Art & Photography – Page 6 – Dietmar Tallroth

Returning

In Art & Photography / Lose thoughts

There are a few places and views to which I am drawn over and over again. And as I keep taking photos of the same scenery, it feels like I am trying to do a kind of 36 views of Mt Fuji. Which I am not. At least not consciously. So why am I returning? After having thought about this for a while, I think I might have an answer. And one, that in a way surprised myself.

The photo on top has been made at Kallahti a small park in the eastern suburbs of Helsinki. The park is situated only a few miles from the city center and reachable by public transport. As the park is on a peninsua pointing towards the open waters of the Baltic Sea, it is also a good place to study and enjoy the multiple layers of islands that form the archipelago in front of the coast.

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In Praise of Shadows

October 8, 2017 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Art & Photography / Lose thoughts

Here in Finland we know about darkness. After all, in parts of the country the sun doesn’t rise for weeks on end. Even in the south of the country, we have on average only 29 hours of sunshine per month in December. Ok, “south” is relative here. Helsinki lies at about 60° latitude, the same as southern Greenland or Kenai in Alaska. No wonder then that many around here suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) coming from light deficiency or simply loath the onset of the season of constant twilight. But not all darkness is created equal and I do think darkness has its upside. Especially also for photographers.

In 1933 the Japanese author Junichiro Tanizaki wrote his famous essay “In Praise of Shadows”. Some of the fame of the text might have to do with the fact that it sings the praise for the Japanese monastic outhouses (among other things). Still, Tanizaki explains in the essay how Japanese aesthetics embrace, and have evolved from, use and appreciation of dim lightning. He finds in reduced lightning the same suggestiveness that seems to permeate also, for example, Japanese literature and especially poetry. And I think he might have a point there.

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Path to the Far North

September 29, 2017 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Art & Photography / Books / News

Yes I know, it starts to sound like the beginning of a bad habit. Still, I am happy to announce availability of my third book. The book has the title “Path to the Far North” and is sub-titled “A photographic conversation with Bashō”. This needs explaining…

The works of the famous haiku poet Matsuo Bashō have been enchanting me for a long time. Especially his travel diary oku no hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Far North) has been my companion for many years. The character 奥 (oku, the far north, interior of Japan) can also mean inner feelings and one’s own heart. So there is an association with “path to the heart” in the title of Bashō’s text. About these two aspects of the Bashō book, as a trip to the north and to one’s inner core, I wanted to make a photography project.

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Plasticity

September 24, 2017 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Art & Photography / Lose thoughts

Every now and then I come over a photograph where I think “this is perfect”. Some photos by Edward Weston, for example. When I then afterwards try to analyze why I reacted this way I realize that this has to do with a certain way to treat the photographic subject. What I also realize is that the approach is just opposite to mine. And that, I think, is worth a thought or two.

The “perfection” I mentioned springs mostly from the plasticity of forms in a photograph. Photography is a two-dimensional art. A photograph in which forms seem to have plasticity and a three-dimensional look is overcoming this limitation. If one analyses further how this 3-D-effect is achieved, lighting springs to mind. It is the fall-off of light on a form that induces this illusion of plasticity in a two-dimensional picture.

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Rhythm

September 16, 2017 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Art & Photography

In the last post I wrote about poetic themes in photography. I also mentioned that I find poetry everywhere in nature. One aspect of poetry is a connection to music via the notion of rhythm.

Rhythm, it has been said, bypasses the intellect and directly works on older parts of our brain. In that sense it is one of these “triggers” that can extend a picture from something we only perceive with our eyes into something that has a “feel”.

We probably learned already before our birth to listen to the heartbeats of our mothers. But all musical rhythm ultimately goes back to the two-beat movement when we walk. From this two-step pulse all the complex rhythmic divisions evolve. This pulse, often accented by prominent beats, has an element of expectation. We expect and anticipate in a rhythm the next beat – that is what moves our feet when we start to itch for dancing.

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Decoration or Poetry

September 8, 2017 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Art & Photography / Lose thoughts

Calling photographs “poetic” has its dangers. Some words have been hijacked and are difficult to set free again. “Beauty”, for example, seems to exist mostly in advertisement and or in combination with the female form. As in beauty pageant.

The same has, unfortunately, happened to “poetic” and “lyrical”, too.

If one searches the internet for terms like “poetic photography” one often first gets to the sites of wedding photographers. “Poetic” there translates sometimes into a look like a wedding cake with too much cream. One can even see that there is too much sugar as well.

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Book Launch: Mountains of the Sea

September 1, 2017 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Art & Photography / Books / Exhibition

In an earlier post I mentioned my upcoming exhibition in Helsinki. So if you are around here on Sept. 12 at 17h drop in at the Laterna Magica Gallery in Helsinki, Rauhankatu 7.

But earlier I also promised to tell more about the project that led to the exhibition and, in addition, I am proud to announce publication of the accompanying book. So, here we go:

The project looks at the fractal character of nature. That will say at the phenomenon that natural processes often come to similar results. While we often tend to think of fractals in connection with small regular forms like fern leaves, the principles apply also to larger forms, even landscapes. The idea to show the big in the small underlies the Japanese arts of suiseki (“bonsai” stone displays) and rock garden design and the project takes a lot of inspiration from these arts.

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Symbols versus Representation

August 27, 2017 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Art & Photography

A while ago I mentioned that are ways to extend the meaning of a picture beyond its obvious content. In providing certain clues, which I called “trigger information”, the artist hopes that the viewers mind will do the rest of the work by unfolding new layers of meaning to the picture. Symbols are one of the better known types of such trigger information. Some of them are so strong that we quite automatically expand their underlying meaning in our mind. In the Western world, at least, the cross as symbol for Christianity has such an effect. While, therefore, symbols can be incredibly powerful, there are problems, too.

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The Joy of Seeing

August 12, 2017 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Art & Photography / Lose thoughts / On Location

The business of photography is often, actually, hard work. We landscape photographers also like to highlight the long hikes, the heavy backpacks with gear, the early hours, the long hours and so on. Does this make our work miserable? No, not at all. Often, it is a bliss.

Today I spent the day at the Komio Nature Reserve in Tavastia, Finland. The area is little known, but good for hiking on eskers and exploring other glacial landscape features like small kettle lakes. My favorite spot there, however, is a small lake with the name Luutalammi. In 1933 the water level in the lake had been, for agricultural reasons, lowered by a meter. In 2003, when the Nature Reserve had been founded, the water level was raised back. In the 70 years inbetween new trees had grown on the shore and they then died off when flooded. This gives Luutalammi a frame of dead trees. I would love to call this poetically a sunken forest, but it is a bit too mundane for that: mostly the former trees are now bare, broken sticks. Like this:

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Things – A Discourse in 3 Cups of Coffee

August 4, 2017 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Art & Photography / Lose thoughts

2017-05-Timelapse-Merged 1.jpg — Timelapse of a budding plant merged into one photo. (c) 2017 Dietmar Tallroth

But in physics, it’s dangerous to assume that things ‘exist’ in any conventional sense. Instead, the deeper question is: what sorts of processes give rise to the notion (or illusion) that something exists?
Karl Friston

A Western school of thinking from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus to the English mathematician and philosopher Alfred N. Whitehead (1861-1947) has maintained the idea that reality is better viewed and understood in terms of processes than in terms of substance, objects and things. This school, loosely termed “process philosophy” has implications on visual art, so let’s have a look.

Have you ever asked yourself, where the atoms and molecules in your body came from? No? Well, take a second to think about it. An easy answer, of course is: from your food. But this answer opens the question where the atoms in your food came from. If you continue tracing, you actually describe a history of the atoms in your body. We don’t have to go all the way back to the Big Bang. Closer to home, so to speak, there is a set of atoms that most likely are part of that history. We call this set: Earth.

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