Since my youth I have been keenly interested in photography and optics in general. Somewhere between my twelfth year and my twentieth I pursued something akin to classical training in the art form, but it was largely a wasted endeavor. I tried to hard to be “artful,” whatever that means, and ended up taking some very poorly-composed, poorly-conceived, and poorly-executed photographs, wasting much film, time, chemical solution, and expensive paper in the process. It was admittedly a fun and care-free kind of time.
One of the things that I took from that training-which was all but forgotten; curse my adolescent brain and that girl’s captivating beauty-one of the things was the “triangle” approach to lighting. Part of what one must remember is that lighting is always a balancing act of instincts, vision, both artistic and physical, and theory. Changes to one part of the triangle, the width of the aperture or the speed of the shutter for example, must be compensated with equal and opposite shifts to the other two tines. It’s a bit like Newtonian physics in that there is always an equal and opposite shift in order to maintain what is called “good lighting.”
Where things get a bit tricksy, then, is when the photographer willingly commits the sin of ignoring theory. Increase size of the aperture from f/16 to f/2.8 and you have an extremely shallow depth of field; fail to change the shutter speed and ISO accordingly and you have an overexposed shot. Sometimes, this can be used to fine-tune a shot to meet artistic standards, perhaps by slightly overexposing a portrait to give the subject luminosity. Like so many other things, writing included, the “rules” and “standards” are in place to ensure that everyone knows the rules of the game, so to speak; we utilize this language, such and such is standard practice, blah creates the norm of what we do. But when these rules are broken–as I have just done–for a specific effect, one apparently becomes a genius, an artisan. It’s the mere fact that such rules exist that lends weight to a sentence beginning with “but”–we focus on the abnormality as it relates to the norm. Finding the rest of the work to be strongly written, we see that it was intentional and not a failing at a grammatical level. “Originality” is born.
Somewhere in there is the thread of exactly what I have been struggling with as of late. Last semester I was a researching machine; I churned out papers left and right and mastered the art of skimming excising theory from long articles and books. As a result, my writing slipped increasingly into the register of the academic article. Time this semester has been consumed almost exclusively by either reading or writing short responses in which I am encouraged to become more personal. Long has it been since I have been asked to inject my own feelings into a piece. I loathe it, to be honest. I am one of those writers who feels that the reader should understand that the very fact I have written something about this topic means that I am concerned about it. If I write about the thematic mechanics of speech and silence in Speak, I expect my reader to know that those things are pretty damn important to my reading of the work. When I write about the inscription of prejudice and racism into communal society in Brave New World, you can be sure that the reason I have chosen to discuss the relatively small selection of quotes from which my essay buds is that I think understanding this aspect of the novel adds a depth to it that would be unseen if it were not understood and taken into account.
Some of my classmates are writing what I think are very grandiose papers. It’s fine if you want to talk about the politics of possessive pronouns in a text, especially when we’re discussing a society that is overtly concerned with things and ownership, but one really needn’t select outside sources for a two-page response paper. I’m as avid a researcher as they come; things are on my docket that I never expected to float within the grasp of my feelers, but that does not mean that I read everything with a mind toward the critical aspects of it. I cannot separate myself from that, now that I know it; I read Brave New World and immediately conjure all of the theoretical texts from Marx, Engels, Althusser, Gramsci, and Foucault. It’s a book about class struggle and indoctrination–literally, not just critically–but at the same time I can choose to ignore any potential research that might grow from my reading of it in this manner. It’s like taking that portrait of an angelic face; I know that I’m choosing too slow of a shutter speed and too low of film speed to properly expose the photograph, but I ignore those rules precisely because I want it improperly exposed. I don’t want to dissect Brave New World into its formative pieces any more than I want to reduce photography to a set of laws and procedures. To do so removes the most important aspect of art from it–the enjoyment. I love the sciences and would not be seeking my PhD if I did not, but there is a more profound love of reading for the sake of reading in me that needs to be satisfied.
You colleagues can have your Post-Marxist Analyses of Gramscian Hegemonic Structures Embedded into Societal Norms and the Collective Unconscious of Brave New World; I’ll keep my annotation-free text and the artistic vision the work delivers, at least for a little while.
