T.S. Eliot - The Hollow Men

Mistah Kurtz -- he dead.

A penny for the Old Guy

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats' feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,

Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed

With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom

Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost

Violent souls, but only

As the hollow men

The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams

In death's dream kingdom

These do not appear:

There, the eyes are

Sunlight on a broken column

There, is a tree swinging

And voices are

In the wind's singing

More distant and more solemn

Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer

In death's dream kingdom

Let me also wear

Such deliberate disguises

Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves

In a field

Behaving as the wind behaves

No nearer --

Not that final meeting

In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land

This is cactus land

Here the stone images

Are raised, here they receive

The supplication of a dead man's hand

Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this

In death's other kingdom

Waking alone

At the hour when we are

Trembling with tenderness

Lips that would kiss

Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here

There are no eyes here

In this valley of dying stars

In this hollow valley

This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places

We grope together

And avoid speech

Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless

The eyes reappear

As the perpetual star

Multifoliate rose

Of death's twilight kingdom

The hope only

Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear

Prickly pear prickly pear

Here we go round the prickly pear

At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception

And the creation

Between the emotion

And the response

Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire

And the spasm

Between the potency

And the existence

Between the essence

And the descent

Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is

Life is

For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

What a dense, dark, and sober piece of writing. Here are some of my emotional and conceptual responses to the poem, along with some possible ways of expressing them visually.

detachment – there is a sense of distance, and a desire to remain far away

· I should find a way to remove my viewers from my photographs. Things should not be seen directly, they should not be instantly recognizable in any way.

· Another way of looking at detachment in disconnection, perhaps playing with either physical cropping or the cropping / combination of photographs

· Shooting in a place of emptiness, impersonality, purgatory

emptiness- the men lack meaning, there heads are filled with straw. They exist in a godless purgatory, they are not violent instead they are hollow.

· Be careful not to make anything too much of a subject. A subject has inherent meaning and value.

· Consider the amount of space, perhaps consider photographing negative space primarily, positive space secondarily

apathy- the men in the poem are not in any state of fear, longing, anger, or violence. They exist indifferently.

· A setting that is cold and indifferent will help here, also pay attention to themes of detachment

fragmentation- many segments are only parts of a whole, such as the fragmented “For Thine Is”

· Ways in which I can fragment the picture plane, distort “reality”, use a mirror as a tool for abstraction

· Perhaps further fragmentation on the computer

· Emphasize subjectivity and ambiguity, odd compositions.

Solemn- seriousness, questioning of existence,

· Dark lighting situations

· Muted color palate

· Perversion of ideal, childhood

post tredegar

I think that I am going to go down to the pumphouse this weekend and try to focus entirely on shape and form. I have to be sure to always keep this conncept in my mind while I am shooting. In a lot of ways, it is nice to have a concept that is established beforehand, this way you are constantly looking for something instead of shooting a variety of photos and then piecing together a concept afterwards. Of course, I still must keep in mind general formal issues like framing, value, and composition. Hopefully i can generate enough images to get a nice body. Wish me luck!

thoughts, pre-tredegar

so tomorrow we are going down by the river to tredegar iron works. I thought I'd take a little time just to remind myself what I'm looking to do while I'm taking pictures down there.

I have to pay attention to framing. avoid things that disintegrate the frame. try to create areas of interest and ways of leading the eye into the picture. Make sure to give objects enough space for the eye to circulate around them without any tension.

Look for a good range of values. Good highlights, deep shadows and a range of mid tones. Avoid lighting that makes things blown out, be prepared to adjust white balance.

Look for possible conceptual ideas that could generate a body of work. be thinking about what a picture means as I am taking it. Maybe try and take pictures that generate discussion.

Move through the space. Try not too remaining to stationary but look at the picture from different perspectives. Avoid using telephoto lens if possible, especially when physically moving physically closer produces the same effect.

will write more. i really hope to get some good ones tomorrow!

photo assignment 4, thoughts

First off, I'm a little bit more worried about this assignment. When I have photographed a space or an object it is relatively static, and I have a lot more control. People, on the other hand, are umpredictable, moving, and dynamic. Perhaps a good thing for me to do is to figure out a manner of photographing people that embraces this spontaneity and lack of control. Or, by contrast, developing a system which allows for an amount of control over the people in a situation.

One way in which this control may be achieved is by shooting in a constant location and point of view. This way the only thing that varies from picture to picture are the people who are moving through the space. This might be a good way to create a unified body of photographs. I did a similar thing when I took a picture of the lamppost from the same point of view at three points of day. By keeping all other factors somewhat constant, the single varying factor becomes an area of interest almost by default. I was thinking about using a tripod and photographing on the corner of two bisecting streets. At a point like this I would be able to capture people either waiting to cross the road perpendicularly or move along horizontally.

I am also thinking now about how people change with a change of area and location. Perhaps I could set up my tripod in different areas of Richmond, for example downtown, the fan, and Oregon hill. It would be interesting to see how the demographics, appearance, and characteristics of people change according to the area of the city. I wonder how much specificity and similarity between people can be found in specific areas. I also feel as though the nature of the people would change according to location. For example, those walking on broad street are probably not going to be walking for leisure. Instead they will most like be walking in order to get from point A to point B. I hope that somehow I can somehow capture this purposefulness and directness in my photographs. By contrast, in the fan, perhaps I will get more pictures of people walking their dogs or taking strolls.

I think it is also important for me to consider how big I want the people to be in my frame. Ideally I would like them close enough where the viewer can notice details like dress, posture, and even maybe facial expression.

Maybe a series of 9? 3 photos of 1 place, 3 places total? I could shoot a ton at each location and then edit them down.

perhaps I will take some shots tomorrow, Friday, as a test, and if they turn out well I will continue onward!

photo assignment 3, thoughts

I chose (like a lot of others I'm sure) to photograph my room. A bedroom is an interesting place to photograph because it indirectly reveals a lot about the person living in it. When carefully observed, one can see a person's interests, personality, behavior, and character in the visual elements of a room.

If it's possible, i would like to approach my room as if I were a complete stranger. As a stranger with a camera, I would try to isolate things in the room that I believe reveal something about the character of the individual who inhabits its space. This being said, I will not arrange or reposition anything in my room, instead I will leave everything as it is, or as I have left it.

It is obvious that things like books, clothing style, and music choice reveal a lot about a person, but I also believe that there are traces of a person in much more subtle things, such as the rumple of a bed sheet, or the creases of a book. I hope to capture some of these more subtle, slightly ambiguous moments. I want to try to focus less on the subject of the photograph as to the nature of the subjects, and how they are existing.

I also interested in how fragmentation and cropping can create interest and mystery. When one is not able to see an object in it's entirety, the mind tries to complete what the eye cannot see. Sometimes a fragmented object is not easily identifiable, and the image becomes much more ambiguous and open to interpretation. At other times fragmentation creates an abstraction in which the viewer might concentrate less on what an object is and more on how the images looks. I think that when this is done successfully it provides a lot of interest and attraction.

I also notice that a lot of the objects in my room are ordinary and mundane in nature. It would be interesting if to try and make the mundane interesting through fragmentation and abstraction.