Bones

"Alas, poor Yorick!" Engraving from a painting by Horace Fisher.

I'm big on "bones."

• Our bodies need bones; skeletons are the framework that hold all our other bits up and together and in their proper places. Our skeletons survive us, too—mainly to scare us on Halloween, or to remind Hamlet of mortality.
• Old houses can be said to have "good bones"—stout, sound framing that can be used again. I live in a house that was built in 1888, but the flesh and guts—the arteries (plumbing), nerves (electrical), fat (insulation), skin (cladding or siding), and eyes (windows)—were mostly replaced in the 2010s.
• A screenplay is the bones of a movie. All the people who make movies are wonderful at their work, performing an infinite number of jobs in symphonic coordination to realize a creative vision, but, no matter how well all that is done, without a good solid script it all falls apart. I like to call beautifully made movies with defective screenplays "jellyfish"—bad bones; weak story. No matter how well realized—acted, directed, set to music—a movie that's a jellyfish can never be anything but a jellyfish.

Somebody here confessed the other day to loving YouTube. It's a new medium—very vigorous, much maligned. The bones of a short-form video—the idea or concept—is not so easy to come up with; already we see rote formulae, and every conceivable form of mistake and error. My favorite is when AI is choosing random illustrations for voiceover and hopefully chooses a generic photograph, but it's of the wrong person, place, or thing. I watched a video about Brian Gottfried the other day—an old-tyme tennis player—and some of the photos were of Vitas Gerulaitis, another tennis star of the same era who superficially resembled Gottfried. Still a few "flaws in the ointment."

I like an old-fashioned and somewhat unpedigreed word for idea generation—ideaphoria. "Ideaphoria is the ability to quickly generate ideas, or to have a creative imagination. It can be measured using a test that assesses the speed and volume of ideas, but not their quality." David Foster Wallace and Robin Williams both had very high ideaphoria.

Pip and...Pip, from David Lean's Great Expectations, 1946

Media are all different and require different ideas
In all new media, it takes some time for people to understand which kinds of ideas work and which fall flat. For example, do you remember in the early days of movies when movies would be adapted from novels, and the novel tracked a character at different ages? Jane Eyre and Great Expectations both track their main characters in childhood and then on into adulthood. In written novels, this works fine—Willa Cather's My Ántonia tracks Jim and Ántonia from childhood to death, for instance—Ántonia dances for just a short interlude in the quick of youth. In movies, though, it's clunky, this scheme. You can't use the same actor for both (there's one early film version of Jane Eyre in which Jane the child and Jane the adult seem to have completely different personalities, mannerisms, and affect; it's hard to imagine how the one became the other), and the audience has to be clued into the fact that, oh yeah, this is supposed to be the same person, only later. That awkward break used to be familiar to moviegoing audiences, who were supposed to have learned to "suspend disbelief" about it, but, soon enough, screenwriters realized it just doesn't work all that well in movies, and they stopped doing it. (Richard Linklater eventually solved the problem in Boyhood [2014], a movie shot over a period of 11 years as the child actors actually grew up! The problem there was that the whole movie couldn't be scripted in advance—the director had to let it evolve as the actors grew into being themselves. Worth seeing, if you haven't.)

But I digress. Anyway, short-form informational videos being a newly dominant media, we're in the period where creators are learning how to generate good ideas, learning what works and what doesn't. Here's a stellar positive example, from a channel called Doctor Mike. The idea is simple, original (at least, I've never seen it before), instantly gettable, yet quite brilliant. He states it in words right from the very outset: "I asked a bunch of different medical specialists, what's the one thing that they would never do given the things that they've seen in their specialty?"

Brilliant idea: succinct, creative, and more or less infinitely flexible. The rest of the video is various specialists naming those things. An orthopedic surgeon, for instance (since we were talking about bones! You see what I did there), says he would never a.) ride a motorcycle or b.) play with fireworks. "My hands," he says, "They're critical. They're precious, I need them, and I don't want to blow 'em up."

The point is that every creative effort in every artistic medium needs bones: a structure to guide the work and give it a framework. A concept. Some kind of guiding set of aims, principles, or ways of proceeding. Even the absence of a framework is a framework! Stream of consciousness* writing, for example, that abnegation of structure, is itself a structure, isn't it? Isn't The Americans in effect stream-of-consciousness photography?

This is the topic I was struggling with two days ago and couldn't organize. I wanted to talk about how we get ideas for still photography and why ideas at their worst can be stunting and restricting and, at their best, enabling and freeing. It's a big, sprawling topic, one in which every specific claim is potentially wrong and yet still could be helpful. Very important and, still, seldom talked about, because it's big and blowsy and not everything will pertain to everyone. Difficult to reduce it to neat little categories and tidy theories stacked like blocks.

And yet. A photographer with a truly great idea can work that goldmine for a decade.

Mike

*William James, one of the most important writers now never read (he's very whitemale, for one thing), is thought to have coined the phrase, in The Principles of Psychology, 1890: "...Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself as chopped up in bits...it is nothing joined; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let's call it the stream of thought, consciousness, or subjective life."

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Featured Comments from:

John Camp: "This might be the most critical question faced by all artists—the question of 'what to do?' and then, secondarily, 'how to do it?' I've given this a lot of thought over the years, and the conclusion I've reached is that people want art (of all kinds) that deals with...people. The Americans has probably a dozen photos that don't have people in them in one way or another, and even those photos refer to people and their artifacts. No pure landscapes. No abstractions. I'm an art freak who has educated himself in a certain way, and so I do like (some) landscapes and abstractions, but in a sort of distant, intellectual art-freak way, not particularly viscerally. The very best photos and paintings, IMHO, have to have a visceral element. Have to evoke an emotional response based on memory and experience and human relationships."

Greg Boiarsky: "A lot of the bones for your ideas can be traced to Marshall McLuhan: 'The medium is the message.' (And, of course, many other clever variants.) Not only do we need to develop a structural language for each new medium (sorry—not media, which is plural), but we also need to find the match between our content and the affordances of the new medium. That is, we need to discover what is inherent or natural to the new medium. Going from print to the moving picture, for example, allows the creator to more easily and fluidly depict the flow of time or causal chain of a process. Going from print or TV to the internet allows the creator to add interactivity to the content. Of course, there are other fits/matches.

"What I find more interesting than what the new medium can do is what it can't do. When I want to do something with my photography that isn't natural to image making, I am forced to be creative within the bounds of the photographic language and limitations of a two-dimensional construct. The very restrictions that limit me also force me to think in new ways. The mother of invention and all that (pardon the sexist trope)."

Comments

[Terry Letton]

I’m guessing that the unifying themes for a series of images more often is recognized in the editing stage rather than during initial shooting. A theme or just a promising subject is recognized and goes on the list of potential subjects to be on the alert for in the future. I personally have a number of such themes starting with family and spreading out to many other topics. If nothing else you need to prove to yourself that interesting images can come from your idea.

[Roger Bartlett]

As an extreme example of the following a series of characters over time you may wish to follow the Michael Apted 7 Up series. The subjects of the series are almost exactly the same age as you and I.
An overview can be found on Wikipedia: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_(film_series)&ved=2ahUKEwjFioKOgeyKAxXnT2wGHQQRCv4QFnoECCwQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1V_guOVCvs5hKnKHgPiIPN">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_(film_series)&ved=2ahUKEwjFioKOgeyKAxXnT2wGHQQRCv4QFnoECCwQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1V_guOVCvs5hKnKHgPiIPN">https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_(film_series)&ved=2ahUKEwjFioKOgeyKAxXnT2wGHQQRCv4QFnoECCwQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1V_guOVCvs5hKnKHgPiIPN

[robert e]

Speaking of bones and Youtube, I was very entertained yesterday by a short take on dinosaurs by sci/tech vlogger Cleo Abram. The treatment focused on an actual dig and its lead scientist and I thought struck the right balance between process, knowledge, history and theory. Paleontology turns out to be something of an ideal subject for these short documentary/promotion type things because (ironically, perhaps?) it's a relatively fast-moving field, and well publicized but at the same time arcane in its inner workings, so there are plenty of field-shaking discoveries to catch up on, nuances to explain, and, well, who doesn't love monsters? Especially at a safe chronological distance, yet brought to dazzling life on video.

Abram, a former Vox presenter, and her team know their medium well, whether live-action or illustrative animation and graphics (and there are many good examples of the latter here). Her relentlessly "gee-whiz" on-camera affect, which can be tiring when she covers topics I know something about, was just right for a field that was the object of my childhood fascination but has since gone through a number of major revisions.

Here's the video: https://youtu.be/RDoVLHaYfgM?si=fOTpEh5HiF9I9a-y

[John Krumm]

Here's a short (very short) by Alec Soth on how to edit photos for a book. It's kind of funny, and helpful.

https://youtube.com/shorts/keDjIt7BXuk?si=SfcHWyGOO-5l7gKz

[Herman Krieger]

Not, what is photography, but where do you find it?

On wanted posters and in galleries-

https://hermankrieger/photography.htm

[aaron c greenman]

Great essay Mike, and food for thought.

ACG

[Sean]

I read an article in the Guardian a couple of years ago that asked Doctors a similar question to the one in the video. The one that stuck with me came from a surgeon who worked with burn victims. They said they never rest hot drinks on their laps, as the skin of your nether region is hard to graft and slow to heal.

William James was ahead of his time, whereas Jung and Freud were products of theirs and contributed greatly, if unintentionally, to the arts, especially fiction, which might be why those two white dudes are still quite popular in the humanities. James, the actual scientist, with his Western construct of objectivity, not so much.

[Daniel]

Still can't figure out how Boneless Chickens get around.

[Chris Bertram]

Your throwaway remark that points to William James's "whitemale" identity as a reason why he's no longer much read is a bit of fashionable laziness. If you look at university curricula in the humanities, you'll find that most of the historical authors covered are still white men. Certainly true in philosophy, my subject. Unfortunately, the mildest attempts to draw attention to the contributions of people who were not give rise to overheated claims of "erasure" in op-eds as columnists compete for "anti-woke" credentials.

[Phil]

Richard Linklater is currently working on a movie that's being filmed over 20 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrily_We_Roll_Along_(film)

[Geoff Wittig]

My mentor John MacDonald, a brilliant contemporary tonalist painter, teaches composition by asking whether a particular scene or view has 'good bones'. By this he means does it have between 2 and 5 easily identified large value masses to hang the picture on. The large shapes of particular value must create a pleasing balance between variety and unity, a focal area, and a path for the eye to wander. Without this, no amount of detail or photo-realistic rendering will save the painting from failure.

[hugh crawford]

No mention of André Tchaikowsky?

The answer to the trivia question “What Polish pianist made a late career move to join the Royal Shakespeare Company?“

[Richard G]

New media: the CD cover just did not work with a reduced LP cover. Take Five was an exception perhaps. I’m not sure the record companies ever properly adapted to the CD so far as the covers are concerned. Had Instagram been around they probably would have done much better.