Wednesday, August 22, 2018

Photo Studies

When I was in Indiana, I took dozens of snapshots of a slide. This slide.

It was out in a field with a whole collection of elderly playground equipment, and I found it visually interesting. So I did a study of it.

In painting, a “study” is a sketch (or multiple sketches) done in preparation for the final painting. It’s an exploration of a subject, with attention to the problems you’ll likely encounter while rendering it. If you’re drawn to the way an article of clothing drapes, for example, but you’re not familiar with the fabric, maybe you try a few ways of painting the fabric, to see what happens. You also experiment with design elements like like color, lighting, and composition. You might learn that to illuminate the flower you want to feature, you’ll need the light to come in at a different angle than you first imagined.

The idea is the same in photography, but the execution’s different. In photography, you can’t use a brush stroke to change the shape of the subject. There are filters and focus tricks and so forth, but film is more like a mirror than a canvas. What you see is what you get. If you want a different picture of the same subject, you’ll have to find a new way of seeing it.

I’m not sure how the professionals do it, but my study of the slide was pretty methodical, at least at first.

I began at a distance. I chose a starting position that filled my frame with the subject, focused, and took a picture. Then I moved a few steps to the left, focused, and took another picture. I did this until I’d moved 360 degrees around the slide.

Then I repeated the same procedure, but from my knees instead of my feet, and I started moving closer.

Next I began to explore the visual experiences of playing on the slide. Walking under it, climbing on it, sliding down it.

By the time I was done with that part, my state of mind had shifted considerably. I felt much less like “I want to take a good picture of a slide”, and more like “I want to know this object’s every mode of being”. It was almost like I was in love with the slide.

I started to take photos that had nothing to do with my concept of slides, and everything to do with this particular slide. Photos from unlikely angles, photos of details that don’t suggest a slide at all, photos of unique opportunities this slide presents for perceiving the environment.

I did a few photo studies on my trip, and they all felt to me like a gradual spiraling inward. They always began with a concept called “slide” (or whatever) and a vague interest. They ended with a fountain of fascination, intimacy, and love for something that meant almost nothing to me before I started.

And I bring this up because the approach I take to photo studies seems like the very same approach I take to solving vague problems, or training new skills when there’s nobody to tell me how to do it.

I think the photo study is a ritual for inducing Original Seeing. It can work with any sort of medium, including introspective. The trick is to build the right kind of camera.

Tuesday, August 7, 2018

How To Smell

Most of the ideas in this post come from the book Being A Dog: Following the Dog Into a World of Smell by Alexandra Horowitz, which is my favorite nonfiction book I’ve read in a long time. She, in turn, took much of what I discuss from Kate McClean, an artist who makes sensory maps of urban environments. But this is certainly my own take, and the instructions as I present them are at times in conflict with what I think each of those people would suggest.

Smelling is a skill. Unless you make perfume for a living, you probably don’t know how to smell. Here are what I consider to be the basics of good olfactory practice.

  1. Assume that everything has an odor. Assume that every single physical object around you emits volatile compounds that you, personally, can detect. This may not be true, but that doesn’t matter. Pretend, for now, that it is. You’ll learn faster this way.

  2. Practice good sniffing. First and foremost, good sniffing means putting your nose right up against the object you want to sniff. Maybe you’re more comfortable picking things up with your hands and holding them a few inches from your face — most of us are — but that’s poor form. Most odorous compounds are heavier than air, and your nose needs to be where the molecules are to ingest them. Plus, when you pick something up, especially a small bit of something, you’re going to be smelling your hand. So pretend you’re a dog. Get down on your hands and knees, if you have to, and bring your muzzle right to the object, until you can feel its surface with the tip of your nose. Then close your eyes, and sniff.

  3. To dislodge more of the smelly snuff, try a sharp exhalation through your nostrils right before you sniff. If you watch dogs sniffing, you’ll see that they do this all the time. It makes a surprisingly large difference.

  4. You’ll also find more smells by scratching things first, rubbing them, or otherwise disturbing their surfaces.

  5. Associate with what you smell. I recommend narrating your thoughts, either by speaking or by writing them down. Let your mind wander, and don’t worry about making any sense. Nouns, verbs, and adjectives are all fair game. So are images, sounds, and dance moves. Treat the smell like an inkblot test. Take a sniff, and say whatever comes to mind. Give it at least ten seconds, but thirty is better. If you haven’t named five things the smell reminds you of, you’re not done smelling it yet.

  6. Maybe it’s not clear to you that you’re smelling anything at all. Doesn’t matter. Everything has an odor, remember? You’re having an olfactory experience of some kind, even if you haven’t recognized it yet, so just start associating. You’ll learn about what you smell as you go.

  7. “Good” and “bad” are not smells. They’re mostly predictions about whether something is safe to eat. When you judge that something smells “good”, just pass right by that thought, and keep on associating. Same for anything that smells “bad”. If you get stuck at this step, reach for the specific (un)pleasant associations that come to mind while you’re smelling the object.

  8. Don’t worry so much about which things smell like which other things. For example, maybe you’ve just sniffed unwashed socks, and thereby invited a familiar compound into your olfactory system. During its stay, you happened upon an association with parmesan cheese. There really is a chemical similarity between your socks and parmesan cheese — namely butyric acid — but what matters is not that the two items smell similar. What matters is that the experience reminds you of parmesan cheese. If you’re always searching for the known relative of a smell, you’ll miss all the scents you’ve never named before. Recognize that “parmesan cheese” has come to mind while smelling, and leave it at that.

Smell Walks

Now that you know the basics, try going for a smell walk. A smell walk is just a walk, but instead of looking at stuff all the time, you relate to your environment primarily through scent. Here are a few more tips for smell walks in particular.

  1. When you arrive at a new location, take note of the background smells.
  2. Elicit three smells per location.
  3. While moving, watch out for momentary smells.
  4. Bring a bottle of water. Your nasal passages need to be a little damp to catch the particles.
  5. Bring tissues. Some of the particles will irritate your nose.
  6. Bring friends!
  7. When there’s an especially interesting smell, invite others to share it with you.

I really enjoy smell walks. They feel indulgent and exciting to me, and I love watching the constant discovery and surprise of my friends when I bring others along. There’s a lot of intimacy in smelling.

I’ve done enough smell walks in my neighborhood that I think I can probably estimate my location to the nearest street corner (maybe better) just by smell, if I’m within a few blocks of my house. I think my nose is about as good as average, based on my experiences taking people on smell walks. If that sounds unlikely to you, you’re probably drastically underestimating how good you are at smelling. Humans have much better noses than they tend to think.

Scent is so neglected in human experience. I think it’s largely because we walk on two legs, and use our hands to examine things. We just don’t spend much time down where the smells are.

It makes me sad, because there’s a whole world of olfactory experience that’s never instantiated. If I ask someone about their day, people will tell me what they saw, and maybe what they heard, but almost nobody tells me what they smelled.

And if someone does mention smell, it’s almost always because something smelled either disgusting or delicious. The world is so full of smells, of so many kinds, but hardly anybody notices. I’d like it if more people engaged with the world through scent.