The Syntax of a Photowork – David Bate
Syntax is the grammatical sense of stringing a sentence together, (SVO – subject, verb, object – The cat sat on the mat) in reverse this sentence would not make sense (The mat sat on the cat).
Syntax cannot be applied to the singular image as the singular image does not unfold, it’s happening occur simultaneously, guided by the visual logic/elements of the image, the spatial arrangements, the lines of light, tone, gesture, etc. However, when one tries to describe to another an image they have not seen, one if forced to string together words into a coherent sentence to explain and describe the contents and subjective reading. We translate the spatial elements of the picture into linguistical discourse.
Silent films can teach us a lot about the photobook. They use text to set up the location, chapter headings, scenes and indication of character speech. Also, the movement between moments and the moments between movements construct the plot.
“While the process of looking at a sequence of photographs in a photobook may seem to be similar, it is quite different. In the cinema, the time, pace and sequence and thus the montage of images is controlled by the film. In still photography it is the spectator who “animates” the pictures by look at them, putting the static images in their mind, and imagining his/her own presence or perhaps even a role within them.” Page 54
“The pace and order of viewing the sequence of scenes in a photobook or exhibition are fundamentally different to cinema: it is the viewer who ultimately controls the flow of pictures.” Page 54
Photoworks have a clear structure to them but it is still up to the viewer how they navigate its flow.
In Indo-European languages, the convention of reading left to write, downwards, has been applied to photobook layout but is there a necessary reason to mimic this logic photographically? Bate questions if compositions of individual photographs assume a left to right reading.
“Eisenstein’s contention on montage were about relations between shots, and that they should often conflict dialectically. The still photographer is not concerned about the length of such shots but more the number of them and the relationship between them.” – page 58
“Perfect harmony creates diptychs of discontinuous spaces, related together in their vertical continuity. In this the pictures are set in a relation of identity (both have inside/outside), but also antithesis (the contrast of different scenes).” Page 58
On Perfect Harmony, Bate claims the visual similitude’s and conflictions are linked by short sentences which opens the pictures to an extra-textual situation. Potential narrative between scenes is only made available via the text. The text does not impose narrative or meaning but allows the spectator freedom for narrative space via speech – page 58
Bate uses the cycle of old and new cars like the relationships between people. This way of thinking would be useful for own practition.
Perfect Harmony is paradigmatic with its vertical plane and juxtaposition of conflicting spaces – work and leisure.
On continuous images and the thread/element that binds them – “More generally the thread can be a character, an object (e.g. a loaf of bread), a process, or even the sense of space of the picture, with continuity given by the particular aesthetic codes of the pictures.” page 67
“The new confidence of photography as art has perhaps loosened the anxiety about journalistic methods, since art photography is less threatened by claims of commercial and media rhetoric.” - page 68
“Invariably in all such works, the syntax (sequence) of the pictures is determined by the continuity if the picture content (the referent). In other words, the sequence of photographs follows the syntax of the referent (of its event or processes), which is different from a “photographic syntax”, which creates a different conception of time and space” page 68
On the Americans – “We travel between the scenes, unconsciously bringing the residues of the previous picture into the next one. The spatial interlude between pictures that is created by the viewer turning the pages (and the white space opposite pictures) functions like a blink, as does the white space between photographs on a galley wall” page 68
There cannot be an actual beginning middle and end in photoworks such as The Americans. Just fragments and components of different stories that intertwine via a thread.
“We could simply say that one image dissolves into the other via metaphor and metonymy” page 71
“To be clear, to create this type of photographic diegesis it is not just a matter of the syntagmatic “editing” of pictures into a sequence, but also the syntactical relation of the pictures. Photographic syntax emerges as a result of a rhetorical organization across pictures, not just their combination into syntagmatic sequences. In the syntax of the Photowork it is the contagious relation of pictures that does the work.” Page 71
Understanding of visual rhetoric may help us to define the type of syntax opertating the different connections between images.
To give his pictures on Zone more of a dream like look, Bate uses bird’s eye view perspective and content of missing detail.
