Introduction

There have been literally thousands of scholarly studies of the human ability to draw. Most of these studies have focused on the drawings of young children, since their drawings shed some light on the processes of growth and perception at work in their brains. On the other hand, there have been almost no scientific studies of the process young adults go through in learning to use a camera. What studies there are have mostly addressed the content of the imagery, or the social situations in which they were made – the sort of thing that would help Kodak sell more film. The dearth of literature on photography is probably due to the mistaken assumption that photography is nothing more than passive observation of pre-existing tableaus.

This has been an exciting area for me to explore as an educator. In the six years I’ve been teaching motion picture photography at HCC, I’ve delved into theories of learning at the intersection of art education, narrative, and movement. Photography is an ideal subject for constructivist educational techniques, which encourage students to develop their skills and knowledge in a bottom-up exploratory approach. This approach differs significantly from the typical methods of teaching moviemaking, and I believe I get better results through the application of modern concepts in education and cognitive science.


The Hollywood Model

Moviemaking is often taught through what might be called the “Hollywood Model,” since it’s analogous to the process used in making commercial films. The student first creates a story in his or her mind; this is turned into a script; storyboards are drawn that illustrate each shot; actors are recruited; locations are found in which to shoot; the movie is acted out, photographed and recorded into raw material; and then the raw material is edited into a finished production. This process works passably well for students who have experience with a camera, creative writing and drawing. But for newcomers, it’s a disaster. Each of the steps in the Hollywood Model presents challenges that can be better addressed by an experiential approach to the subject, one that assumes nothing about what students know, one that allows them to build new abilities through experience.

The Hollywood Model has a sort of Cartesian duality to it, a lack of connectedness between mind and body. The conceptual work is done in the mind, before any use of the camera. In shooting the movie, the photographer’s body is merely a servant carrying out the mind’s preconceived instructions, not involved in the creative process at all. Storytelling, in this approach, is very symbolic, like a series of events worked out before using the camera. Another way of expressing it is that it is very “top down,” starting out with the big concept, and working downwards to flesh out the details.

The major shortcoming of the Hollywood Model is that it doesn’t integrate visual experience into the process. It isn’t interactive, in that the students aren’t encouraged to react to what they see through the camera in any significant way. The visual thinking has already been done, in the development of the storyboards. Storyboards make sense for Hollywood, where they’re used mostly as marketing tools, intended to attract investors to the project. The actors and locations don’t exist when Hollywood’s storyboards are drawn.

Students without any significant camera experience have trouble imagining in their minds what to do with the camera, because their bodies have never done it. Having seen a great many motion pictures in theaters and on television is no substitute for having done the work themselves. After seeing a movie, what the neophyte remembers is mostly his or her understanding of the movie, and not the specific details of its construction.

There’s an axiom in the art world to the effect that young children draw what they know, while older children draw what they see. The drawings of young children have a strongly schematic quality to them. The typical stick figure isn’t a visual experience of a person, so much as it is an icon of a person. I’ve noticed a similar quality to novice photographs as well – the photographer is often more involved with the idea of what’s in front of the camera than she is with the visual experience. I believe that a lot of this has to do with the management of visual complexity. The novice tends to put the subject in the middle of the shot, include a fair amount of empty space around the subject, and keep lines horizontal. Things such as shadows, textures, and asymmetrical placements don’t have a value to the novice, and are often avoided. They often have what I call the “Egyptian syndrome,” after ancient Egyptian art – people either look at the camera, or are photographed from the side. This is in keeping with an iconic approach to perception, and is the same thing young children do in their drawings. In many ways, it the clearest view of what is there. It’s also the least expressive.

Contrast the Hollywood Model with the process used by still photographers. Experienced still photographers, when sensing that a location offers some good shots, feel an instinctive “pull” to particular positions within the environment. Experienced photographers also take a lot of pictures, feeling no remorse at throwing most of them away. Good natural photography is a bottom-up process of exploring an environment, letting the visual experience guide the exploration. For them, drawing storyboards is a completely alien activity. Their photos are not just pleasant images, but a diary of their physical reactions as they looked through the viewfinder of the camera.

At the outset, the question must be asked, what should be the goal of teaching motion picture photography? There’s a widespread assumption that this kind of photography should be all about visual storytelling. But in order to create stories, one must have a language in which to develop them, and this is the main problem with the Hollywood Model. Even for students who know how to create stories in their minds, spoken language doesn’t directly translate into the visual language of the camera. And many entry-level students don’t know how to create verbal stories, either.

One of the primary things any serious artist needs to learn is how to design. This is certainly true in any practical art, such as architecture or engineering. And it’s quite true in cinematography. Making a movie is a project requiring a lot of work in many different aspects. Some sort of process is needed to organize the work, allowing the creative effort applied to be accumulated in some meaningful way. In most instances, effective design is contiguous with implementation. The creator, whether artist or engineer, engages in an iterative trial-and-error process through which potential approaches are sketched out and compared with each other, allowing the creator to delay commitment until things “feel right” one way or another.

For the motion picture photographer, I suggest that the camera itself is the best design tool, not pencil and paper. In the hands of skilled sketch artist, there’s an iterative process to drawing, in which the artist begins by lightly making marks, and slowly commits to those suggesting the best overall placement of objects in the finished drawing. But to the novice, there’s no iterative process, just a crude attempt to make marks on the paper that suggest some objects. And even for the skilled artist making a storyboard, there’s no iterative process involving the environment where the movie is to be shot.

There’s an ongoing debate in the visual literacy community as to whether visual images constitute a language. They’re certainly not as specific in their meaning as spoken languages. But spoken language isn’t simply a means for taking something pre-existing in one’s mind and conveying it out into the world. Language serves as a development system for ideas – a means for defining our thoughts, organizing and polishing them, and rehearsing our interactions with others. Language gives us the means of experiencing, organizing and remembering ourselves. Most of us experience thinking as talking to ourselves in our heads, an auditory feedback process that doesn’t merely represent what we think, but rather constructs our thoughts as we try them on for size.

As much as spoken language allows us to construct meaningful sentences and phrases, so does a visual language allow us to make meaningful constructions concerning a particular place. Just as we construct our thoughts in our heads in the process of talking to ourselves, so a photographer can practice making visual statements by exploring a place with the camera, and trying different shots on for size. The philosopher Villem Flusser referred to the photographer as a hunter, stalking prey. Regardless of whether the student wants to do nature photography, documentaries, or visual storytelling of invented stories, a feel for this stalking process is essential.

Photography, whether still pictures or motion pictures, is a very physical process. The images on the screen or in the pictures look like they do because the photographer went somewhere and did something. It’s not all that different from dance, with the obvious exceptions that the photographer is dancing with the environment, not a partner. And the photographer doesn’t dance before the audience’s eyes, but rather, holds their eyes in his or her hands. The language of photography is a language not just of imagery, but of movement through space. In order to control the instrument effectively, the cinematographer must develop a sense of responsiveness to what’s seen through the camera.


Expressive Images

Given that photography involves movement, the next question is, how does the student become responsive to what’s seen? How does one develop a sense for what to shoot and where to stand to do it?

Modern neuroscience has determined that there are two pathways for light stimulus as it’s being processed by our brains. The entry points, namely our eyes, are connected to the visual cortex in the back of our heads by one set of neural processes along the sides of our heads (called the ventral pathway), and another running along the top of our heads (called the dorsal pathway). These aren’t simply parallel bundles of neural wiring, but rather two entirely different processes. The nature of these processes, and their interaction, explains a lot in terms of how students learn to see meaning in photography.

The dorsal processes are sometimes called the “where-is-it” circuit. This part of the brain detects surfaces and edges in the light entering the eyes, and makes spatial sense out of what’s in the environment. Walls, tables and chairs, doors and windows are detected by these circuits – not their identity, but simply their surfaces and edges.

The ventral processes are sometimes called the “what-is-it” circuit. This part of the brain determines the nature of what’s being seen. The walls, tables and chairs, doors and windows are identified as such by this set of processes, based on the memory of what’s previously been seen and experienced. The ventral processes don’t just put labels on the things before us, but are quite context sensitive. We aren’t robots, after all – we move through the world with purpose, and we look with purpose. If I want to sit down, for example, the ventral processes determine objects suitable for that purpose, and the interaction between these two processes will direct my gaze toward a chair. But if the room suddenly began filling up with water, I might look around for something to stand on to get off the floor. What was seen as something to sit on a minute ago might now be seen as something to jump up on to avoid getting wet. The interaction of these two circuits is what the eminent psychologist Rudolf Arnheim called “visual thinking.”

These two neural pathways also figure prominently into the work of James Gibson, a well-known vision researcher who was most active in the middle of the last century. Gibson had an interesting perspective on these two pathways. He coined the term “affordances” to talk about our perception of things in term of what function they afford the viewer in the current context. In my previous example, the chair affords me a place to sit at one time, and a place to stand at another. Gibson believed that most animals see their environment this way, learning through experience to see certain shapes as representing food, safe shelter, or the shadows of predators. Gibson died before much research had been done on the underlying neural processes, but I believe his theory of affordances fits today’s neural maps quite well.

Gibson’s work was aimed at practical applications; he developed principles for training military pilots during World War II. But photographers go through a similar kind of learning experience as pilots, learning to “fly” their cameras based on environmental cues. In their case, however, the affordances they learn to perceive are not just functional, but expressive.

Perhaps the simplest of these affordances are related to the relative positioning of the camera. Seeing a person from a higher vantage point makes them look smaller, less powerful. Conversely, looking up at a person makes them seem bigger and stronger. Many of these perceptions are thought to be based on childhood memories.

Other common expressive affordances are related to light and color. The face of an actor who is partially illuminated, and partially in the dark may suggest a person doing some soul-searching, or perhaps a person who’s hiding. People bathed in warm-colored light are more easily seen as happy or cheerful, while those bathed in cooler colors may look sad.

Many of these attributes of objects are suggested by Gestalt theory in the early part of the 20th century. Factors such as proximity, grouping, symmetry, angularity and closure can be used for expressive purposes. Beginning photographers tend to avoid such factors in their photographs, most likely due to problems in the management of complexity. Experienced photographers, on the other hand, make use of complexity in expressive ways. In fact, there is a relationship between visual complexity and our sense of engagement.


Clarity Versus Expression

The eminent neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran has proposed a theory of art called the “Peak Shift Principle,” in which expressive elements of pictures are distortions or exaggerations of reality. Consider the type of drawing known as caricature – art having two significant interconnected aspects: one of which is that it characterizes something; and the other is that salient elements are exaggerated. I believe that good photography does much the same thing; not exaggerating things in the sense of making them bigger or unlifelike (although this certainly can happen), but simply by calling the audience’s attention to them. In other words, salient visual details show up in front of the camera more often. Good photography characterizes a place or a person by the way it brings the audience’s eyes to meaningful details. Another way of putting it is that good photography captures the essence of something or someone in front of the camera.

The essence of acting is for the actor to bring the inner nature or state of being out into the open, where the audience can have an experience of them in sight and sound. In my approach to cinematography, the camera is an actor, a co-conspirator with the people and things in front of it, conspiring to sell the audience on some feeling or point of view. The student learns to see expressively partly by concentrating on suggestive details.

(to be continued)