to the collaborative aspects of the book The Decisive Moment: Ibid, 150.

22. In addition to photographic positions, I would like to at least refer to two exhibitions that have contributed significantly to the understanding of movement in photography. In 1943, Nancy Newhall curated Action Photography, a more analytical show on the role of speed in photography. Alongside technical-historical milestones such as Muybridge’s motion series and current stroboscopic flash shots, snapshots were also on display. It was about ‘Action photography as a means of expression, presented through the aesthetic movements it has inspired and through special uses such as Dance, Press, War, Movies.’ See Exhibition of Action Photography. The second exhibition is called Sprung in die Zeit (Leap into Time) and was organised by Janos Frecot and Inka Graeve at the Berlinische Galerie in 1992. While Newhall had shown the exploding Hindenburg together with accidents, sports shots and several photographs by Weegee, the Berlin exhibition focused on artistic positions. Francesca Woodman, Martí Llorens, Dieter Appelt and Minor White, among others, were on show here (see Sprung in die Zeit).

23. Hecht and Desnizza, Psychologie als empirische Wissenschaft, 121.

24. Ibid.

25. Grave, “Der Akt des Bildbetrachtens,” 59.

26. Gombrich, “Moment and Movement,” 298.

27. Jokeit, “Gesehen werden,” n.p.

28. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 2.

29. Ibid., 3.

30. Ibid., 4.

31. See Massumi, Politics of Affect, 14.

32. Although Scott is talking about temporality in the quoted passage, his phenomenologically influenced considerations can also be applied to movement, since they are always conceived in space as well.

33. Here, geologist Marcia Bjornerud would certainly disagree when she writes: ‘Early in an introductory geology course, one begins to understand that rocks are not nouns but verbs — visible evidence of processes: a volcanic eruption, the accretion of a coral reef, the growth of a mountain belt. Everywhere one looks, rocks bear witness to events that unfolded over long stretches of time’ (Bjornerud, Timefulness, 8). That is, even the seemingly universal criteria of phenomenology can be culturally variable.

34. Scott, The Spoken Image, 274–75.

35. The image object addresses what is depicted, the image vehicle the mode of depiction. See Pichler and Ubl, Bildtheorie zur Einführung, 23.

36. Scott, The Spoken Image, 275.

37. See Ibid., 291. For page turning in the photobook see Lockemann, “The Photobook,” 200–02.

38. See Johansson, American Winter.

39. See Both, “Gerry Johansson. American Winter”; Cockroft, Gerry Johansson: American Winter.

40. Andrews, Q & A with Gerry Johansson.

41. By continuity, Boehm also means the continuity behind the figure, i.e. the assumed certainty that the figure stands/lies in front of or on a ground. See Boehm, “Der Grund,” 64.

42. As Lockemann notes on another photobook, the generous white space of the page is also useful for focusing on the individual photo, as the white space — like a passepartout — helps to block out visual distractions beyond the body of the book. See Lockemann, “The Photobook,” 209.

43. See Porras, “Notes on Grain,” 253.

44. See McCloud, Comics richtig lesen, 86.

45. See Adams, Listening to the River.

46. Here one must differentiate. In the analysis of Susan Lipper’s photobook Domesticated Land, Lockemann shows a case where — in my count — points 7 and 9 come into conflict. Lipper’s book is sequenced in such a way that usually a photo is only placed on the right-hand side of a double-page spread. This changes on a double page spread where there are photos on both the left and right — which depicted different perspectives on one place. This has the effect — as Lockemann rightly says — of slowing down the turn of the page. In my opinion, this has more to do with the comparative display situation, i.e. point 7, than with point 9, the sequencing from moment to moment. Another factor that has contributed to slowing down the speed of the pages in Lipper’s book is that on the double-page spread you are no longer in a moving car — as in other photos in Lipper’s book. This circumstance would be covered by point 1 in my count. See Lockemann, “The Photobook,” 210.

47. One of the few exceptions to Johansson’s more than 25 published books is Antarctica, a relatively tall 24.5 × 30.5 cm book published by Libraryman in 2015.

48. Suler and Zaika, Perception and Imaging, 121.

49. See Olson, The Florentine Tondo, 8.

50. Andrews, “Book of the Week.”

51. See Tunbjörk, Vinter.

52. See Eggleston, The Democratic Forest.

53. See Brinkmann et al., “Does “Action Viewing” Really Exist?” 27–48.

54. ‘One possible aspect of dynamism we focused on in this paper is the comprehension of traces left by the artist and referring to the actions performed during the creation process. This contributes to an ongoing discourse in psychology related to embodiment.’ Ibid., 45–6.

55. Another very application-oriented study that must be mentioned here is by Shari Tishman and has been published under the title Slow Looking. Her programme has already been implemented at institutions such as the Tate and the Photographer’s Gallery and is based on the premise that the time we spend with an artefact is essentially responsible for intensifying image-viewer relationships and developing a semantic level of image viewing that is denied to a quick encounter.

56. Shore, Das Wesen der Fotografie, 62.

57. Martin Parr, known as ‘the flash junkie’ (Weski, ‘Queen Gets Wet’) was one of the first to follow Weegee in using flash as a stylistic element in artistic photography. For his photobook Bad Weather (1982), he bought an underwater camera with a wide-angle lens and flash and photographed the weather — although in black and white — very similarly to Tunbjörk. The weather is movement, and requires movement. It is visible — as drops, puddles or shine — and makes visible: stooped, sheltered and fleeing people who want to escape the bad weather, or at least do not want to linger in it for too long. Aesthetically, the landscape format and the composition, often horizontally oriented, absorbs the vertical force of the rain.

58. Arnheim, Kunst und Sehen, 306.

59. Nikolajeva and Scott, How Picturebooks Work, 140.

60. With protention and retention, Husserl described a process of perception with protention as an ‘expectation intention’ (‘Erwartungsintention’), and retention a primary memory as the reverberation of what has just been perceived. See Husserl, “Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins“, 410–13.

61. See Gombrich, “Moment and Movement,” 300. Husserl had already referred to this example, see note 60.

62. See Brinkmann et al., ‘Does “Action Viewing” Really Exist?’.

63. See Martinez (Ed.), Handbuch Erzählliteratur, 1.

64. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 26.

65. Boehm, “Der Grund,” 71.

66. See Grave, “Der Akt des Bildbetrachtens,” 52–3.

67. Jokeit, “Gesehen werden,” n.p.

68. Variance is the opposite: Here the viewer becomes attentive — it is an individual deviation from the scheme.

69. The distinction between variance and redundancy is not an invention of PCT. Here, too, there are phenomenological roots and roots in the work of Albrecht Koschorke, a cultural scientist who has made this dynamic fruitful for literary studies. See Koschorke, Wahrheit und Erfindung, 50–51.

70. Colour, for example, was not included here for reasons of length.

71. Michel Frizot also pointed out that the distance between the moving object and the camera also plays a role in the perception of movement: the closer the photographer gets to the constantly moving object, the faster it seems. See Frizot, ‘Geschwindigkeit in der Fotografie’, 243.

72. Lessing, “Grenzen der Malerei“, 32. See Grave, “Der Akt des Bildbetrachtens,” 51.

73. See Gombrich, “Moment and Movement,” 306.

74. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 35.

75. Ibid., 51.

76. Leroi-Gourhan, Hand und Wort, 49.

77. Massumi describes the invisible of what is perceived as virtual: ‘A thing cannot be understood without reference to the nonpresent dimensions it compresses and varyingly expresses in continuity. The formula is by now familiar: these dimensions are abstract yet real. They are virtual.’ Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 201.

78. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 157.

Additional information

Funding

The research presented here was conducted at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI Essen). It received no grants or further funding.

Notes on contributors

Anja Schürmann

Anja Schürmann is an art historian and a Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI Essen). Her current research focuses on visual narration. She investigates the visual narration in photobooks both on the phenomenological-theoretical and on the aesthetic level of the knowledge of images (Bildevidenz). In 2021, she co-edited a thematic issue of the journal Fotogeschichte entitled Turn the page! New Perspectives in Photobook Research. Her PhdD ”Conceptual vision. Ekphrasis as an art historical medium in the 19th century” was published by De Gruyter in 2018. For her research, she received the Prize for Art Criticism from C/O Berlin and was a DFG doctoral research fellow at Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, Germany.