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| Larry Wolf, Illusion of an Ideal (2024) |
In the subterranean spaces of a house is a spotlit model of the house, a cleared space in the underground rubble, a self within the self. Beyond, a barred window. What is abandoned? What is preserved? What is protected? What is imprisoned?
The very things which an artist would leave out, or render imperfectly, the photograph takes infinite care with, and so makes its illusions perfect. ...
It has fixed the most fleeting of our illusions... The mirror with a memory. ...
The mind feels round it and gets an idea of its solidity. We clasp an object with our eyes. The mind feels its way into the very depths of the picture. ...
There is such a frightful amount of detail that we have the same sense of infinite complexity which Nature gives us. ...
Form is henceforth divorced from matter .. matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer, except as the mould on which form is shaped. ...
There is only one Coliseum or Pantheon; but how many millions of potential negatives have they shed, — representatives of billions of pictures,— since they were erected! Matter in large masses must always be fixed and dear; form is cheap and transportable. We have got the fruit of creation now and need not trouble ourselves with its core. Every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon scale off its surface for us. Men will hunt all curious, beautiful, grand objects, as they hunt the cattle in South America, for their skins, and leave the carcasses as of little worth.
Already a workman has been traveling about the country with stereographic views of furniture, showing his employer’s patterns in this way, and taking orders for them. ...
To render comparison of similar objects or of any that we may wish to see side by side, easy, there should be a stereographic metre or fixed standard of focal length for the camera lens to furnish by its multiples of fractions, if necessary, the scale of distances and the standard of power in the stereoscope lens. In this way the eye can make the most rapid and exact comparisons. ...
The greatest of human triumphs over earthly conditions, the divorce of form and substance.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Atlantic (June 1859)
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| Larry Wolf, John Perry Optics Lesson (1977) |
In 1977 I took a photography course with John Perry, a physicist at the University of Vermont. John is also a photographer. Here he explains how a lens works, drawing freehand, at the intersection of his worlds. I already knew that lenses bend light and flip the projected image. Nonetheless, I love a science lesson. Then and now.
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| Larry Wolf, Brain at Build Cafe (2023) |
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| Larry Wolf, Swapped Brain at Build Coffee (2024) |
Moving forward from the fresh insight that the camera, with a single sensor, is not like the old stereograph cameras with a separate frame for each lens. Enter the editor (me) to swap the two halves, effectively treating them as distinct frames.
Look at these with a stereoscope (Colleen Woolpert (navigate to Twinscope Stereograph Projects), London Stereoscopic Company).
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| Larry Wolf, Self Portrait with Stereoscope (2024) |
The first image doesn't want to align. The second does, it's what I experienced at the patio of Build Coffee, where I'm close to the wall on my left, filling more of the frame.
Like our brains, split down the middle, our two eyes with separate optic nerves feeding the visual brain which combines the seeing into one world with depth perception, this second image recreates the depth of the scene.
Finally this is making sense.
for your viewing pleasure
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| Larry Wolf, Stairs (swapped) (2024) |
(finishing the story from the other day).
Library of Congress - Digital Collections - Stereograph Cards
Eastman Museum - Classifications: Stereograph - Image Available
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| Larry Wolf, At the Edge (2024) |
What the f is happening here? The perforated graphic on the bus window has a sharp edge that is covering the right lens of my camera but I'm seeing the mesh mostly on the left side. Huh?
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| Larry Wolf, Looking Beyond the Edge (2024) |
And again here. Whatever it is, is consistent.
Let me try to noodle it out with some diagrams...
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| Larry Wolf, Dual Lens Schematic (2024) |
There is one "object" in this simplified world, with two arrows, one up and the other to the right. There is a pair of lenses on the camera, each projecting an image onto the sensor. The projected image is flipped by the lens, classic optics, with the arrows now pointing down and to the left. The right lens projects on the right side of the sensor; the left lena projects on the left side of the sensor. There is some vignetting at the edges and overlap between the images.
But. Looking at the display screen on the back of the camera, I see an image where up is up and left-right orientation is correct. I can read the text on the bank; passing cars create motion blur in the correct direction.
But.. the right side has become the left side, so the camera must be rotating the image 180 degrees. With just a single lens, this is the end of the story. With this dual lens, it's just the beginning.
With the mesh covering one lens (and a bit of the field of view of the second lens), what is seen by each lens becomes apparent. This is beginning to explain how my two-lens-single-image pictures look the way they do, something I notice when I'm making the photograph but isn't obvious to the viewer of the resulting image.
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| Larry Wolf, Stairs (2024) |
I'm closer to the stairs which appear on the left side than I am to those on the right; they just appear to be diverging differently in the image. If anything it looks like have bent the visual plane. Ah ha.
I've been using this lens for over a year and finally a corner case happened, in a way I noticed while making the photographs. It was clear the right lens was looking through the mesh... but seen on the left side.
A good reminder to pay attention to details, to be open to surprise and to puzzle through what might be happening.. or just enjoy the surprise!
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| Larry Wolf, Mirror Stage (2024) |
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| Larry Wolf, Mirror Stage (2024) |
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| Larry Wolf, Mirror Stage (2024) |
The protagonist of The Mirror Stage is Simon Fujiwara, an 11-year-old boy. He’s going through puberty, the process of deep emotional and physical confusion. Simon lives in a small fishing village ... [he] feel[s] suffocated and repressed. For Simon is hiding a terrible secret: Simon is gay and nobody knows it, not even himself. ...
The Mirror Stage is a play about a young artist who walks into a museum one day and sees a painting that changes his life forever. When I was 11 years old, I saw this painting, which is on the wall in front of me here. It’s called the Horizontal Stripe Painting, and it’s by Patrick Heron, and it was painted in 1959. ...
This painting was extremely significant for me for two reasons, because firstly, it made me realize when I saw it, that I wanted to become an artist, and secondly, that I was gay. ...
in 1995, IKEA bought the rights to actually copy the color code of the painting and put it on their range of soft furnishings, everything from ironing boards to bed covers. And I was actually able to buy those bed covers that were based on the painting as a teenager and literally dream in my favorite artwork. ...
a French philosopher, Jacques Lacan ... , wrote this paper, and in it he explains how human beings go through this process of looking for mirror images of themselves in other people and in objects and in the world around them. And that, during puberty, this becomes extremely heightened, that pubescent children look for mirror images—but sexual mirror images—of themselves in other people, but also in other objects. So, Patrick Heron, who made this painting, was very influenced by this notion of the mirror stage. He would even describe his paintings sometimes as being mirrors to the inner soul. And what’s interesting, or what inspired me as a teenager, is to see for the first time an abstract expressionist painting, an image in which the body has disappeared, and its just pure form and color, a sort of internal experience sort of made flesh ...
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| Larry Wolf, untitled (2024) |
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| Larry Wolf, untitled (2024) |
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| Larry Wolf, untitled (2024) |
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| Larry Wolf, untitled (2024) |
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| Larry Wolf, untitled (2024) |
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| Larry Wolf, untitled (2024) |
