Slowly learning: using KvL

I’m not so sure it’s that there are flaws in the education system… but rather that sometimes it just takes time to learn.  I feel that way with KvL’s material.  The more I live with it and work through it, the more I am learning (and hopefully getting “smarter”), but it is anything but a quick process.

After getting a few pages into this week’s reading, I decided to select an image, a photograph I had taken, and work my way through the reading with it, as opposed to my old strategy of doing the reading and then trying to use my new-found knowledge to analyze the image.  I think this might be a more productive route for me (especially as it keeps me from “forgetting” to consider a necessary part of the reading after the fact).

The image I chose is a photograph I took in the Summer of 2008 while visiting Oregon’s Central Coast.  It is a picture taken of my grandma while she, my sister, and I were walking along a trail to Oregon’s highest coastal point.  It happens to be one of my favorite photos I’ve taken of my grandma, actually one my favorite “vacation photos” I took the whole time I was out there.  I’ll stop there, though, with my narrative, and let the KvL material work us through what’s going on in the photo. 

1) The represented participant (my grandma) does not look at the viewer’s (interactive participant’s) eyes, which makes it necessarily an ‘offer’ – one that addresses us indirectly (119).

2)  It is framed in a medium shot, cutting the subject off “approximately at the knees” (124).  This creates a proxemic social distance that allows us to have a level of relational involvement with the subject but without extreme attachment.  The subject is standing at a lookout position (128) with scenery in the background, available for a highly-distanced examination by the viewer.  The subject is of closer relational importance to the viewer than this scenic backdrop.

3)  The photo chooses the angle for the viewer, and in this case the point of view is subjective, in that not every feature of the subject is seen (130)

4) The photo is taken at an angle parallel to the subject, increasing involvement with the subject (134), as opposed to merely being a spectator from an oblique angle.

5) We see the subject from a Backview.  This is where my interests in KvL’s thoughts were really piqued.  Their description of the photo of parents at first seemed to be a moment where they would be analyzing my photo, but I grew resistant to their extrapolation.  They argued that there was a desire on the part of the photographer to distance himself from his parents and their world (138).  Because I do not have a great desire to distance myself from my grandma, especially not at the time when I was on vacation with her, that description did not make sense… at first. 

    

What I then saw in their description of the “complex and ambivalent” backview is that there is a level of detachedness from the subjects – an amplified detachment beyond just not having a direct gaze, in that we don’t even see the eyes at all.  This is one of the reasons why the photo resonates so much with me – because this detachment paradoxically affords me (one who personally knows the subject) an increased level of attachment.  The backview provides me with a view of the subject (my grandma) as an independent, un-attached subject – a then-83-year-old person who was still taking her own pictures for herself while on vacation.

6) The perspective is from a low angle, but not too low of a degree.  This then creates a relationship between viewer and subject (140) that lends power and authority to the subject (something that works for me as a viewer, in that this is my grandma – someone who naturally I would be accustomed to “looking up to” despite being physically taller than her for some time).

7)  Her perspective/relationship with the other objects in the image gives her as the subject authority of the other objects that she is literally “looking down on.”   She is on the same level with the clouds, and thus has an equitable power relationship, with them, but the rest of the earth and sea are below her.

8)  This is a naturalistic photo with nothing “out of the ordinary” (like color, context, brightness, etc.) that might challenge “reality” so there is a very high level of modality (159).  There are sharp details and saturated colors, but nothing beyond what is socially accepted/expected of consumer-grade digital cameras – certainly nothing approaching the “hyper-real” (161) like some have argued (I think falsely) about the “Squirrel Crasher” image below – another standard vacation shot, though this time with some more-than-standard content crashing the party.

(CNN.com) 

I have liked this photo of my grandma since I first reviewed the “film” after the vacation.  I have had a hard time articulating why, though.  KvL’s discussion helped me work through it in a way that I think was profitable.  Perhaps I am learning, even if slowly.