<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by pareidoliac</i>
<br />Here's am article that appeared in Raw Vision magazine # 49 by Gary Monroe, photographer, author, and a PHOTOGRAPHY INSTRUCTOR at Daytona Beach Community College.
www.garymonroe.net/article-ressler.htm
Fred, the article is very interesting and it does re-inforce what I first thought, the first time I read a blurb on your work. Plus, I also learned a couple of things from this article. I want to post a couple of excerpts with comment or question.
Excerpt: "Ressler’s photographs are composed solely of the play between light and shadow. His technique is simple and straightforward. He has the film processed and the photographs printed at a custom laboratory. There is no room for photographic or digital manipulation."
Me>> I understand what he's saying here. Your setup is one of dropping off the undeveloped film at your custom laboratory. So, on the surface everything appears to be what you say it is, and there's "no room for manipulation". It all seems obvious to me, and straightforward, but in all fairness, have you ever been asked to prove anything. For instance, has anyone ever asked to see the negatives after the fact of getting them developed, and the prints copyrighted? Has anyone (art dealer or critic) ever done a side by side comparison with one of the copyrighted photos with the negative? That one step alone would go a long way towards ruling out a whole host of after the fact manipulation.
This may seem nuts to you, because well respected art people have done whatever they deem necessary, but "proof" has a different standard. Think of what the FBI might do, or a good team of legal investigators who for some reason or another had to prove that "Image A" came from "Negative A", and you'll see what is being asked here. This part seems like the easy part (proving the chain from snapping the picture, to negative, to print), but unfortunately that wouldn't be everything. But it would help.
Excerpt: "According to Ressler the images are always there, ‘filtering through the trees, it’s just a matter of how clearly defined’. His interest, though, is not in the passing fancy, of finding resemblances to the natural or super-natural world. This is further reinforced by the fact that his photographs do not contain any real objects, such as branches or leaves. "
Me>> This is interesting. What does he mean by "do not contain any real objects, such as branches or leaves?" Surely we are looking at shadows of real objects such as branches or leaves, aren't we? Or are you deliberately trying to capture shadows that have obscured the fact that what we're looking at are shadows of leaves and branches. I don't quite understand this part, but it seems important to me.
Excerpt: "All of Ressler’s photographs are rendered in as much focus as possible (using an old Nikkormat manual camera). Paradoxically though, due to the nature of the shadows themselves, the image is never keenly resolved. Ressler’s unique photographic practice highlights the difficulty of asserting one type of epistemological reality or set of beliefs over another. Neither the shadows nor the photographs are definitive and yet it is this lack of definition that gives them their fluidity and meaning. They are inversions or negative reproductions of the real."
Me>> This is the "blurry" part that I tried to explain with my little demo. The blurriness comes not from a state of non-focus, but rather from the nature of shadows of overlapping leaves 20 feet away or so.
rd
