We linked Vanderleun's Frame Up photo essay yesterday, but I thought it was worth further highlighting - or framing, as it were. Especially because my photography teacher friend thought that his idea was cool, and plans to use it in her classes. A few random thoughts and a quote:
- Vanderleun is apparently a big Hopkins fan, as am I. Hopkins was a student of the medieval metaphysician Duns Scotus, from whom he seems to have come up with his notions of "inscape" and "instress." While Hopkins never defined these terms, he attempted to realize the immanent presence of God in his poetry with rhythm and imagery (eg, here.)
- Are photographers simply artists with ADD? I am (obviously) no photographer. I specialize in minimally-composed, poorly-lit, half-focused snapshots with a camera I don't know how to use, which are more intended to document a thing than anything else. In my youth, I drew and painted but I never developed those interests. I have always had too many interests - a dilettante in the perjorative sense of the word. However, I know that when you paint a thing you enter fully into it, of necessity, with brain, soul and hand. Same as playing a song with piano or guitar.
- Framing has, indeed, a magical effect. It has always been a wonder to me how putting a frame on a canvas transforms it. Or how a wall, fence or hedge gives structure and architecture to a garden. Or how framing a fact with context does the same. Or how putting a quote in a "quote box" inclines one to read it. Are frames our tools or are they our protection from TMI, or even from the terrors of the infinite and of chaos? Or both? I'm in over my head now. One day, long ago, I took a B&W random photo of an old dock piling with a spike in it and some weeds next to it, on the West Side of Manhattan. It was one of the 20 photos I've taken in my life that came out well. Produced it in the darkroom myself. I put it in a $1.99 black frame and it looked like art. It's long lost, though.
- In a comment on Vanderleun's piece, the internet metaphysician and master neologist Gagdad Bob has this to say:
This is an extremely provocative subject. The other day I posted about the importance of boundaries in the creation of meaning. In the absence of a frame there is no art or science. But who knew that simply providing one allows one to appreciate the superabundance of beauty that is always pouring forth from virgin nature?
In fact, you may remember the young videographer in American Beauty, who was able to perceive beauty by virtue of framing it with the camera, whether is was a paper bag blowing in the wind or a dead animal by the side of the road.
I often go mountain biking in my area, and just by virtue of taking along a camera and framing the shots (even if I don't even take a picture), a different level of beauty suddenly emerges. You start to see things from a "God's eye view," for what is creation but a finite limitation on infinite possibility, i.e., the imposition of boundary conditions on the infinite?
One could say the same thing of the formal structure of a poem, or of the structural narrative of a great novel that elevates the mundane to a higher plane, or the stage in theatre, which is also a kind of frame.
Bottom line: in the conduct of your life, choose your frame very carefully. It makes all the difference. On one level the frame is an artifice, but on another level it is the doorway into the infinite and eternal.
I guess it goes without saying that I see theology as a frame though which we may see, know, and experience all sorts of things (i.e., truth and beauty) that will go unnoticed in the absence of the frame.
Image is from Vanderleun's piece.
