Clare Adams

ADX7009 Research Seminars

What could ‘embodied’ photography look like?

(November 2013)

What could ‘embodied’ photography look like?

The aim of this research is to explicate the question "What

could embodied photography look like?" 

Whether we consider ourselves to be a disembodied mind, which

is entirely distinct from our physical selves and the external

world, or, whether we consider ourselves to be embodied;

inextricably linked with our physical selves and the external

world, dramatically affects our understanding of the artistic

process. Is a photograph doomed to represent the external world

or could the process and the finished article be considered

embodied, as part of the world; and if so, what would this look

like?

Firstly I will examine how dualism permeates our everyday

language and experience of the world and contrast it with what

it is like to be embodied. I go on to discuss what it means to

make or perceive art in these different ways of being in the

world, particularly in terms of what ‘representation’ is

perceived to be.

Referring to the artwork of Cézanne, as discussed by Merleau-

Ponty, will be key to understanding the conditions under which

the artistic process maybe considered to be embodied and the

term autofigurative will be introduced to describe it.

Referring to Collingwood’s theory on "art as imagination" and

Cazeaux's article on "sensation as participation”, I will

discuss to what degree intention and interpretation play a

role in embodied art practice. I will explain that intention

is a negotiation when artist and material/technology meets;

and that interpretation is part of this activity, since

meaning is already implicit in the materials and choices as

they are being made. It will be argued then; that the

criterion for a successful piece is one that both shows and

incites embodiment and will necessarily refer to its’ style.

I will analyse what could be meant by style when Merleau Ponty

describes the embodied process and the resulting artwork and

whether embodied art practice has a certain ‘look’. I will use

Cezanne and Giacometti’s work, to compare and contrast what

style may refer to in each, in order to test the weight of the

criterion.

Finally, I will contest Merleau-Ponty’s claim that photography

“destroys” embodiment by showing how it itself might be

embodied in either the camera-work or in the entire

photographic process, giving examples of what this might look

like in other artists work. I will give an example of my

practical research, which takes elements from the different

examples, and explain what I think I achieve in this and how I

plan to take it further.

The World And I or The World With I

Dualism naturally permeates our language when we talk about

our experience in the world. We talk about bodies in relation

to ourselves but not as ourselves, for example; we might say ‘my

brain’, ‘your foot’ etc.; which indicates possession of our

physical self by something other than ourselves; which suggests

our mind is a non-physical thing separate from our bodies.

Rene Descarte promoted a separation between mind and body. In

Meditations on First Philosophy he supposes,

The fact that I can clearly and distinctly understand one

thing apart from another is enough to make me certain

that the two things are distinct […]Accordingly, it is

certain that I am really distinct from my body, and can

exist without it.

(1996:54)

Descartes is describing himself inwardly and talks about

things not ‘belonging’ to himself, even going so far as being

able to ‘exist without [his body]’. For Descartes then, vision

could be described as the ‘something’ (your mind; or soul; or

ego perhaps) inside your head looking out at a movie screen; a

kind of ‘ghost in the machine’ that sends a message to the

body to respond accordingly once visual information is

registered on the retina from light received from the external

world. This process is often described using the character of

the Homunculus, Latin for ‘Little Man’, in place of the mind,

where the Homunculus controls the “Cartesian Theatre” to relay

visual information to our bodies. Whilst there are many

different types of dualism that could be explicated here, the

importance of dualist metaphysics for my research is that the

external world is represented in the mind. Although messages may

pass between the mind and the body, the body is separate and

passive.

In contrast, the term ‘embodiment’ comes from phenomenology

and offers a theory of existence in which the human being is

located in and as part of the world through the body. Maurice

Merleau-Ponty differentiates sharply from the dualist

perspective in his phenomenology, in that for him, knowledge

[of the world] is arrived at through our bodies, rather than

our consciousness or mind. It then follows; that which we

perceive through our bodies cannot ultimately be disentangled

from them.

To describe the entanglement of body and perception, Merleau-

Ponty uses the example of your left hand touching your right

hand. The right hand is both felt and feeling in an ungraspable

continuum. The more you speculate on the moment of touch and

of feeling, the more the subject and object division becomes

arbitrary and unattainable. He cites, “The body catches

itself from the outside engaged in a cognitive process; it

tries to touch itself whilst being touched, and initiates ‘a

kind of reflection’.” (2002:107). We can have experience of

the world through touch, sight, smell etc precisely because we

ourselves can be touched, seen and smelt, and that there is no

division between this phenomenon of seeing and being seen. Our

bodies are not windows for our minds, to look out upon the

world as a representation as is the case with the Homunculus.

Rather, we are implicit in the world: our vision entangled

with it. In, Spell of the Sensuous, David Abrams says, “We

might as well say that we are organs of this world, flesh of

its flesh, and that the world is perceiving itself through us”

(1997:68)

Unlike, the Cartesian Theatre, where the body reacts to visual

stimuli: to be embodied would seem to suggest that vision and

movement are inextricably tied. In Eye and Mind, Merleau Ponty

asserts that,

My moving body makes a difference in the visible world,

being part of it; that is why I can steer it through the

visible. […] We can only see what we look at. What would

vision be without eye movement? And how could the

movement of the eyes not blur things if movement were

blind? […] If vision weren’t prefigured in it?

(1993:455)

For artists then, there must be a difference in how to

approach an artwork when vision of the world is

representational, and separate from the body or if it is

imbued with the body and entangled with the world.

Where is the art?

If we are to take the dualist view, that vision is represented

in the mind, then in the Homunculus example, we can imagine

the artist perceiving the movie screen and that ‘little man’,

inside the head, instructing the arms of the artist to pick up

the paint brush and paint the ‘movie’ as it unfolds on the

screen. The little man is making a ‘copy’ of the movie, a

representation of the representation. The notion of the ‘copy’

can be found in Plato’s The Republic. He suggests, “the artists

representation stands at third remove from reality” (Plato,

339). For Plato, art, with few exceptions, is relegated to

being copies of reality when reality itself is a copy of the

essence (or truth) of things that he terms Forms. This

sentiment could account for most representational art we know

of, where the skill of the artist is noted in their ability to

produce a perfect rendering of what is seen.

For Robin Collingwood, “representation is a matter of skill, a

craft of any kind” (1938:42) however, art proper exists solely

in the mind as “imagined” and that which is produced in the

real world; the art object and the process of making itself:

is secondary to this. Collingwood wanted to dismiss technical

formulaic art in order to foster art that was purely

“expressed” by the mind. He says, “to create something means

to make it non-technically, yet consciously and voluntarily”

(128). It is clear that Collingwood has dualist tendencies

when he reduces the bodily actions and the skill of making to

just craft and separates the ‘art’ from the ‘art object’,

thereby elevating the status of art to the imagination. Later,

I will explain how Collingwood sympathises with embodiment,

however firstly we can see how his separation of the artwork

from the maker may be problematic.

If we say we are located in and as part of the world, or,

‘being-in the-world’, this has implications for how artwork is

enacted. When we take pen to paper to draw, it could be argued

that it is not our mind that does the drawing; rather the

drawing is brought into being by our bodies. Merleau-Ponty

suggests,

[…] we cannot imagine how a mind could paint. It is by

lending the body to the world that the artist changes the

world into paintings.

(1993:123)

Indeed, when we try to speculate how the mind could possibly

draw without the body it is very difficult to describe without

referring to sensations of movement only achievable with

knowledge of being-in-the-world, located by our bodies.

For instance, when drawing, we may alter the pressure of the

pen to denote lighter or darker areas, the motions of which

are synchronous with lighter or heavier tensions in the body.

Taking this into consideration when drawing a tree we see in

front of us, these sensations of darkness and heaviness are

also, perhaps, synchronous with how we perceive the tree to

be, ‘the feeler in the felt’ as Merleau-Ponty puts it

(1992:123). The way the drawing comes into being is a

repercussion of us being there, sensing the weight of

branches, or the lightness of leaves as strokes on the paper.

Quality, light, colour, depth, which are there before us,

are there only because they awaken an echo in our bodies

[…] Rather than seeing it, I see according to, or with

it. (1993:126)

Here, Merleau-Ponty discusses how it might be to paint in this

way, and as an example, he holds up the work of Cézanne, who

rejected traditional methods of painting in order to paint his

experience of being-in-the-world, “in that instant when vision

becomes gesture […] when, in Cézanne’s words, he “thinks in

painting””.

When we view the painting Mont Sainte-Victoire [Fig 1] we do not see

the perfect rendering of an external representation that

depicts a mountain scene in every detailed stroke. Rather, we

are drawn to the same moments encountered by Cézanne at the

time of painting, which are revealed to us in the hazy brush-

strokes. The brush-strokes are incomplete actions. Rather than

developing a single-point perspective each stroke draws us

elsewhere on the painting, like a glance or occurrence akin to

the experience of seeing; the canvas becomes the incidental

anchor for this experience and its own “coming-into-being”.

In his essay Sensation as Participation, Clive Cazeaux asserts

that the depiction of the mountain is not a ‘thing’ that is on

the painting, but is in relation to us as painter and

therefore of viewer of the painting,

The “work” in the latticework of senses, bodily joints,

negotiations between space and flat canvas, and colour

distribution that defines the appearance of the mountain

is already present in the painting not as a thing but as

an original and continuously active relationship that

extends to include Cézanne and ourselves. It is in this

respect that the painting is autofigurative and

relational, with these concepts being two sides of the

same coin. The painting is a technology: the origin of

relations – a nexus of paint, surface and environment –

that coordinates the embodied behaviour of painter and

viewer.

(2012:11)

Autofiguration, is a term coined by Merleau-Ponty to describe

how a work of art may come into being. A compound of auto

(self, same, spontaneous) and figurative (representing forms

that are recognizably derived from life) by its own definition

seems to suggest a way of working that might be like

Cézanne’s, which Cazeaux says is a ““middle ground between

representation and abstraction” (2012:14).

However, it would be prudent to clarify here, that in

accepting Merleau-Ponty’s metaphysics we acknowledge that all

art making is embodied. Realist and hyperrealist painting must

also necessarily be embodied and so must work that leans

towards the abstract. The comparisons of this work with work

that shows itself to be embodied might be the subject of

another enquiry. For the sake of this investigation I will be

focusing on art making that follows the premise that to be

autofigurative; the artistic intention (where intention is not an

end but a means to act), the technology and the context need

to be in constant negotiation.

Embodiment, as Merleau-Ponty explains it, calls upon the

senses as something that exists in correlation to the artist;

providing the context for the artist to work autofiguratively.

According to dualism, things might appear as pure phenomenon

or ‘”sense datum”, where a green apple would appear only as a

mental image of ‘green’ and ‘roundness’. For Merleau Ponty,

the senses imply each other; they overlap, coagulate and we

come to know them experientially and habitually through all

manners of their being. The apple can also be ‘sweet’,

‘healthy’ and ‘crunchy’ and attend to hunger, in the same

instance of it being green and round. It has the signifying

power to evoke, as Cazeaux (2002) puts it, “something or

other, where “the other” is important because it confirms that

the meaning is suggestive, dynamic, “moving on,”.

Intention, Interpretation and Style

Far from being a passive colour palette; as Cézanne paints, he

is painting the colours as they come to him in his experience

of them, his own vision returned to him. As the viewer sees

it, they too see that activity, since they ‘share’ the same

sensing capabilities. In this way the application of meaning,

and therefore interpretation in the work, begins with the

artist since, as Cazeaux (2002) puts it, “the senses

themselves are already conceptualized” in the way that the

artist perceives the world.

It follows then, that intention and interpretation are not

mutually exclusive as may be popularly believed, and nor do

they exist on different planes firstly for artist and then for

viewer. It is here that we can call upon Collingwoods ‘art as

imagination’ to suggest that a “sharing” takes place between

the artist and the viewer with the artwork acting as a kind of

gateway. It is the deficit inherent in the ‘unfinished’ or

‘hazy’ brushstrokes that offers itself as something to be

inhabited or shared by the viewer. Collingwood says,

The imaginary experience which we get from the picture is

not merely the kind of experience the picture is capable

of arousing, it is the kind of experience we are capable

of having. […] Apart from the activity of our senses we

should see no colours at all.

(1938:150)

This research does not aim to place value judgments on the

perfect rendering of artworks, rather it aims to discuss the

possible criterion of ‘embodied artwork’ and judge a piece by

its success in this capacity, in both its process and its

interpretation. Therefore, when referring to the ‘hazy,

unfinished’ brushstrokes of Cezanne, rather than being a

critique of his painting skill it is actually a marker for its

success as a piece of embodied art.

Using Cezanne as an exemplar for autofigurative artwork, with

his characteristic ‘hazy’ ‘unfinished’ brush strokes that he

repeated in much of his work; it would be tempting to say that

‘hazy’ and ‘unfinished’ were aesthetic properties of

autofiguration and that this is a style of work. However this is

erroneous, as using the word ‘style’ or ‘property’ in this way

is at cross-purpose with what is an ontological rather than

cultural enquiry.

Autofiguration by its own definition resists being contained

as something that might suggest it is a thing-in-the-world

that can be fashioned or appropriated. If instead,

autofiguration is the coming-into-being of our experience in

the world, then, ontologically speaking, it is the experience

itself that has a certain style that as participators, we can

inhabit or share by the ‘filling in’ of our own subjective

experience.

Cazeaux states that, “an object and a technology can be said

to have a style in as much as they lend themselves to certain

ways of being” (2012:16). Similarly the artists also lend

themselves to certain ways of being; otherwise all instances

of Mont-Sainte-Victoire by other artists would look like ‘a

Cezanne’. Whilst we may share similar sensory and motor

capabilities, Singer suggests,“an artist may be said to

discover his [own] style in the world” (Singer, 1993:238) and

it is the “struggle” of the painter to find the expressive

gestures that authenticate their qualitative experience of it.

It could be argued here, then, that a criterion of embodied

practice is something of an “Intentional spontaneity” and that

if intention and interpretation overlap to inform style, then

style has within it the optionality of intention and

interpretation. The task for the artist will be in the

negotiation with material, which will become a meeting place

of how the artist comes to express. Clay will only appear in a

clay-like way. Indeed, Singer suggests,“The artist is most

aware of his style when it appears as a limitation. (1993:238)

It is well documented that when sculpting his figures, Alberto

Giacometti is known to have become exasperated with his

medium, and at the time of making, his sculptures became

smaller and smaller, with the surface of the clay appearing

feverishly attacked. When we study the marks on his sculptures

[Fig 2] this feverishness is located simultaneously in

ourselves as it is in the impressions in the clay. It is a

time machine back to where Giacometti stood. About his

struggle with perception, Giacometti is noted to have said,

I looked at the people around me and all of a sudden I

saw them as I had never

seen them …Everything was different: depth, objects,

colours, silence … and completely new … a sort

of continual marvelling at everything.

(Morris. 1993:105)

Like with Cezanne’s painting, in Giacometti’s sculptures (and

indeed his drawings of his brother Diego which depict the same

feverish strokes in charcoal) we come to know his visual

process through the feverish style in which they were enacted.

Indeed John Berger said of Giacometti’s process, “It was

the act of looking which kept him aware of being constantly

suspended between being and truth‟ (1970:174).

Giacometti’s style does more than just return visual data to

us, as in hyper-realist painting/sculpture/ or indeed

documentary photography, in these cases, “It is seen ... but

not reflectively known” Crowther, 1993:41), as the style of

the artist is diluted and perception “hypostasized”. Crowther

goes further to say that not only can sensory reflections be

ignited in the viewer, but furthermore the;

[…] strife of world and earth can be embodied in a work

at a level of universal significance. `Irrespective of

the creator or audience’s empirical historical

circumstances, they are joined at a more basic level of

truth.

(1993:97)

If the artist has a certain way of being in the world, their

perception stylising in a particular way; then it could be

claimed that style is located relationally to its own

historical context, at the time of making.

For example, Cezanne’s work comes at a point in history

somewhere between or overlapping both Impressionism and

Cubism. Giacometti’s dramatic way of sculpting comes into

being during post-war existentialism. In this sense, Crowther

suggests what Merleau Ponty fails to fully articulate, that

autofiguration, in the context of the artist, “creates the

world anew” (1993:117), and as such, their style being

“original, innovatory, or exemplary” (1993:117) becomes a

criterion for the success of its embodiment.

We have seen how an artist might come to paint or indeed

sculpt autofiguratively, but the photographer may be doomed to

represent.

Is the photographer doomed to represent?

In its,’ “mechanical genesis” (Sontag,1997:158) the camera is

in some sense a creator of images, and can be held as

independent from the image-maker, for the sheer fact that the

‘making’ takes place in the camera itself. The image-maker can

do a lot to influence that process but nonetheless, that

process, despite all manual adjustments, happens on its own.

This fact has given the camera the status of being an

objective instrument and of showing the ‘truth’.

“Common sense suggests there is a kinship between

photographic images and truth” Scott Walden (2010:91). Here,

Walden reflects on situations that have arisen where people

have been upset that a photograph has been manipulated to show

a different version of what happened; thereby revealing a

deeply embedded relationship between photography and truth.

However, we cannot entirely separate the image-maker from the

camera, even in documentary-style photography which

presupposes an ‘objective’ point of view.

For example, as part of the Farm Security Administration in

1930, photographers were asked to portray the plight of the

poverty-stricken cotton farmers. The resulting images are now

said to be the main record of the Depression era in America.

Photography has an ability to tell a story with a given

message or agenda, just like any other medium such as painting

or writing,

[they] … would take dozens of frontal pictures of their

sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had

gotten just the right look on film – the precise

expression on the subjects face that supported their own

notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture,

exploitation and geometry. … in preferring one exposure

to another, photographers are always imposing standards

on their subjects.

(Sontag,1997:7)

The fact that the image can be manipulated and the camera

settings altered, adjusted and framed in a specific way,

places the photographer in an ‘aggressive’ position, according

to Sontag. She asserts that, “To photograph is to appropriate

the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a

certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge and,

therefore, like power” (Sontag,1997:4) By appropriating

something you are necessarily making an object out of it, to

use as a means to an end; to further an idea which necessarily

perpetuates a subject-object dualism. Furthermore, the

photographer has an agenda to represent, which locates them in

an aggressive, almost god-like position.

In contemporary society, photography assumes representation,

which is why we approach things like air-brushed models in

magazines or pornography with caution. It could be argued that

it promotes an unattainable and potentially damaging view of

both men and women that could be interpreted as reality.

Indeed, the view that representation can be deceiving and

perhaps detrimental for society can be found in Plato’s The

Republic. He suggests representation “has a bad effect in its

audiences, who learn to admire and imitate the faults it

represents.” (Plato, 2003: 349). For Plato, Photography would

be the most extreme example of representation as it is

arguably the most accurate depiction of the external world

possible and therefore would be deemed as mimesis: an imitation

of reality.

Photography as embodied

Merleau-Ponty would reject photography as having the capacity

for being an embodied art form, in Eye and Mind he discusses

with the artist Rodin how, “it destroys the overtaking, the

overlapping, the “metamorphosis” [Rodin] of time” (1993:316),

though here he is talking about photography as he knew it, in

the documentary sense, you might wonder what he would make of

it being used in a completely different way: one that

encapsulates the very overtaking and overlapping he refers to.

John Stezaker, doesn’t take photographs at all, instead he

juxtaposes found-photographs of cultural significance, such as

film icons and splices them with something other to initiate a

third potential for meaning – to be filled by the viewer. In

Siren Song (Fig 3), an upturned colour-postcard of a wave

takes the place of what would be the face of (what we assume

to be) a style-icon or similar, who fills the rest of the

picture-plane. The result is somewhat disturbing; the ‘break’

of the wave has an outline that more-or-less fits with where

the head should be, so that the dynamics of the wave itself;

its power and movement, our gaze both accredits and contrasts

with the vicarious composure of the woman. Like in Cezanne’s

work, our gaze is returned to us, not in ‘hazy unfinished’

brushstrokes, but in the “overlapping” of the sensory with the

documentary; it is a comment on pictures themselves and their

ability to be interpreted differently, perhaps for one, the

wave may make the woman ‘serene’; or another, as ‘angry’: the

piece shows room for interpretation itself.

If I were to elicit a criticism of Stezaker’s work as being

categorised ‘embodied’, it would be to compare the immediacy

of the painters brushstroke in the act of perception, such as

in the work or Cezanne; with the way in which Stezaker

compiles his montages which certainly incur a more drawn-out

artistic process involving various stages. However to dismiss

Stezaker’s work on this basis would be to reduce style to a very

limited time-sensitive perception of the world, where if this

were the case, experience would leave us as soon as the brush

makes contact with the canvas.

In David Hockney’s photo-montages, we encounter the similar

lack of immediacy seen in Stezaker’s work, as the imaginative

moment is extended from the photographs being taken and them

being arranged in the montage until it is ‘finished’.

Additionally, Hockney work does more to dispute Merleau-Pontys

view that the camera “destroys” embodiment by exemplifying the

overlapping Merleau-Ponty suggests it lacks.

Hockney associates cubist painting with his own approach to

photomontage. Cubist paintings require the viewer to let their

eyes be taken by the salient orders inherent within the mark-

making and in doing so, the viewer comes to ‘know’ the reality

of the image. When the painter adds more paint to the canvas

in a cubist painting, it is more than just adding material it

is,

Fresh thoughts and observations […] Much human

experience, when one comes to think about it, is a matter

of layering. We understand the present by comparing it

with the past.

(Gayford. 2011:115)

For Hockney, the problem with one-shot photographs is that

they do not invite the viewer into the scene to look around.

The ‘split-second’ appearance of these images, their single

point-of-view and those paintings that are made from them, do

little to represent the experience of seeing. Hockney’s layers

of photographs are all instances of ‘being there’; each

photograph, like a different hue in Cezanne’s painting;

becomes another thought or viewpoint as they arise, next to

one another, the moment extended through multiple photographs.

In Hockney’s montage David Graves Looking at Bayswater London (Fig 4)

we seem to ‘feel’ our way through the image in order to

decipher it. Our eyes rest on the subjects face, then perhaps

to the window to see what that person is looking at, we notice

Hockney’s own shoes as one of the lower-most photographs and

situate ourselves in the room looking ‘up’ the image from

Hockney’s perspective.

Like in Cezanne’s paintings where the ‘hazy, unfinished’

brushstrokes are revealing in themselves as markers of the

body in relation to the mountain, echoed in the viewer; the

way in which the photographs are laid out are also important

for embodiment. It shows us selection ‘at work’: how our own

visual process works. If it can be agreed that representation

isn’t as the Cartesian Theatre suggest, then vision itself,

like the camera, is not framed. As a montage, the ‘frame’ of

the generic photograph has been lost and instead an ‘edgy’

frame-work takes its place with gaps that could refer to the

deficit present in our own visual sphere, the deficit with

which the viewer ‘shares’ and ‘infills’ with their own

presence. Quite different from if he had taken a photo that

tried to ‘represent’ ‘David Graves Looking at Bayswater

London’; this would have been static, framed by the camera,

rather than then the visual field and not indicative of

Hockney’s presence; or indeed: the full sense of David Graves.

We are instead presented with fragments of Hockney’s actual

experience of being there with the camera and David Graves,

the variety of views and negotiations of which is returned as

one multiplicity.

It is worth asking how it might be to use the camera

autofiguratively, for as it has been said; there is a

perceived lack of immediacy when there is a gap between the

camera-work and the culmination of images for the finished

piece. This infers that there is a difference between embodied

camera practice; the moment when you are ‘with camera’; and

embodied photography; when the process is fulfilled: since the

camera is only the first step in the photographic process. In

this way we can see that Stezakers photo-montages may indeed

be embodied photography in that as a whole piece it can be

described as being embodied. However, the moment the

photograph of the montage was taken was still just a single-

shot photograph and not perhaps autofigurative.

On the other hand, Hockney’s montages may show the camera-work

itself to be embodied by virtue of the decision-making and

salient orders within vision reproduced with the camera. Each

time the camera is moved according to Hockney’s movements, the

camera is ‘correctly’ focused and exposed for each moment;

just as when we look at something, the thing focused on

appears larger and in focus. Additionally, when Cezanne

painted, rather than mix his paint to achieve a colour, he

made certain colours appear through the juxtaposition of

different colours rather than by mixing. The same could be

said of the way in which the photographs are placed together

afterwards; in the mosaic-like positioning comes a fuller

expression of what is there than had it been attempted in one-

single image.

Suzy Oliveira’s photographic sculptures are reminiscent of

Hockney’s montages; in that the photographs taken are put back

together in joined layers with a relief. In Centre Of Your World

(Fig 5) a C-print of a forest floor printed on archival card

forms a 3D wall-mounted relief with layers that advance and

retreat. We view them in much the same way as a Hockney in how

we register the scene; our eyes routed through the prominence

of the layers. However, the main discernable difference is

that the movement is given to us in terms of depth, rather

than flat space. On the 3D ‘edge’ there appears to be motion

blur where the camera has moved to get a different view-point,

it appears almost as if the ground has been ‘cut’ and suggests

the movement atop terrain. This blur may be the insignia of

the artists presence in the same way as we can see Hockneys

shoes; the handling of the camera that gives a sense of being-

there.

In Langdale Fell, Motion Frozen/Frozen Motion (Fig 6), John Hilliard

presents us with a double aperture combining two views of a

partially frozen waterfall. On the left, the ‘frozen motion’

was captured by precisely focusing the camera onto the frozen

river which resulting in the water flowing next to it

registering as a blur. In contrast, on the right hand image,

Hilliard attempted to arrest the flow of water by moving the

camera with the speed and flow of the water; attempting to

make the camera river, as if he were feeling through the camera

itself by using slower shutter speeds to “sense”. This results

in the flow of water being still and the ice being out of

focus and ‘flowing’. The fact that he tried to make the camera

‘like river’ by moving it with particular impositions is more

reminiscent of the immediacy of drawing, where the pen carries

the motion of the wind in the leaves, as concurrent with the

tension in the artists’ hand. However the ‘moment’ of

embodiment is still extended to the act of placing the two

versions together which would have happened at a later stage.

Seen together, the double aperture ‘admits’ the photographers

role in the image-making by revealing the process of their

manipulation in the resulting image; but also ‘admits’ the

cameras own intentions in having a certain way of being. This

is a good example of how artist and material negotiate

together to bring the image into being and of both being part-

of-the-scene. Langdale Fell, Motion Frozen/Frozen Motion shows the

limits of the cameras ability to tell the ‘truth’ but also the

limits of our own ‘vision’; the image is self-conscious and in

a completely different way to Cezanne’s painting: shows

embodiment. Seeing the images together we arrive at a sense of

knowing the scene more completely then if he had used one or

the other image.

Eeva Karhu’s work combines different exposures and angles of

the same view together in one image to create an overall

ambience of a place through light and colour, her work is

often described as impressionistic for these reasons. For

example, Path 1 (Fig 7) is made up of 30 photographs of the same

walk she takes throughout a month in winter, a visual diary of

different moments of the same place, placed upon each other

with varying degrees of opacity; but so that the similar

features shared throughout come through. The differing levels

of opacity reveal the temporal nature of how we perceive in

the different layers so that the final image conveys ‘winter’

more so than had it been just a single split-second image from

a single perspective.

Furthermore her Light Paintings (Fig 8) are a series that I find

particularly evocative. For these montages she photographed

the light that fell on a blank canvas everyday for a year,

then arranged the recordings by seasons. The photographs

varied according to season, time of day, and the light in the

room being natural or artificial. Whilst it could be said that

the camera is doing all the work, it is in the arrangement of

the images that the scope of her project is fully realised,

she says,

At that moment I stepped aside from being the painter,

and let the Sun work on the canvas for a period of one

year. My role was director, to record that act with my

camera combining photographs that I obtained. […] By the

end of the process, after one year, my canvas is still

empty but the evidence of the photons playing in the

surface have been recorded.

(Karhu E. 2007)

The resulting montage of squares of varying shades of night

and day tessellate as a whole. Karhu’s work is autofigurative in

the sense that there is an element of chance in what occurs

between camera/canvas/photographer, though she relies upon the

environment for the work to come into being, she gently

directs in the repetitive nature of the entire process.

The resulting montage is not dissimilar to Hilliard’s piece

Camera Recording its Own Condition (7 Apertures, 10 speeds, 2 mirrors) (Fig 9)

a piece in which photography becomes both subject and object

thus blurring those very boundaries. In this piece Hilliard’s

fingers can be seen taking the photograph and holding up a

smaller mirror so that the camera settings can be seen. The

camera’s own possibilities are clearly seen and yet it is not

a direct representation of reality, rather it is multiple

versions of it made possible only by the artists own intention

to show it in this way.

In my own work, CameraTree (Fig 10)I have tried to take

elements from Hilliards work in the way he makes the camera

‘river’. For me, sensing through the camera, by using its functions

how one might use a pen, appeals as a way of working

autofiguratively where I am depicting a tree in a camera-like

way, as opposed to depicting a tree with a camera in a vision-

like way. I find this approach to be more explicitly

autofigurative than Hockney’s, although he uses the camera in

a vision-like way, he steers the camera, rather than the other

way around. However, perhaps it could be argued that Hockney,

like Oliveira, has more success in the way he frees the

photographic image from having a frame as opposed to

Stezakers, Hilliards and Karhu’s work. Oliveira goes further

than Hockney in this way as it brings the photograph into

relief as well which serves to intrude on the viewers space.

In CameraTree, from many perspectives, on slow-shutter speeds

of varying degrees, I attempted to move the camera with the

speed of the wind moving through the leaves and branches of

the tree. Where lightness and wind was perceived, I attributed

it to slower shutter speeds in the camera and so ‘felt’ it in

this way, through the camera in order to capture it. In

contrast, the trunk of the tree was perceived as heavy and

immobile and this was captured using fast shutter speed,

halting the motion. The result is that the leaves of the tree

appear almost ‘painted’ by the camera, as the light registers

the camera movement creating ‘gestures’, where as the trunk of

the tree is more static and deeper as it is less exposed. Put

back together as a composite, I attempted to reimagine the

tree with the hundreds of exposures taken so that as a whole

image it reappears as a tree. It is was my intention to act in

the moment with the camera in response to the tree as it

appeared to me and so on this basis I would deem it to be

successful. Further practical research might involve an

element of relief like in Oliveria’s work, where the singular

photographs are printed onto clear Perspex, and when arranged

as a composite in relief, the latticework of frame is even

more an ‘illusion’ given to us by the camera.

We can see then, that there are different ways in which

photography can be employed to reveal embodiment, in some it

is seen in the camerawork, but usually it is in the entire

photographic process as a whole. True of all the examples

here, is the way in which they are layered or juxtaposed with

something other, either a layer on top or to the side or; in

which the layering suggest the works coming-into-being and

reveals the negotiation between artist, material and context.

Moving forward, further theoretical research might aim to ask

whether embodied art-making is a more ethical, viewer-friendly

way of making art, whereby the notion of ‘artist as genius’ or

of having power is replaced by one who is part-of-the-world

rather than commenting on it. It might investigate that art

made in this way seeks to include the viewer rather than

alienate at a time when public opinion of the arts is very

critical of its intentions.

Bibliography

Abrams D. (1997) The Spell of the Sensuous, USA: VintageBerger J. (1980). About Looking. London: BloomsburyCazeaux C. (2012) Sensation as Participation. Aesthetic Pathways 2 (2):2-30 Collingwood R.G. (1938) The Principles of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Crowther P. (1993). Art and Embodiment. Oxford: Clarendon PressDescartes R. (1996) Meditations on First Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Gayford M. (2011). A Bigger Message. London: Thames and HudsonJohnson G.A. (ed) (1993) The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader. Evanston: Northestern University PressKarhu E. (2007) Light Paintings. www.helsinkischool.fi/helsinkischool/artist.php?id=9060 (Last Accessed 3/11/2013)Kostelanetz R. (2003) Conversing with Cage. London: RoutledgeMerleau-Ponty M. (2004) The World of Perception. London and New York: RoutledgeMerleau-Ponty M. (2002) Phenomenology of Perception. London and NewYork: RoutledgeMorris F. (1994) Paris Post-War, Art and Existentialism. London: Tate PublishingRadice B (ed) (2003) Plato: The Republic London: PenguinSontag S. (1977). On Photography. USA: PenguinWalden S. (2010) Photography and Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing

Further Reading

Cazeaux C. (ed) (2000) The Continental Aesthetics Reader. USA: RoutledgeCazeaux C. (ed) (2011) The Continental Aesthetics Reader 2nd Edition. USA:RoutledgeJanaway C. (2006) Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art. Oxford: Blackwell PublishingSobchack V. (1992) The Address of the Eye. USA: Princeton University PressWeschler L. (2008) True to Life USA: University of California Press

List of Illustrations

Figure 1: Cezanne. P. Mont Sainte-Victoire seen from Bellevue, Oil on Canvas, Barnes Foundation, Pennsylvania

Figure 2: Giacometti. A. Walking Man II (1960) Bronze, Succession Giacometti / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Figure 3: Stezaker, J. Siren Song V,(2011) Collage

Figure 4: Hockney D. David Graves Looking at Bayswater London (1982)

Figure 5: Oliveira S. Centre of your world (2009) C-Prints on ArchivalCard

Figure 6: Hilliard J. Langdale Fell, Motion Frozen/Frozen Motion (1979) Photograph, Tate

Figure 7: Karhu E. Path 1 Artifical Light (2012) C-Print, Purdy HicksGallery

Figure 8: Karhu E. Light Paintings 01 (2012-2013) C-Print Helinski School

Figure 9: Hilliard J. Camera Recording its Own Condition (7 apertures, 10 speeds, 2 Mirrors) (1971) 70 Photographs on Card on Perspex, Tate

Figure 10: Adams C. CameraTree (2013) Composite Photograph.