Mental And Depictive Space · Friday January 27, 2006
Traditionally, a photograph is a piece of paper coated with light sensitive metallic salts; that is flat, has edges, and is static. A photograph is a physical object frequently placed in an album, frame or wallet. The frame, defined first by the photographer and secondarily by the owner – if not the same person – is part of the transformative process, rendering an abbreviated moment into a permanent 2D representation. In addition to this literal existence, and what might be called its depictive space, a photograph simultaneously depicts a mental space. It depicts a cat, dog, sunset or loved person, but also the meaning those things had for the photographer: which, for the majority of photographs, represent a shared and easily understood visual language.
‘Mental space’ is sometimes more complex, or subtle, and considerable less obvious. A photograph may have a deep depictive space, as a record of receding planes of focus, but a shallow mental space. Or it may have a shallow depictive space, but – arguably – a complex, if not a deep mental space. One of the prevailing fashions in photography is the ‘flat’ or ‘deadpan’ aesthetic, seen in photographs of Lee Freidlander, William Eggleston, and the contemporary works of Sarah Jones. There is a deliberately uniform focus where no part of the picture is privileged over others, and an arrangement of parts – typically, of urban, domestic or possibly industrial ephemera – that have no inherent value or meaning. Space is deliberately flattened, meaning is deliberately avoided, and meaning is created paradoxically by adopting this strategy, so the photography becomes a thinking or conceptual process. I don’t pursue this extensively because it’s not inherently beautiful or decorative, but have examples nonetheless:
I quite enjoy the deadpan aesthetic, and it reminds me of the paintings of Edward Hopper. Hopper also conveyed psychological meaning, or ‘mental’ space, by his conscientiously flattening technique. The aesthetic result is an image that looks back at you, forcing you to consider your own viewing and psychological process. Like a mirror reflection it simultaneously shows you something and nothing, and thus contains and expresses the psycho-dynamic of image-meaning. By not making any statement, or establishing any visual or semantic hierarchy, the viewer is free to consider their own mental constructions.
I take greater pleasure in a beautiful landscape, especially if it is mountainous. I would not accept graffiti, washing-up in a sink, or disused industrial machinery, as a photographic subject to hang on my walls. Nor would I use such images as a screensaver or desktop on a computer. I enjoy the vast depictive space of a panorama or distant peaks, which for me has a corresponding mental space: I am familiar with the psychological freedom of mountain walking.
