You can use a camera to draw with, just as you can use so many other things that you don't normally think of as drawing tools. But in order to use a camera more like a drawing implement I like to think of the old northern European definition of drawing, a definition that suggests that you need to 'drag' the images out of the world.
The verb 'to draw' comes from the same linguistic root as in a horse 'drawing' a cart. It means to drag, pull, or bear weight. The Middle English word was “drawen,” the Old English “dragan” and the Old Norse, “draga,” meaning of course to drag. The German word is “tragen,” meaning to bear or carry. Just as in an earlier post we looked at a hypothetical Indo-European base, for the word 'art' which was 'rt', in proto Indo-European, we have the word “dherach-,” meaning to pull or draw along. In this case to draw means to act upon something and make it move.
By thinking of your camera as a drawing tool, you can perhaps see it as something that you can move through the world, and as it is moved it leaves traces of its movement.
Lewis Chaplin: scanner image
The beginning of a self portrait using a smartphone
The continuation of a self portrait using a hand held scanner
Another way to think of the idea of drawing is simply to act upon something and make it move. This could be as simple as using your camera or smartphone as you walk past or through an environment.
Walking through grass
The idea of recording from a low viewpoint begins to connect the process of dragging with that of passing through.
But how do you give the environment more traction? One way is to make whatever is being recorded much more difficult to see. For instance if light levels are very low, or so high that images are bleached out. It could be that you are so close to the subject that it becomes unrecognisable, or only a small part ever becomes visible. Perhaps there are barriers between you and the thing seen, such as frosted glass or translucent perspex, An old mirror with silver removed would perhaps only reflect fragments of reality, could the world be photographed through this mirror?
Eugenia Raskopoulos Diglossia 2009
Jacky Redgate Light Throw (Mirrors) I 2009
We tend to think of the world as always being 'in focus' but what if it is not? When you look through an Argos catalogue, every object photographed in it is something to possess, so each one is always in focus. But what would be the opposite of a catalogue of things that we might want to possess?
John Hilliard
Hilliard uses two different shutter speeds to establish a time difference between two images of the same people, the slow speed creating an ambiguity that allows the audience to conjecture what might have happened in terms of the relationship established in the left hand frame.
Shop window: Eugène Atget 1910
Reflective surfaces confuse the eye and slow down the read as two images combine. Atget was one of the earliest photographers to become fascinated by complexity and distortion, rather than the power of photography to document the world.
Perhaps the biggest issue at the centre of all this is how we see the world. Is it something to own or possess? If so, we will develop a way of recording it that singles out things in such a way that we can 'own' them or frame them for possession. However if we understand the world as something we are immersed in, something that we are interconnected with, or locked into its systems and processes, then we need a different way of recording a situation rather than preserving a selected moment, or standing outside of the world and framing it.
If I go back to the etymological root of the word 'draw', we can perhaps use it to help us open out a different way of using photography. When a field is ploughed the plow is dragged through the ground and as it is dragged it pulls things up from under the ground, things that were 'in the dark' and brings them back to the surface, back into light. Farmers sometimes finding old Roman coins or other treasures as they drag their plows through the soil.
The plants that will be grown in the prepared 'broken' soil will live two lives. One through their roots, whereby they sense out a relationship between the elements and creatures of the earth, where they interconnect with fungal message systems, find a home alongside earthworms and form an intermingling with bacteria and other micro-organisms, so that the mineral nutrients that they are embedded into can be shape shifted into food stuffs; the other life will be in the light.
The elements that compose your camera or smartphone were once embedded into the ground, but at some point they were dug out or pulled up into the air by what would have been a far more destructive process. Metals such as copper, gold and silver for wiring, lithium and cobalt for the battery, and aluminium, silicon, oxygen and potassium for the glass screen, would all have been mined. Oil is extracted by deeply inserted into the earth pipelines before it is used to make the plastic for a smartphone case and rare earth elements, such as yttrium, terbium and dysprosium, are used to ensure that screen vibration produces the beautiful colours that are now required. The elements that compose your smartphone were also once in the dark. As you use it you are 'bringing it out into the light', you can now unearth its possibility, but what 'possibility' will you reveal?
Can you re-insert this light sensitive machine back into the world in some way? The word 'photography' literally means to draw with light. To draw is to drag, to pull out; so can you 'pull out' of the world an awareness of itself? Can the smartphone become a tool for enlightenment?
A plant lives two lives, one underground and the other one in the air. It breathes in carbon dioxide, and interacts with light to produce energy and oxygen, this photosynthesis creating food for all the creatures of the world. A plant's leaf is its camera, leave something on the lawn for a few days and then pick it up and you will have made a photograph. Whatever was left on the lawn, becoming a negative, a negative revealed as a yellowed form because it is not exposed to the energy of the sun's rays. That familiar green is there because chlorophyll is green, a pigment that absorbs blue and red light. Pigments absorb some wavelengths of light and reflect others. A green pigment is therefore one that absorbs all of the wavelengths of light except green. So plants are green because chlorophyll reflects green light, or another way of putting it is that green light is the only wavelength the leaf isn't using to store energy or make sugar.
Grass is very sensitive to electrical charge and if present during the time when lightening hits the ground, the electrical discharge will leave a tree like ghost of itself.
A lightening 'drawing' in grass
The lightening drawing is simply a ghost image of a process, but what it does reveal is how certain forms of interconnectedness appear over and over again. This could be a drawing of a tree, its branches dividing in a 'dendritic' system like tree root patterns or river systems.
A river system in Tibet
So can the camera be re-inserted back into the earth from which it came from? Can it operate more like its precursor, the leaf, can its 'photosynthesis' produce new life, create an awareness of possibilities that are not so much about ownership as about revealing processes and interconnectedness? Can it be dragged along and drawn into a new life in the light?
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