Making Light of Art or Art with Lytro?

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If you were an “image maker” back before 1800, odds are you worked in paint, ink, clay or stone, and your objective was representation.  Etch the critter you want to kill on the shaft of a spear or the wall of a cave and you increased your chances for a successful hunt.  If you were both a good hunter and a talented artist, maybe Og would slip you an extra hunk of Mastodon haunch to do some painting on his wall or weapon.  Fast forward 20,000 years, and the ability create a particularly godly rendering of the monarch or prelate could get you a pretty cushy stay in Athens, Alexandria, or Rome. 

Come the 14 and 15 hundreds, and the dominant artists of the Renaissance were employing canvas, oil paints, and occasionally ground glass from the thriving foundries out on Murano to craft portraits and landscapes that seemed real enough to stride off the wall and stroll around the piazza.  Brush and palette-type image-makers continued to thrive well into the 1800s.  Anybody who was anybody had a cluster of oils adorning the walls – like some eerie foreshadowing of today’s refrigerator doors or cubicle walls.  Consider James Whistler’s homage to his mother; still mainstream when painted in 1871.  But by then the game was definitely afoot.

As far back as 1826 Frenchman Joseph Nicephore had used a camera obscura to burn a permanent image of the view from his garden onto a doped pewter plate.  He called it heliography, or sun-drawing.  It was, in reality, the beginning of photography.  By mid-century image-makers were toting boxes of various shapes and sizes in to the halls of congress, the homes of the high and mighty, the backwaters of jungles, and onto any battlefield to which they could finagle access.  Photography arrived and changed image making for forever.

Photography was a double-edged sword.  It certainly loped the legs out from under the portrait painter.  Who needed a “close to real” painting when you could have something else that was “picture perfect”?  On the other hand, from this newly mandated supine perspective, artists began to look beyond the blinders of representationalism.  It is not by chance that Impressionism sprang onto canvases in the late 1800s, just as photography was claiming control of portraiture. 

Almost without exception, significant innovations in our ability to create images change the entire spectrum of human expression.  Consider these three connected innovations:
Point and shoot digital cameras, their inclusion into cellphones, and, the Internet. The result? At the end of May of this year, Facebook announced that its users photo archives had exceeded 100 billion images.  That is a lot of refrigerator doors, and an incredible number of dumb cat pictures.  But it is also a phenomenon that we should not ignore.  The iconic photographer, Ansel Adams, used to distinguish between “scenic beauty” and artistic beauty.  Scenic beauty is what you see on postcards.  Artistic beauty is what you see in images created by Adams, and Margaret Bourke-White, and Yousuf Karsh.  I would hazard to guess that the majority of Facebook photos contain neither scenic nor artistic beauty.  They are images of convenience posted as a shorthand peek into our experiences.  Neither the intent nor the impact is aesthetic.  They are reportorial – because the capabilities of the technology incline us to that usage:  Point. Click. Dog. Child. Vacation. Flat tire.  Photography trivialized.

But there is a new game in town.  Its name is Lytro.

The short explanation is that Lytro is a company founded by a freshly-minted Stanford Ph.D. by the name of Ren Ng that is going to put the light field camera in to our hands.  Whether it will be in our phones or a stand-alone unit is still up for grabs, but we will have it.  Dr. Ng intends to see to that.

“Cool.” I thought.  .  .  .  .  “What’s a light field camera?” [And, I’ve taught photography in a very respectable university!] 

I now know that a light field camera is one that grabs and stores all the light being reflected by whatever is in front of the camera.  That, too, seems something of a yawner until you think about what it means to have ALL the light that is reflected by whatever is in front of a camera.

Remember Joseph Nicephore and his heliography? Sun drawing?  And remember what it became? Photography?  That’s right – photo = light.  Photography is “light drawing.”  Photography has, until Lytro, grabbed SOME of the light being reflected by whatever is in front of the lens and makes a drawing with that little bit of light.  Without getting all warm and geeky about this, being able to grab ALL the light, store it, and play with it all you want AFTER clicking the shutter is, well, incredibly warm and geeky – and artistically awesome.  I understand that it used to take scads of cameras and computers to generate those “ALL the light” images.  Lytro does it with cellphone size technology.  Truly wonderful.  Why?

Just three examples:

Depth of field.  The depth of field in any photograph is the range of the image that is in focus.  Think of a photo as a loaf of sliced bread.  You are looking in one end of the loaf and the picture ends at the other end of the loaf.  The depth of field is the number of slices that are in focus.  Depth of field is one of the things that photographers who are concerned with artistic beauty agonize over.  Focus draws the eye, de-focus feathers attention.  Deciding which slice or slices of the loaf you want to be in focus is an artistic decision.  BL [Before Lytro] you had to decide on the desired slices beforehand and adjust light sources and the opening of the lens and the shutter speed that would – depending on the light sensitivity of your film – allow just the right amount of light into the camera so that it would draw the loaf of bread so that only the slices you wanted to be in focus, would be in focus.  Clear?  Of course not, and it no longer matters.  What is important is that an “ALL the light” image let's you determine depth of field AFTER you take the picture – and you can keep changing your mind and/or create multiple depths of field.  Make slice one clear, fuzz out 2 through 6, 7 and 8 clear, and so on.  Old images quickly become, well, toast.

Example two: Shutter delay.  Gone.  You had to push the shutter halfway so that, WAIT, the autofocus could decided which slices of the loaf you wanted in focus, adjust the light and shutter speed and NOW you can take the picture.  Oops.  Baby smile gone, speeding athlete out of frame, whatever.  Not with Lytro.  One click of the shutter gathers ALL the light – gobbles the whole loaf.

Example three: Flash.  Surely you jest.  Lytro grabs ALL the light, and rarely needs more.

I better stop now.  I’m feeling a little lightheaded.  Oh, I know, people will do silly things with it.  We’ll see images with more focus highlights than anyone could absorb.  Those will be horrible.  But the others?  Oh, the possibilities .  .  .  .

All right, way down here is the link to the Lytro picture gallery.  I knew if I put it up higher on the page, you’d never get here.  Enjoy.

http://www.lytro.com/picture_gallery
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Life Before a Lens

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We went to a birthday party the other day.  A young friend was turning 40.  It was a lovely gathering, and one of those days for which folks move South.  The air was soft, daffodils nodded sleepily, and trees covered with white and pink blossoms perfumed the air and cascaded petals with every passing breeze. The guests were a mixed lot, generationally speaking.  We were not the only couple beyond 60, and there were a number of thirty-somethings with toddlers in tow; older children in their late teens and early 20s amused their younger siblings. I knew enough about the crowd to know that the photographs being snapped were going to end up on online. “Interesting crew,” I thought. “Young enough to Facebook, and old enough to think about it.”

I taught photography once, at a university long ago and faraway, and have always been fascinated by the effect of cameras on people; on both subject and photographer.  As a photographer, I was well acquainted with the camera as shield.  Despite being more than a little chary of heights, I could peer fearlessly into the most dizzying abyss – as long as I did it through a camera’s viewfinder.  Strange, not? More interesting though, is the effect of cameras on the people before the lens.

The one photographic affinity I can claim with the iconic Ansel Adams is that we both married women who hated to be photographed.  Far more common is the urge to be seen, and seen in a particular way.  Pointing a camera at a group of kids is a transformative act.  They pose, they smile coyly, they smirk, they fain the total disinterest of the Gap kids they see in the magazines and store windows.  In short, they present to the lens the version of themselves they wish to be made public; they perform.

My undergraduate degree is in Theater, and for the first couple of decades of my life my plan was to become God’s gift to the American stage.  God, apparently, had not been informed.  I did, however, learn a great deal about the nature of performance.  I had the good fortune, while studying at Kalamazoo College, to be directed by visiting artist Karl Malden, who had trained under Lee Strasburg at The Group Theater in New York.  Malden, who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in Streetcar Named Desire, taught us that performing meant, in part, filling the theater with your character’s personality.  You had to "be" the role so completely that you radiated the character’s essence with such intensity that you “spoke” to the back of the house even while silent.  It is emotionally, psychically and physically exhausting.  And if you do it long enough, it is not difficult to lose track of where the self stops and a character begins.  There are real personal risks to a life spent in performance.  Ask Charlie Sheen.

So, I found myself musing as I looked around the sunny birthday scene, how does a life change when you expect every moment to be captured, chronicled and Facebooked? What is the nature of a life lived before a lens?  What is the result of perpetual performance?  Does “who we become” change when more people know us via a “performed existence” in social media than know us as the result of a shared life in the real world?

This is when I am supposed to lay a little wisdom on you, to give you a thoughtful answer to the questions I just posed.  I would if I could.  Instead, I am afraid I can offer only guesses. My guess is that we put too much stock in photographs these days.  We spend too much time recording and distributing events.  We should be more focused on living the event than on reporting it.

Does that mean we stop taking photographs?  Call for a moratorium on home videos?  Of course not.  Whether we pay the local 15th century portrait painter, or snap a shot with our 21st century smartphone, we will always try to capture the precious moments of our lives in a way that aids memory when memory begins to fade.  And we will want to share those experiences.  But I would caution us about watering the wine.  You sip the best vintage straight.  Perhaps it is the 20th century in me, maybe faint echoes of even earlier times, but I still feel that the most precious memories, the deepest emotions, deserve the honor of, if not privacy, then at least a degree of exclusivity.

You can now “friend” the Pope.  “Yo, Pontiff! Wazzup?”  I think not.  If I have a concern for young people growing up before a lens, "performing" their self even as they construct it, it is that they will lose sight of their precious individuality as they co-mingle it with the other 500 million folks living before the lens.  Against the backdrop of a conflagration, the flickering of a single candle seems insignificant.  And yet, it is quite lovely.
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