five
Try to tell the truth by taking photographs that lie about it.
- Max Pinckers
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After some days of puzzlement with the instruction, suddenly I thought this could be the easiest 12by12 instruction ever. Actually, telling the truth by lying about it is what almost every photo does on reducing our visual perception to two dimensions. OK, I was wrong, that doesn’t count because the ability is on the medium, and not on the photographer. However a photographer can intentionally do something similar. Think about photographing subjects in motion, for instance. The shutter speed will change the way movement appears in photographs. Short shutter speeds freeze the subject but hide the movement. Long shutter speeds show us the movement, but distort the object in motion. Therefore, we can show the object or we can show its momentum, but not both things on the same photo. Can we square this circle? I dare say yes. One day, an anonymous and genius photographer discovered the panning technique. The moving object is photographed keeping it in the same position of the frame for the duration of the exposure. As a result, the subject remains more or less intact and the background goes blur, suggesting its speed. What is moving is shown frozen, and what is quiet is shown running. So we see the true because a lie is being shown.
I must confess I love the panning technique, especially when its result is imperfect. When imperfect, pannings give us a glimpse of a dimension that it is not exactly space or time, but something in between. A dreamlike dimension. Dreams, so. The stuff that best tells the truth by lying about it. More of the same...
five
Try to tell the truth by taking photographs that lie about it.
- Max Pinckers
---
After some days of puzzlement with the instruction, suddenly I thought this could be the easiest 12by12 instruction ever. Actually, telling the truth by lying about it is what almost every photo does on reducing our visual perception to two dimensions. OK, I was wrong, that doesn’t count because the ability is on the medium, and not on the photographer. However a photographer can intentionally do something similar. Think about photographing subjects in motion, for instance. The shutter speed will change the way movement appears in photographs. Short shutter speeds freeze the subject but hide the movement. Long shutter speeds show us the movement, but distort the object in motion. Therefore, we can show the object or we can show its momentum, but not both things on the same photo. Can we square this circle? I dare say yes. One day, an anonymous and genius photographer discovered the panning technique. The moving object is photographed keeping it in the same position of the frame for the duration of the exposure. As a result, the subject remains more or less intact and the background goes blur, suggesting its speed. What is moving is shown frozen, and what is quiet is shown running. So we see the true because a lie is being shown.
I must confess I love the panning technique, especially when its result is imperfect. When imperfect, pannings give us a glimpse of a dimension that it is not exactly space or time, but something in between. A dreamlike dimension. Dreams, so. The stuff that best tells the truth by lying about it. More of the same...