Understanding depth - 2024 03 28
There are significant differences between the billions of digital photographs we consume every day across social media platforms and the singular hand-made images we create and gift or sell from our art desks. The work of capturing a digital photograph involves a picture of contemporaneous events. The work of creating a hand-made image involves materials, processes and time-based techniques inspired by mystery. Sometimes it is hard to understand why anyone would take the time and effort to make a hand-made image when so many digital images are instantly available. I am thinking about these differences in three areas: appreciation, agency, and relationship.
There is a difference in the way we appreciate digital photographs and hand-made images. We can understand appreciation in terms of the length of time we spend appreciating the image. Digital photographs flood our media feeds. We spend seconds to comprehend the content of the photo, another few seconds to make meaning of what the photograph contains, and perhaps another few seconds to add a comment to the thread associated with the photograph. And then it is gone. It will take longer to find the photograph later, if we want to use it in something we are writing or working on, assuming we can locate it, then it took for our original encounter with the image.
The hand-made image exists in material form in our real world. We may receive it as a gift, or we may purchase it for ourselves, or we may purchase it as a gift. It exists in our world, in our personal, private space, as we move through each day. It becomes a companion to our experience, a silent witness. It becomes a constant in our surroundings, that we can check in with, to gauge our reaction to unfolding events in relation to our emerging sense of self: the meaning we are making today, the meaning we made yesterday, last week, last season, last year.
It is important to understand how our human agency is enacted in the circumstances by which the digital photograph flows by in our social media feed and the circumstances that result in a hand-made image arriving into our hands. The images we see on our social media feeds are curated by the technology company that has captured our time and attention in that moment. The images we are consuming are designed to keep us looking for the next one. Any single image may represent a particularly good or bad day somewhere on the planet. It is not personal to us, except for the connections we bring to it through our interests, passions, history, and professions. Rather, we are being fed a continuous stream of images that we catalogue and index in an instant. The image only has meaning in that instance of consumption. After that, having done its work, of capturing your attention, it continues to flow to the next pair of eyes and curious brain, endlessly keeping eyes on screens for the purpose of monetizing attention.
The hand-made image arrives in our hands through our human agency. It doesn't matter how the image came into our hands: someone else thought of us and purchased the image to send to us; we purchased the image and to deliver to ourselves; or, we purchase the image to deliver to someone else. The point of acquisition is an act of agency, an act of selecting, purchasing, and delivering, evidence of activity, evidence of human agency.
When we combine experiences of appreciation and human agency, we form relationships to the images we encounter. If we have invested scant time and appreciation, and exerted minimal human agency, we are going to form a transitory, tenuous relationship with images we encounter. In terms of digital photography, the sheer volume of imagery and social media experiences designed for short attention spans means that we form relationships that form and dissolve in real time. There is literally no time, and no material substance to the experience. No lasting relationship can be formed because there is no object permanence to form a relationship with.
In the case of a hand-made image arriving into our material world, we are immediately forming multiple relationships - with and through the material object. We form relationships with the object itself - the subject of the image, the method of work, the size of the image, the colour, shape, intensity, lightness or darkness of the imagery. We place the object - in a frame, on a wall, on a fridge, on a tabletop. The place it occupies has meaning, it conveys the importance of the object, but also the circumstances of its arrival into our lives. We form relationships through the object - who has sent it, what event does it commemorate, what quality or achievement is it celebrating, is it meant to be our possession or are we meant to pass it on after we have enjoyed it? The object serves as a vector point to relationships, incoming and outgoing, that are signified in the existence and the reception of the object.
This article is a short meditation on understanding depth - both as a social, cultural, emotional and interpersonal expression through hand-made images, but also as an artistic interest - how the composition, colour, materials, methods and techniques convey a sense of depth in a two dimensional work of art.
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