Somewhere in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina i was at a  workshop with photographer John Menapace, and he gave us an assignment to use the camera like a pointing tool, and to snap a picture, while gesturing with said camera, of the object of your particular concern and interest. This was way before the time of lcd screens and megapixels, and involved a large amount of uncertainty and a degree of film wasting. It was an excercise in loosening up one’s vision, and most of the time resulted in blurry messes of questionable visual value. At the time, to make a photograph with pretty much any camera of small or medium format, you had to attach it, sort of, to your head/eye as you filled the frame and focused and shot. Now, one can wave a miniature electronic box in front of onself, and with the magic of auto focus and image stabilization and varying degrees of automatic flash, you can come up with something fairly recognizable any time one of these cameras stands at arm’s length from one’s eye(s). You still are, however, making a selection of an object within a frame that your eye has been drawn to, and where that object of desire winds up in the final picture is still crucial to the composition.

In gardens, the concept of having a focal point where one’s eye is drawn to is something that has always bothered me. To place a bench or a gold-leaved shrub or a  statue of a naked nymph holding a polished bronze apple so that eyes are drawn to that point in the garden has always seemed to me to be counter to the point of being in a garden. My interest in a bench might be to go there and sit so i could gaze back over the space i just passed through. The gold foliage of that mock orange over there might be interesting  because of its relation colorwise to the stand of bronze carex beneath it or the complementary nature of that purple smoke bush just behind it. And that nymph sculpture- don’t make me go there.

Photographing a garden is a whole, other matter. It has been said, i forget by whom, that the garden- or piece of a garden- that one sees in a photograph only exists for the fraction of a second that it took to capture that image as the shutter popens and closes. This particular picture frame had been selected to focus attention on foliage or flower or trick of the light or all the above, and once the shutter has been tripped and the camera moved on, that section of space mingles back with the rest of the garden. Having recently given a garden talk locally, i came home to the new garden that was the subject of my pontification, only to be fairly disappointed that pretty much none of the greatest hits of the past summer were in evidence in the October gloom- i had just run through over a hundred garden views that in reality had only been there for a few seconds in total exposure time, and were certainly long gone, except as saved in pixels logged in 0’s and 1’s, somewhere in the digital file marked summergarden09.

One might be asking what this has to do with film, to which i would say that we were talking about getting people’s attention in film class the other day. Much has been made of subliminal messaging in the media- you don’t know the half of it. It seems that there are things aimed at getting one’s attention going on all the time, frame by frame. From colors to light to objects and character placement in the frame, we are constantly being told to look over there. An example we were given was of a student play where the instructor in that class was a minor character. What our instructor noted was that, while this particular production was a bit scattered, the experience of the teacher on stage had him staring intently at the main character getting through his lines, drawing wavering attention back to the main focus of the scene. While it seemed something of a revelation at the time, in thinking it over on the way home it seemed more obvious in a real world sense. You can be walking down the street and see intensity of gazes on other people’s faces grow and wane, but if you notice a number of people focused in the same direction you are fairly likely to turn and see what’s going on. Add a look of concern or an emphatic,  pointing finger and you have even more reason to look. Like, well, over there- no behind you. Too late.