Do you Want to Look at a Picture of the Thing we are Looking at?

In a magazine cartoon, I think it was the New Yorker, a family on the Staten Island ferry are looking at the Statue of Liberty. The mother with android in hand says: “Do you want to look at a picture of the thing we are looking at?”

In the 1966 Antonioni film “Blow Up”, a fashion photographer while walking through a London park takes a candid picture of a couple and inadvertently records what appears to be a murder scene. A dead body in the bushes and the couple possibly involved.

In an episode of the British T.V. comedy series “Blackadder” Sir Edmond Blackadder hires an artist to hide behind a curtain and secretly paint a picture of the Duke of Wellington while engaged in a secret tryst with a wench. It is the 18th century and photography has not yet been invented. The painting is then used as leverage against the Duke who has it in for Sir Edmond’s employer, the young Prince George.

U.S. Army reserve specialist Lynndie England was sentenced by court marshal to serve time in prison for her role as a participant in prisoner abuse and torture while she was a guard at the Abu Grahib prison in Baghdad. The incidents came to public attention because snap shots were taken of the abused prisoners in “comical” humiliating and tortuous poses and showing Lynndie England other prison guards present in the pictures grinning into the camera.

David Hockney in the 1970’s produced a series of photo collages known as Joiners, a patchwork of Polaroids taken of the same subject one small part at a time and united to produce a complete composite image of the subject; much like the satellite composite imaging used to produce maps of the Earth or other bodies. The Hockney Joiners are unlike the satellite composite imagery in that the resulting maps have an intended linear and planar continuity, and the images are taken at precise vantage points to produce the continuity. The Hockneys are more visually related to Picasso and Braque cubist painting by way of the inherent fragmentation due to the picture taking process: precise vantage and accuracy are not of prime concern. Unlike cubism, where the abstract structure is the primary concern, Hockney produced his Joiners entirely from an assemblage of pictorial elements, building them into a single image composed of the actual images of the components; similar to the devise used by Kurasawa in “Rashomon.” The characters in the film provide their own version of the same incident which they have witnessed. Their combined accounts provide the us with a profoundly conflictive and inconclusive view of the incident and if we were judge or jury we would not be able to decide a verdict. Yet, the combined component versions of the story as a devise through the various accounts produce a cohesive and comprehendible plot and artist conclusion. Unlike Hockney’s Joiners, “Rashomon” focuses on the psychological and social aspects of humanity as the component parts of the piece, the phenomenological, while Hockney’s Polaroids are purely objective imagery and basically phenomena.