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Visual Art & Digital Photography, Part 4:
A Picture Energy Field
Composing photographic elements in a dynamic manner

When I take a photo, I often think of the area I have framed as an energy field. It is a field of forces that I must contain within the frame. My composition is based on how those forces reverberate within the frame, i.e., how they react to the hard vertical and horizontal walls of the picture format.

I arrived at the idea of an energy field in a very personal way. When I was a young boy, I often went onto the pond at my Dad's house and floated for hours in our small wooden row boat. When the pond was almost still and I was close to the edge, I could see the ripples from the boat hitting the shore and then coming back and hitting the boat. Some days I sat on the dock and watch ripples in the water, created by the wind, hit the posts on the dock and bounce back across the water. All the while I marveled at the small magic water bugs, the pond skaters, striding the surface and navigating these ripples, bugs that literally walked on water.

While I arrived at the idea of an energy field somewhat intuitively -- although I could sense it in the paintings of Jackson Pollock, work that I had seen in depth at his retrospective exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC -- it turns out that modern physics had already mapped out this basic concept and further that it was well known to the Abstract Expressionist painters.

"The content of abstract expressionism has to do with energy...an energetic field of force."
Robert Motherwell
Jackson Pollock, wanted to create "a pictorial surface that gave the impression of an energy field...This field became the condition for advanced art."
The Museum of Modern Art: The History and the Collection, 1984.

In a book about the Abstract Expressionists, I came across the following paragraph concerning objects, energy and the new view of the real world that Einstein had conceived and that had been accepted by most Abstract Expressionist artists:

In classical (Newtonian) physics, an electromagnetic field was defined as an arrangement of discrete, electrically charged particles [ED.: THINK SHARP OBJECTS LIKE PEOPLE IN SHARP PHOTOGRAPHS]. This field exerted a force on each particle determined by the position of the particle in relation to the others. But modern (Einsteinian) physics inverted this concept, defining "particles" themselves as stable patterns of electromagnetic waves [ED.: THINK A BREATHING MOVING PERSON]. This model viewed the energy filed as primary, and the object in is as complicated perturbations of that field.
The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America, by Daniel Belgrad, 1998.

About 50 years earlier, the Italian Futurists had arrived at a similar idea.
The Futurists believed that physical objects had a kind of personality and vitality of their own. revealed by "force-lines" - Boccioni referred to this as "physical transcendentalism". These characteristic lines helped to inform the psychology and emotions of the observer and influenced surrounding objects "not by reflections of light, but by a real concurrence of lines and real conflicts of planes" .
http://www.all-art.org/history580-1.html

However, there is a significant difference between the work of the Abstract Expressionists and the Italian Futurists.

Poet Robert Duncan emphasized that the Abstract Expressionist action painter's work was "energy embodied in the painting (felt), which is now muscular as well as visual, contained as well as apparent..." while the Futurist work was "energy referred to (seen)..."
The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America, by Daniel Belgrad, 1998.

In other words the work of a Futurist was a picture or depiction of energy, while an action painter's work was the imprint of the actual energetic forces of the painter.

And how does this all relate to experimental digital photography?

Recently Lea Louden, a gallery owner, who in May 2012 will be showing a 25 Year Digital Photography Retrospective of my work, wrote about my experimental photography:
The quality found in his experimental images was as though he was painting with light and color, capturing movement as though it were an ‘energy light field.’
Many years ago another reviewer said that I was 'action painting' with a camera -- a quite good description I think. Yet my work is a combination of approaches from a number of other artists.

I believe what I am doing is a mix of both Futurist ideas and Abstract Expressionist ideas about capturing energy. Combining elements of different art approaches is often a useful way to develop new art.

New approaches to art often involve a synthesis of previous art movements, for example: His work [JACKSON POLLOCK'S] brought together elements of Cubism, Surrealism, and Impressionism, and transcended them all.
Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible, by B. H. Friedman, 1995.

The Italian Futurists wanted to depict movement through time, the Abstract Expressionists wanted to record the energy of their creative efforts and the movement of their bodies. In my photographs I do both: on the one hand I take a shot of a musician moving over time and, on the other hand, I let the positioning of my body and my framing determine the composition.

When I take a photograph I am in a state of heightened awareness; I can at the same time study: the figure of a musician as he or she is playing (for example), the background, the color of the light sources, the intersecting angles created by all of these and the relation between figure and ground. I move my body, frame and zoom the lens until I find a point of balance, of equilibrium -- and that is when I hit the shutter button. During this time all words and thoughts vanish from my mind and I let my senses and my body determine the right moment.

My work is both objective, i.e., a real shot of a musician over time, and subjective -- you are seeing a musician through my eyes, my body movement and the artistic decisions I made to get the shot. And if I am successful it is a photograph of the energy of the music being played.

This is part of a series of articles about visual art and digital photography.
#1. Visual Art & Digital Photography: Realism & Personal Expression
== How digital photography can be both realistic and expressive at the same time
#2. Visual Art & Digital Photography: Part 2: Space, Time And Memory
== How Experimental Digital Photography can evoke a sense of remembrance
#3. Visual Art & Digital Photography, Part 3: Art, Memory & Subjective Truth
== Is figurative art/photography limited while abstract art/photography is not?
#4. Visual Art & Digital Photography, Part 4: A Picture Energy Field
== Composing photographic elements in a dynamic manner

All uncredited  work is copyright by Richard (Rick) deGaris Doble 2011.

NOTE:See a list of my other articles here at PIXIQ. www.pixiq.com/contributors/rick-doble

For more about my approach to photography see my book: Experimental Digital Photography.

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