Interstitial #9. City borders. Pictures from the suburban Milano.

A message from the afterlife and a massage from the past

I'm not sure if my Internet good friend Mike Chisholm was including me in his resurrection post focusing on the blogs' blight but I suspect that for the usual parameters this blog may actually be dead. Instead, not to reassure anybody, it is not. To be honest I find that the migration of compulsive blog followers to other shores (facebook above all) is somewhat a liberation. Several times I felt guilty to not post enough but as I see it now it's only because it takes time, and a lot of effort to say something that i feel strongly enough.
In the meanwhile my researches on paths, trails and roads took me to the medieval pilgrimages and in the detail that of the "Camino de Santiago". It is a bit early to say something that has not been said upon though. Mainly what fascinates me there is the spread of visual resemblances along the various routes, and the related issue of how visual cognition is transmitted among us. The idea that I started to caress is that a trail may also be considered a visual media, a very ancient one that, perhaps, we even share with other species. This idea was reinforced by a personal revival I had for Herbert Marshall McLuhan's "The media is the massage" in particular I've found these youtube videos: part1 and part2 that I think maybe of interest to anyone who's engaged in understanding the current state of things in visual, and not only, media. An other interesting suggestion came from this post that I've found that describes a tradition in molding trees along pathways walked by American Aboriginal peoples.
As an aside consideration a thing that amazed me is McLuhan's prediction of the "easternalization" of the western culture that he viewed as a consequence of the diffusion of the electronic devices (or "electric" given the zeitgeist he was in). His general idea was that the spread of "electric" devices would led, as a consequence, to the lost of the western obsession with the identitarian ego as opposed to a "into the flow" perception of the self that, he says, characterizes the eastern culture.

Un messaggio dall'aldilà e un massaggio dal passato

Non sono sicuro se il mio buon amico Internet Mike Chisholm mi abbia incluso nel suo post sulla moria dei blog ma ho il sospetto che in base ad alcuni parametri questo blog possa considersi morto. Invece, non per rassicurare alcuno, non lo è. Per essere onesto trovo che la migrazione verso altre spiagge (facebook sopratutto) dei seguitori compulsivi di blog sia una liberazione. Spesso mi sono sentito in colpa di non "postare" a sufficienza ma per come la vedo ora è solo perchè ci vuole tempo e un sacco di sforzi per dire qualcosa che senta con sufficiente intensità. Nel frattempo la mia ricerca sui cammini, sentieri e strade mi ha portato ai pellegrinaggi medioevali e nel dettaglio sul "Cammino di Santiago". È tuttavia presto per dire qualcosa che non sia già stato detto in merito. Quello che mi affascina in tutto ciò è lo spargersi delle assomiglianze lungo le diverse strade e l'argomento relativo di come la cognizione visiva venga trasmessa tra di noi. L'idea che ho iniziato a carezzare è che un cammino possa anche essere considerato un media, uno molto antico che, forse, condividiamo anche con altre specie. L'idea è stata rinfrozata da un revival personale che ho avuto per McLuhan e il suo "Il media è il massaggio" e in particolare ho trovato questi video su youtube: "parte 1" e "parte 2" che penso possano essere d'interesse per chi sia impegnato a capire lo stato delle cose nei media visivi e non solo. Una altra interessante suggestione è venuta da questo post che descrive la tradizione di modellare le piante lungo i percorsi di alcuni Aborigeni Americani.
Come considerazione a lato quello che mi ha stupito è la predizione di McLuhan circa l'orientalizzazione della cultura occidentale che egli ha visto come conseguenza della diffuzione dei dispositivi elettronici (o elettrici dato lo spirito dei tempi in cui era immerso). L'idea generale è che il diffondersi di dispositivi "elettrici" avrebbe portato, come conseguenza, alla perdita della ossessione occidentale incentrata sull'ego identitario opposta a quella orientale che è, lui dice, caratterizzata da una percezione del sè inserita nel flusso.

Milan ordinary landscapes. Giardino Robert Baden-Powell #7

Milano Giardini (gardens) Robert Baden-Powell

A separate reality

“This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”

Taken from "The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams

In the last post I've made some remarks about the status of a picture with regard to its genesis. Looking back I think that I need to make some adjustments to what may seem, otherwise taken, a gigantic naivete.

A picture, or a photo, has its own reality as an artefact. Itself a picture defines a space. Its own, the one enclosed in its boundaries. As such a photo may be considered an endpoint to a process of production. At least this is what is implied by “having a purpose” or being “finalized”. A photo, however, is not exactly a finite object, it is, so to say, only one half of it. What remains is to be supplied by the viewer along the different, implied, reading axis. More, in our times, the support is no longer needed to have some very large circulation. Loosing its body has photography lost its finalization ? I'm not sure of this. Browsing trough photography blogs there seems to be a recognizable nostalgia of the print on one side and “a not totally clear” onto the other, but the line is starting to get clearer demarcating the former photographer's approach to the Internet as a device to point to something else living outside (the prints) from the ones that are interested in exploiting directly the media as a transport device for the, now incorporeal, exchange of little pieces of space.

But just to divagate from a theme ways too hot for this summer there is an other interesting question rising up laterally. Once we start to consider that of a picture a space of its own we are opening the possibility to explore it visually. This metalevel has been achieved in the early times of photography itself. The Alinari where among the first to make a successful and profitable use of photography in representing pictorial spaces. In recent times Richard Prince had a vast media exposure on the question of reuse (aka explorations, or appropriation) of ready made visual artefacts. Back in the seventies, when conceptual art was made, many photographers worked on the theme of reuse and exploration of the two dimensional world of past or utilitarian imaging. I suppose that each of those in my age has got some kind of inspiration from that. The “not Art” applied to photography at the time, however, relegated those quests to the oblivion.

So it is with great appreciation that I salute a bold move from a small Italian Art Gallery: “The Studio Glenda Cinquegrana”, based in Milan, that is trying to promote, not without merits, the works from a young Artist who is focusing, mainly, for my knowledge, on the “flatlands” of past landscape painting.

Milan ordinary landscapes. Giardino Robert Baden-Powell #6

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Milano Giardini (gardens) Robert Baden-Powell

"When the real world changes into simple images, simple images become real beings and effective motivations of a hypnotic behavior. The spectacle as a tendency to make one see the world by means of various specialized mediations (it can no longer be grasped directly), naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs; the most abstract, the most mystifiable sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of present day society," Guy Debord “The Society of the Spectacle”.

A picture, it does not matter that much how produced, is itself an object. For a lot of people it may be even an object of desire. The desire to make something similarly spectacular, or beautiful or so. For others the need to have it is the most "natural" consequence. Purpose may be a good practical key for interpreting the meaning coming from the match between the photographers intentions and the addressee, as Mike Chisolm pointed out in an interesting post. To transform real things into objects of desire is an ancient wanna be dating back to Midas' King myth. The consumerist society give us only this opportunity of expression ?

Since I'm a strong, and somewhat masochistic, idealist (or if you are better a giant egocentric) I firmly believe that there may be other ways or purposes. One of them is certainly, as much as cicadas do, to mark my place in this world, as a viewer. In this case photographs are, for me, simply an outcome of a stream of conscious viewing.

Landscape photography, among other genres, has lots of roots in the need to transform places in something that can be sold. It's not a case that one of the most celebrated, Ansel Adams, landscapists started exactly from that point as he points out in his biography; certainly he succeeded. But on the darker side he also succeeded in the production of that unhappiness that may be subsumed under the “Vacation blues”, that subtle depression that takes in when the place you desired so much does not match with the projection build upon the encountered images.

It seems to me that this may be the zeitgeist of landscape photography, a profound tension among the need to built up objects of desire and the need to communicate the experience, not always positive, of looking at our world.

But getting to more amusing things, the strict followers of this blog certainly know of my personal interest in the Situationist International. Recently I've been amused by what I would call “Born Again Situationism” that seems to pop up every where, even in suspicious academic contexts. I do not have any shareable key to understand why except to read it in a postmodern light as pointed out by this paper.

Milan ordinary landscapes. Giardino Robert Baden-Powell #5

Milano Giardini (gardens) Robert Baden-Powell

Milan ordinary landscapes. Giardino Robert Baden-Powell #4

Milano Giardini (gardens) Robert Baden-Powell

Milan ordinary landscapes. Giardino Robert Baden-Powell #3

Milano Giardini (gardens) Robert Baden-Powell

Many of you certainly wonder when I will continue the series on Philosophy. Well It's coming soon. In the meantime I let you speculate on to the clockwise and counter clockwise "gestalt" of the wisterias, Glicini in Italian, (scroll down for the English version).

Milan ordinary landscapes. Giardino Robert Baden-Powell #2

Milano Giardini (gardens) Robert Baden-Powell

An other quote to continue the previous post discourse:

"... What we need is a new definition. The one we find in most dictionaries is more than three hundred yeas old and was drawn up for artists. It tells us that a landscape is a "portion of land which the eye can comprehend at a glance." Actually when it was first introduced (or reintroduced) into English it did not mean the view itself, it meant a picture of it, an artist's interpretation. It was his task to take the forms and colors and spaces in front of him -- mountains, river, forest, fields, and so on -- and compose them so they made a work of art ... " J. B. Jackson "The word itself" from "Discovering the vernacular landscape"

In Italian, a Latin based language, the word "landscape" is rendered as "paeasaggio" from the French "paysage". The root is a bit different though, coming form "pagus", the village or administrative country unit and formerly "border milestone stick into the earth". However The European Landscape Convention endorses the equivalence in its official text:

“Landscape” means an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors (EN)

"Paesaggio" designa una determinata parte di territorio, così come è percepita dalle persone, il cui carattere deriva dall'azione di fattori naturali e/o umani e dalle loro interrelazioni (IT)

I've opened this series with some pictures of a couple of kinds of wisteria. Thanks to a willing friend here is a nice, and informed, digression, scroll down for the English version.

Milan ordinary landscapes. Giardino Robert Baden-Powell #1

Milano Giardini (gardens) Robert Baden-Powell

Just a short quote for this post.

... when I was photographing in Vermont, photographing the landscape, I didn't know what the landscape was ... I mean the landscape was picture to me. What I was trying to find was the ideal landscape that I'd seen in other pictures. I could never find it, but it was the landscape I was looking for. And so somehow even though I was trying, sometimes, I could never see the real landscape. I could never see the landscape that was there.I was always seen through this haze of other pictures, that in some ways I was trying to reproduce, or reproduce the feeling of it.

"Thoughts on Landscape" by Frank Gohlke

Milan ordinary landscapes. Porta Garibaldi #14. February 2010

Milano Gioia / Garibaldi. Drift/Dèrive map

Last week I took a small vacation away from the blog. As usual in Italy the months preceding summer time are the ones where every body decides to do things (just to stop a few months later and resume operation in the late autumn). This generally ends up leaving a short time for everything. In some ways it is a habit coming from the times when life was marked by the seasonal vacancies. But, wherever it may come, it is a clear manifest of our incapacity to act in a socially organized way. But just to make something useful out of this post I like to point you to a book that I'm reading with great joy: "Thoughts on Landscape" by Frank Gohlke. The book consists mainly in interviews, intros and a few articles, the paperback edition is more than enough for quality. But even in the, somewhat, unordered collection, the book contains some very interesting thoughts expressed in plain and straight concepts. His interviews are touching in a sense I have rarely found in a book containing writings from a photographer, even in words he is clearly motivated by a search for a truthful expression of his visions and experiences. In books written by photographers we got used to a posthumous kind of rational reconstruction of their acting, it is not the case here. Gohlke may even seem to be the incarnation of the conscious landscapist. Something, I bet, many of us, aspire to be.

"I just love the way things look, all things, even if they're awful things. You know, the necessity to make moral judgements about whether this or that thing is desirable comes later, but what I'm motivated by, first of all, is just a fascination, a love for the fact that things exist in the world; they have a certain appearance and that it's possible with a camera to create a picture out of those appearances, and if you do it right, even to suggest that those appearances might have certain meanings or implications for us.
Frank Gohlke"

Milan ordinary landscapes. Porta Garibaldi #13. February 2010

Milano Gioia / Garibaldi. Drift/Dèrive map

Blurb and an old flame. Part three

Some handy references for those willing to adventure into the LaTex land. To start with some motivations here is an advocacy article: LaTeX isn't for everyone but it could be for you. For a first intro see A (Not So) Short Introduction to LaTeX2e. But the fastest way, if you want to experiment with it, is to install a version of "xelatex" on your computer, it is available for all most any operating system, and give it a try starting from the files mentioned in the last related post.

But even if your more interested in using your wysig have a look here for some ideas in the design of the book: tufte-latex, LaTex users will find it ready to use. Have a look at the pdfs available and mainly to the one that focuses on the book style.

In my first try, for blurb, I want to put the image slightly off centre. How to arbitrarily position an image into a page is a thing that is not present in Eric's example. The task may be addressed via the package named, quite obviously, "photo" that lets you manage the picture as a "float" object, the package is available in every LaTex2e distribution. Anyway you may find it here or in the CTAN TeX/LaTex repository.

Milan ordinary landscapes. Porta Garibaldi #12. February 2010

Milano Gioia / Garibaldi. Drift/Dèrive map

Blurb and an old flame. Part two

The first impact of blurb, with regard to the practical help the site hands out, is of dismay. "Hell another site for Adobe devotees" was my exclamation. Just to say it plainly and once: I think that Adobe is exercising an unfair use of its dominant market position both in pricing and in sloppy quality of the software. But, fortunately, while Photoshop may have no rivals, Adobe's tool for desktop publishing has some fierce rivals in the Open Source world, and, much more important, on Linux (I'm a linux user and programmer till the day one when in circa 22 posts I've got it's former version in the usenet news). The simplest and easiest one to use is Scribus; to start out I've made some experiments with it. The Metrics from the blurb calculator were easy to adapt after having grasped the intricacies of blurb margin and boundaries settings (the mentioned paper model helped a lot).Scribus however is a wisyg and that means that it is quite easy to get to a first draft, but it requires a lot of clicks and it is short on automation. Yes there is a templating engine but it seems best suited for short brochures. Changing the style of an already made book requires a lot of repetitive and not automated work. Till now my needs always have been of pure text pdf writing. For that I've always resorted to an other tool: TeX/LaTex, in my opinion the best publishing software ever made and fully available in the open source free for the entire humanity. Unfortunately TeX/LaTex is a bit uncomfortable to use for a total end user. Mainly you operate it from the command line, you may as well resort to and interactive shell, but I think that at the end the command line version is simpler to use and after some exercise it is easy to make a set of automated scripts that in a few steps will reassemble the entire book. So I decided to do some googling to find out what was available from the LaTex community for composing books and photobooks targeted at blurb. As for almost everything in the TeX/LaTex world I did not come away empty handed. To begin with you may start from this resource that Eric Jeschke kindly made available in a true open source spirit. The post comes complete of a downloadable archive containing the basic scripts and the picture of one of his books. You may either study the way in which the metrics is laid out or simply assemble his book till you are sure to have a fully functional LaTex setup. There are two supported formats one to build up a blurb pdf and one to make a web version for the web.

Milan ordinary landscapes. Porta Garibaldi #11. February 2010

Milano Gioia / Garibaldi. Drift/Dèrive map

For a definition of "Dèrive" see here. For the entire ongoing series of detours around the Garibaldi building site see here.

Blurb and an old flame. Part one

It's my turn to get interested in photo books. Frankly I have some doubt, on the ethic side, about the opportunity to participate in the great consumption of natural resources that the photographic allows. Digital, for me, represented a renewed interest in the thing for its seemingly low profile in resource hungriness. But there is a side in which its undeniable that an Art object needs to be an object of desire too. So online books in some ways seem to be a sort of sustainable compromise. The great advantage is that in the end only the strict demanded ones get printed and thanks to the parallel pdf version the option in circulation may not suffer from any restriction.

After having evaluated several services I finally landed to blurb for my first attempts. I'm aware that it may not be the best one. But it seems certainly the most frequented one in photographic realm.

Having made the first step the second one that comes in immediately after is how to do it. As a Humanist with a romantic side, I've always loved well composed and printed books. It is incredible the amount of knowledge involved in a book design, in our era of wysigs it is easy to forget about it. Every thing seems easy and only a matter to test and try. The results, however, are not always so good, as you may easily find out by yourself by looking at several previews available online. Plus I have a personal dismay for the huge amount of time that the test and try practice requires. So I went to a library and bought an old book making manual, just at least have an idea of what was needed and discovered the joys of the material practice of the cut and paste, no not the one you perform with a computer, but the one you make with a ruler and a cutter to build up a model of what you are looking for.

Milan ordinary landscapes. Porta Garibaldi #10. February 2010

Milano Gioia / Garibaldi. Drift/Dèrive map

For a definition of "Dèrive" see here. In the last months I've mainly focused on the preliminary phase of photo making, that I've called "inventio", a term borrowed from Leonardo Da Vinci's "Treatise on Painting" (as you may know anachronism is another obsession of mine). The way in which a photographer borders his/hers performing space certainly constitutes an important part of his/hers identity.

In the meantime, while busily reading philosophy contributions to the topic of physical/conceptual space bounding, I've came across this interesting study on mazes, labyrinths and tracking from BLDGBLOG.