Clear Liquid Thought: The Photographs of Jim Dine
The camera sees even beyond the visual consciousness.
--Ralph Eugene Meatyard
Argument: The Photographic Unconscious
In his article "Photographie avant analyse"1 photography critic François Soulages discusses
the reciprocal influence between photography (as an emerging technology in the nineteenth
century) and the study of the unconscious (prior to the invention of psychoanalysis). To what
extent, he asks, did a new technology such as photography enlighten, modify, or enrich the
understanding of the unconscious? And, conversely, how did what he calls "the hypothesis of the
unconscious" allow for a better understanding of a new technology? These questions, inherent in
the beginnings of photography and essentially linked to its role in the comprehension of the
visible and the invisible body, have gained considerable importance today.
The photographic works I will discuss here participate in our understanding of the
unconscious in a paradoxical way, since they do not imply disclosing images of the artist's
unconscious specifically encoded into symbolic meaning. On the contrary, my concern is with
these works' potential to generate visual equivalents of inner life perceptions in a variety of
puzzling formal patterns whose disclosure of meaning is cunningly deferred. The photographic
compositions of Jim Dine are not narratives of inner life, but forms of visual experience that
inform our ways of thinking the unconscious.
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1 François Soulages, "Photographie avant analyse", Photographie et inconscient (31-35). In this study,
Soulage primarily deals with the beginnings of photography and with its paradoxical uses in psychiatry
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...rundberg, Andy. "Now, the Camera's Eye Turns Inward", in The New York Times, May 28.
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19 The phrase used in the title of this article is coined after the title of one of Dine's black-and-white
photogravure prints, "Clear Liquid Talking", 1996.
Krauss, Rosalind.The Optical Unconscious. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1993.
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The poem “Extended Development” by Sarah Kay explores the ways in which the art of photography has changed throughout time, yet still remains a highly important and influential hobby. More specifically, how photography is an important aspect in each member of the speaker’s family. By using allusions, characterization, and imagery, Kay explores how the art of photography has changed throughout time.
Fuss and Barthes, they share an interest in photography, they share an interest in the foundation and principles of photography, moreover they share an interest in photography that is deeply personal. Fuss takes the camera out of photography. Barthes takes photography out of art. Both men want to get to the essence of what a photograph is, one by thinking and writing about it, and one by doing it. In this paper I will show how Adam Fuss’ work matches up with and demonstrates the ideas of Barthes’ in Camera Lucida.
While Conolly and Diamond argued for the use of photography to objectively represent the “general external character of mental suffering, or derangement of mind, and of structural changes
Practiced by thousands who shared no common tradition or training from the earliest days of taking photos, the first photographers were disciplined and united by no academy or guild, who considered their medium variously as a trade, a science, an art, or an entertainment, and who often were unaware of each other’s work. Exactly as it sounds photography means photo-graphing. The word photography comes from two Greek words, photo, or “light”, and graphos, or drawing and from the start of photography; the history of the aforementioned has been debated. The idea of taking pictures started some thirty-one thousand years ago when strikingly sophisticated images of bears, rhinoceroses, bison, horses and many other types of creators were painted on the walls of caves found in southern France. Former director of photography at New Yorks museum of modern art says that “The progress of photography has been more like the history of farming, with a continual stream of small discoveries leading to bigger ones, and in turn triggering more experiments, inventions, and applications while the daily work goes along uninterrupted.” ˡ
Tolmachev, I. (2010, March 15). A history of Photography Part 1: The Beginning. Retrieved Febraury 2014, from tuts+ Photography: http://photography.tutsplus.com/articles/a-history-of-photography-part-1-the-beginning--photo-1908
The unconscious mind can be explained in various ways and can take on various attributes. Carl Jung the author of “The Archetype and the Collective Unconscious,” defines unconsciousness as the first reactions and interactions a person endeavors. Several Physicists believe that the unconscious mind acts separately from our voluntary thinking. Scientist believes that understanding the unconscious mind is key to determining what type of archetype a person may have or develop. Experiments such as, reaction to stimuli, have lead cognitive psychiatrist to determine the strength of the unaware and involuntary mind. In addition, many social physicists have also believed that the unconscious mind is unaware of it actions and that the unconscious part of our brain can sometimes be focused on several signs that our conscious self can’t see.
Freud drew the attention of the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious mind in psychology. This is one of Freud’s best contribution to psychology. He illustrated
Sontag, Susan. "Essay | Photography Enhances Our Understanding of the World." BookRags. BookRags. Web. 15 Apr. 2014.
Freud (1960) said \"that very powerful mental processes of ideas exist which can produce all the effects of the mental life that ordinary ideas do, though they themselves do not become conscious\" (p. 4). This is an indication that there are other parts of the mind in which thoughts occur. According to Freud (1960), \"the state in which the ideas existed before being made conscious is called by us repression\" (p. 4). It is by the theory of repression that the concept of the unconscious is obtained.
Starmans, C., & Bloom, P. (2012). Windows to the soul: Children and adults see the eyes as the location of the self. Cognition, 123(2), 313-318.
As seen in paintings of battle scenes and portraits of wealthy Renaissance aristocracy, people have always strived to preserve and document their existence. The creation of photography was merely the logical continuum of human nature’s innate desire to preserve the past, as well as a necessary reaction to a world in a stage of dramatic and irreversible change. It is not a coincidence that photography arose in major industrial cities towards the end of the nineteenth century.
... qualities, and focal ranges, meaning the camera could calculate the appropriate settings, which before, were a educated and process.
"History of photography and photojournalism.." History of photography and photojournalism.. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Nov. 2013. .
Paintings, like many forms of art, are very subjective—what one may find intriguing another may completely disagree. “Art is physical material that affects a physical eye and conscious brain” (Solso, 13). To glance at art, we must go through a process of interpretation in order to understand what it is we are looking at. Solso describes the neurological, perceptual, and cognitive sequence that occurs when we view art, and the often inexpressible effect that a work of art has on us. He shows that there are two aspects to viewing art: nativistic perception—the synchronicity of eye and brain that transforms electromagnetic energy into neuro-chemical codes—which is "hard-wired" into the sensory-cognitive system; and directed perception, which incorporates personal history—the entire set of our expectations and past experiences—and knowledge (Solso, preface)
Their knowledge in the unconscious system is repressed and unavailable to consciousness without overcoming resistance (e.g., defense mechanisms). Thereby, the repression does not allow unconscious knowledge to be completely aware; rather, it is construed by means of concealing and compromise, but only interpretable through its derivatives dream and parapraxes that overcome resistance by means of disguise and compromise. Within the preconscious system, the contents could be accessible, although only a small portion at any given moment. Unconscious thought is characterized by primary process thinking that lacks negation or logical connections and favors the over-inclusions and 'just-as' relationships evident in condensed dream images and displacements. Freud asserted that primary process of thinking was phylogenetically, and continues to be ontogenetically, prior to secondary process or logical thought, acquired later in childhood and familiar to us in our waking life (1900, 1915a).