Lifson: I said in our pre-tutorial emails that I was interested to hear about your relationship to the scenic places you photograph...That is, if the portfolio is representative of your approach to landscape photography, of the subjects within that area that you prefer. Cohen: You have to remember that I am quite new to this, so I'm still exploring/discovering; I have no "approach" as such; I'm just following my nose as I explore. Lifson: In other words, your landscape photography isn't limited to the kinds of landscapes in the portfolio? Cohen: At this point, that's about all the true landscape photography I've really done; my primary subjects in the past have been family and nature (flowers, insects, birds, etc.). Lifson: Ah. This is interesting, and this is good. How recent are the landscapes in the portfolio? Cohen: They were taken on a vacation (50th birthday present) just a few weeks ago. Lifson: OK. [I have] things in better perspective, in context. Cohen: I hope so; I've been concerned that my inexperience could be problematic here. Lifson: No, not at all. In fact, it's an advantage. Cohen: I certainly hope so! Lifson: We're talking at the beginning of an exploration, before patterns set in. Cohen: Precisely! In fact, i'm always concerned about falling into patterns or ruts. Lifson: If I had come back from that trip with only three photographs like the ones in the portfolio, I would have been asking myself how to keep on making landscapes during the time before I could make another trip west. Cohen: You touched on that in your statement, and I can relate to it; if my photography can only be done on trips like this, it would be very sad indeed. Lifson: I'd be looking around where I live for subject matter that I could handle--there's a good word to keep in mind, "handle", I'll explain later...For subjects I could handle in the same way. Cohen: You also touched on the comparmentalization of time, and that is definitely a challenge for me. Lifson: "Handle"...Other words are "treat" or the plain, useful word, "photograph". Because as glorious as those places are, the strength of the photographs isn't in the subject matter. Cohen: The lillies of the field, in other words? Lifson: I hadn't intended to say this so early, but as a way of leading into the question, "What are the strengths?" it's a good device. Cohen: Clearly it's a greater challenge to make great photographs out of ordinary things around us Lifson: So here goes. The photographer Garry Winogrand once said to me, "If a dramatic subject matter were the guarantee of a dramatic photograph, every sports page photograph of a close play at home plate would be a masteripiece." Lifson: The drama comes from the way the photographer "handles" the subject. Cohen: I understand the concept; translating this into action is the challenge Lifson: So we should now turn to the two pictures in which you turned the subject into drama. Those are Hoodoos at Sunrise and ***** We'll take the simpler one first, Hoodoos at Sunrise. Cohen: Turning the subjects into the drama you describe was certainly an unconscious process in my case; in fact, it's that spontaneous preconscious process that appeals to me so much in photography Lifson: Can we...say a few things about "unconscious" processes [before talking about the picture itself]? Cohen: Certainly; so much of my life is rational/planned/deliberate, that this offers a release. Lifson: Well, yes, but not the way you think. Cohen: i'm listening... Lifson: You're probably right, the process is probably unconscious at the moment. But it seems consistent. I know it's a jump to say this from only two pictures, but there's also the fact that when you were choosing pictures from that set of exposures, and pictures to submit to this...Well, it's sort of like a competition...To submit to this tutorial as well, you chose these two. Cohen: I see your point. Lifson: So if the process of making drama was unconscious, there was another process, the process of choice...Of choosing and rejecting...And [for the purposes of this portfolio submission, choosing no more than 10 pictures which had to] put your best foot forward... [And what you did with the three landscapes] was to choose drama. So yes, [the whole process, shooting and choosing] was probably unconscious, but also yes...consistent. Cohen: But is there a danger in making what is somewhat 'unconscious' now into a reasoned, intellectual exercise? Lifson: No. A flat no. [Pause while Lifson collects his thoughts.] Lifson: Every good picture comes from myriad decisions. At the beginning, most of them are conscious. Cohen: But isn't there something in the creative process which isn't entirely "conscious" or rational? [Pause] Cohen: Certainly one makes decisions to be at a certain place, at a certain time, with certain equipment, but then other forces come into play Lifson: It's when many techniques are mastered and many conscious decisions get made, that the unconscious becomes informed. After that, when it operates by itself, it makes hundreds of decisions in a split second--which is what a photographer does-And those decisions rest on and arise from a pretty vast resevoir of previous conscious decisions.... Cohen: My other "passion" is playing volleyball, and there are certain similarities - one must master several basic skills, but how and when to draw on these in the heat of action is what makes one a true competitor or not... Lifson: Right. Taking pictures is a lot like any other difficult activity which depends on 1) knowing a lot of individual technical "moves"... and 2) instinctively knowing when to use which ones. For example, I sometimes wonder when a certain famous photographer first noticed he was getting sharp foregrounds, fuzzy backgrounds, and said to himself, "I've been doing this unconsciously, sometimes it works, it must be something I've been interested in [but] didn't know it.... What happens if I start consciously to try to make it work?" Lifson: Then came, for sure, a lot of practice and experiment, during which the photographer learned lots of ways to make out of focus and in focus things work together. Cohen: Point taken; I just want to avoid being too intent on the mechanics that I lose the joy of the creative. Lifson: But when it came instinctively to him to do it [one] way with [one] subject, [another] way with [another] subject, and [he] didn't have to think about it...A good shortstop doesn't...say, "Hmmm, from the sound of that [hit] [it S] a three bouncer to my left," he just hears the crack of the bat...and dives. [Pause] Lifson: They joy of the creative comes from a mastery of the mechanics and [from instinctively knowing] when and why to use them, so that you use them without thinking and the joy of that, well, it's fantastic. Cohen: Yes; that's what i'm after. Cohen: And that level of skill/instinct will only come with daily, consistent practice.. Lifson: Right. And from knowing the kind of "handling" to use with [what subject, when...] Lifson: Now, in Hoodoos at Sunrise and Grand Canyon Sunset... Cohen: I have Hoodoos on my screen... Lifson: What you saw in Hoodoos at Sunrise, of course, was the foreground so bright and the background still in shadow. And the foreground so orange and the background so blue...Is my monitor getting the colors right? Sometimes it doesn't. Cohen: Background more brown, with a touch of blue, on my monitor; foreground definitely warm brown/orange Lifson: Right, Brown...I was captivated by the blue. Now, in those two planes, [i.e., the two planes] of the landscape and [the two planes] of the photograph, there's the beginning of drama. In pictures, drama depends on visual contention, visual conflict. Just as in theater. Cohen: I can see how you put into words and make conscious what appealed to me on an unconscious level. Lifson: But then came the handling-[Part of which is something Winogrand] also once said to me, "A photographer is responsible for everything he puts within the four edges of his picture." What, from the whole of the scene before you, you choose to put within those edges. This, of course, also means what you choose not to put there. [Pause] Lifson: As long as we're talking about edges, let's talk about the top edge of Hoodoos at Sunrise. You've put it where it cuts off the rock formations before they finish, before THEIR top edges become a horizon line. In fact, you've chosen not to use the "natural" horizon line. [Pause] Lifson: [I'm starting] a digression, now...I'm coming down to the middle of the picture... Lifson: The virtual horizon of this picture is a triangular black shadow just above the...[foreground] orange rock formations...It's not actually "just above", it's over the first ridge or whatever of the brown rocks... Cohen: I'm looking for what you're describing. Lifson: If you go straight up from the "s" at the end of "Hoodoos" you come to it. Cohen: Ok, I think I see what you're referring to; what is the significance of this area? Lifson: That's the vanishing point, more or less, of the perspective set up by the two planes of orange rock forms in the foreground, and therefore it more or less implies the horizon of a horizontal plane (which we don't see) on which those orange rocks rest...It's implied...And a horizontal line across the picture at that point is more or less the picture's horizon...[You've made] a complicated picture... Cohen: What is the value of this line/observation? Lifson: It's part of what makes the drama... of what turns the space and volumes...of the...canyon, into the world of your picture. [Pause] Lifson: Therefore, it's part of what makes your picture a picture, that is, something that creates a world that has nothing at all to do with the [actual canyon. The picture creats] a [canyon at sunrise] that never was, and never will be, except in the picture, where, by the way, it's always the present, so it's outside of time, too, whereas that canyon is very much in time. For example, it changes its appearance with every change of light...And atmosphere... Lifson: But the picture, it's always the same. [Pause] Lifson: By the way, in "Outside of time, too" , the "too" means "as well as outside of nature's own space." [Pause] Lifson: And no, I'm not reading anything into the picture. I'm only looking at what's already in the picture, at its visual structure. Cohen: I see what you're describing, but certainly it would never have occurred to me to describe it that way Lifson: That's why I'm the teacher. Cohen: And how can i apply that principle in future photographs? Lifson: It's a good question, but can you ask it in about 10 minutes? The answer will mean more when we've looked at other parts of the picture structure, and the handling, that also work to create the drama here. Cohen: No problem Lifson: I want to get back to that top edge. [Pause] Lifson: On the left, [the top edge is] just above some of those blue-flecked chimneys--I wish I knew what they were actually called... Cohen: Hoodoos Lifson: And because it's just above those...Let me count them... [Pause] Lifson: Six, there are six vivid ones... [Pause] Lifson: Because it's just above those six blue-flecked hoodoos-it lets them complete their forms, if you will--They, the six, become variations on the larger, orange/pink hoodoos in the foreground. Lifson: Minor characters, a minor melody, if you will, close in every way to the major characters or melody, but in a different tone, a different key, a different rhythm...Understated, where the foreground chimneys are emphatically stated, and so on... [Pause] Lifson: So there's a kind of contention there, two groups of characters, each with a different "take" on the same idea. One dominant, but the other saying its piece, and not giving up... Cohen: Again, a fascinating observation Lifson: [The smaller, quieter forms in the background are] not yielding to the insistent "Look at me, I'm the important thing here" of the foreground group...[The background group is] holding its own... [Pause] Lifson: But to the right of the picture, still along the top edge, the edge interrupts the forms of the hoodoos in the row that stretches toward the picture's right edge... [Pause] Lifson: Another digression: True, there's that little bit of open space way at the right...That's a bit of surprise, that's a tiny opening onto another world...So really the row is stretching [to the right] toward openness. But... when we read the picture at first...[that top passage is] stretching toward the right edge....In other words, it's not moving toward more landscape, more nature, it's moving toward the limits of the world within the picture, the world the picture creates... Lifson: And these hoodoos, without their tops, interrupted by the top edge, fragmented by it...are, by virtue of that interruption, that fragmentation, DIFFERENT forms, and, in a picture, different forms means different THINGS. So you have yet another set of characters. Now we have three [sets]: the orange group in the foreground, and the two brown/blue ones in the second plane. [Pause] Lifson: And each set, each group holds its own. No group gets shy and slinks off stage, the way some people, say, in a conversation with a much stronger personality, gradually stop talking and become deferential, over modest, say self-deprecating things...So there's contention, there's conflict, and the picture structure holds it all in suspension...Each part seems to have an area whose size and shape and all is appropriate to itself...The photographer has given each part its due. The foreground material is splendid, the photograph doesn't undercut the splendor. In fact, it celebrates the splendor. But it doesn't celebrate it to the degree that it denies the visual interest, the singularity, the "voices" if you will, of the other parts. [Pause] Lifson: Then there's that tiny corner of sky at the right. Is it sky? Lifson: Or a further reach of the canyon's space, in yet another kind of light... Cohen: Actually, I think very distant rock/mesas, rather than sky, but I'm not 100% certain Lifson: You're probably right. The implication is of yet deeper space, of a different kind of light in it, as that part of the world catches the morning sun in its own way. [Pause] Lifson: I wish that corner had been a little larger. Cohen: Actually I do have a shot almost identical to this one, but a little wider angle, with more of that area. Lifson: It would be interesting to look at. My intuition is that just a little bit larger, it would have had an optimum visibility, we would have seen it at the same time we see the rest of the detail. [If so, the] drama would have been richer, the world of the picture more complicated, more all-embracing, richer...Richer's the best word. [Pause] Lifson: Now to your question, how do you use this information in the future? That was it, more or less, right? Cohen: Yes. Lifson: We've covered a lot of ground, here, so I'll try to fish the various points out of the discussion and make them simple and concrete. Cohen: I'm definitely a bottom-line practical type of person. Lifson: 1. Having seen what just a top edge can do to create two groups of dissimilar forms/objects out of a wide passage of very similar forms and objects, you can [photograph in the future so as to] see what the top edge can do in other situations with other wide background passages of similar or even identical forms and objects. And when you look at other people's photographs, good ones, you will be able to see what the top edges do there, with similarly defined material. [Pause] Lifson: For example, with the pictures of Paris streets and the buildings that line them by Eugene Atget, who worked in Paris 1897-1927. When he was faced with a street with a building on one side whose five or seven or whatever third story windows, all identical, had to be at the top of the frame...If he wanted to get everything in the picture that he wanted that row of windows HAD to be at the top of the frame...To create five or seven or whatever distinctly different windows...Five or seven or whatever distinctly different forms, characters... Lifson: He sliced the top edge diagonally across the building...So that the left-most window, say, was just a stone window sill and a little bit of dark glass, with the bottoms of white curtains...And each window, as your eye goes along the row left to right, is taller, has the wooden frame divisions, but the panes of glass are low rectangles here, tall rectangles there, and the curtains in each window has a different shape/ And none of the forms is a rectangle, becuse the top edge is always at a slant...You'll start to see this sort of thing all over the place, in good pictures. Cohen: I'll try to keep this in mind as I view other's photography, painting, etc. Lifson: 2. BUT because the top edge is only ONE of the four edges, you'll quickly become aware that your other three edges can do similar things, create new forms...Create forms in the picture that are not the forms of the things in nature...Yet we will still read a window, or a tree, as both a real window or tree AND as a window or tree that exists nowhere but in the picture...Now that's only for the edges. Lifson: 3. Now that you see that there's drama in this picture, and...that it comes from contention between forms, and between groups of forms...And between light and dark...And between colors, and between tones within a single color...All those different blues...in the hoopoos...You will start to look at the next things you photograph with questions [like]: Lifson: Where are the separate, contending elements here? Lifson: How do I put them in the frame so that they contend? Lifson: How much of each do I need to make it contend.? Lifson: How much is too much? Lifson: How much of those orange/pink hoopoos would be too much, so that they visually overwhelm the other things, take up too much of our attention from the other things, and so destroy the drama [THAT YOU, DON COHEN, ARE] FEELING as you stand here, this sensation, this emotion, that makes you want to take the picture in the first place? Lifson: For the evidence of these landscapes and of your having chosen them for this tutorial is that you are definitely responding to something in nature over and above the physical natural beauty of the scene... Lifson: And the evidence is that what you're feeling, what you're responding to, is drama. Lifson: It's subtler, more spread out, in a lower key, in Grand Canyon Sunset. [Pause] Lifson: [This piture has] more characters, each one speaking pretty softly...It's like overhearing an important and slightly intense conversation, in almost whispers, among a group of very much interconnected people... Lifson: But it's there... [Pause] Lifson: I suspect...Here we come to the "How to keep practicing?" part of the question...I suspect...No, I know from experience, as we all know from experience, that that drama is everywhere in inanimate nature. It's in the trees alongside the neighborhood playground, at certain times of day, under certain slants of light...It's in backyard gardens...It was along the creek that ran by my house when I was a kid, and it was in the scrub forest, sumac mostly, and small elms and maples, that ran down the hill from my house to that creek.. Lifson: And it was in the albino squirrel that used to dance on the telephone wires at the top of that little forest, but only sometimes, that is, only sometimes when it danced, only when the light was right and the squirrel was in the right place along the wires, that is, against the right bunch of elm tops, the ones that had the most shape, and were closest too him, so that when I narrowed my field of vision to him I also saw the contours of those tree tops.... Lifson: He was too small, of course, to be dramatic against the whole stretch of tree tops outside my parent's livingroom picture window. Lifson: In other words, it's everywhere. And when [Don Cohen is] responding to a scene, one possible thing [he's] responding to is the drama in it...In a certain rectangle imposed over it...That's what you sense...Something in an imaginary rectangle...Which, I think, is why you want to make "beautiful images of the world around us," and not beatuiful sentences... [Pause] Lifson: But substitute "pictures" for "images"---Pictures are what we make, and they have four edges. Images are what's inside of a picture, and they don't have edges around them... [Pause] Lifson: this is getting pretty dense. I said simple, but I guess not... [Pause] Lifson: Another way to say this, much simpler, is something the photographer Andre Kertesz used to say. "Nature begins the thing," he'd say, and when quizzed, would explain that "the thing" = "the picture". So I'll change it. "Nature begins the picture. I complete it, that's all I do, I complete it." Lifson: Now if you look at the extremely irregular, jagged, rhythmic and non rhythmic top edge of the group of orange hoopoos in the foreground, you'll see what a singluar character you've made out of that group. Lifson: It's not so much a group as just one [monumental] form....[And it's] grand, really grand, by virtue of that jagged crest. [Pause] Lifson: It can't be described by an ordinary mathematical curve. Can't be called even "like" one or antoher of the regular geometric shapes... Lifson: It it were a person, we'd say, "larger than life," or "absolutely unique," or "like nobody i've ever seen before"...A person like that walks into a cocktail party, everyone's eyes turn to him. He comes with news about the simple fact of being. Our lives feel ordinary [next to him]. They're not, but they feel that way. (The shapes out in the brown and blue plane, they're more predictable, one from the other.)...O ur ridge of orange hoopoos: Toast of the town. [Pause] Lifson: 4. So now that you've seen that you can create a photograph with a hero in it, by virtue ONLY IN PART of what the thing is in itself, BUT ALSO BECAUSE OF the way you framed it in itself, AND of the way you opposed it to the other things in the picture... Lifson: [From now on you'll SEE that in] that row of trees alongside the neighborhood playground, in that certain slant of light, there will be probably one tree that grabs you more than the others. Before you would have framed it to make it large and vivid and everything, I'm sure of that. But now you know there's a chance to make it the hero of a dramatic photograph. So now you'll look at it in your viewfinder with a difference. Cohen: Of that, I am certain Lifson: You'll be asking different questions about: Lifson: A. How much of it to show. Lifson: B. How close to get to it. Lifson: C. Where to put it in the frame in relation to the other trees, and to the swings and things in the background. [Pause] Lifson: You'll ask where to put the top edge so that the branches are at their most interesting, describe the most singularly interesting lines across the top of the picture...And in relation to the branches of the other trees: Which ones are minor versions of the heroic tree's branches. Which ones are different characters altogether? And so on. [Pause] Lifson: And with these questions in mind, you can photograph anywhere, any time, if only for a few minutes, even if the subject matter doesn't arrest you all that much. Even if your intuition tells you the picture won't be very much, if anything at all. Because asking these questions even under those conditions will enable you to practice the..."Techniques" is a right word but not the best...To practice the techniques [or "moves"], see the results, learn from them, develop a whole spectrum of answers to the questions, so that when something grabs you, even if you see it from your car as you're driving slowly down a neighborhood street, you can get the camera to your eye and intuitively frame it right, that "unconscious" you rightly value will be working...Spontaneity too... Lifson: But it will be drawing, spontaneously, intuitively, unconsciously, from the right moves out of a whole spectrum of moves... Lifson: And that's why we practice. Lifson: And that's why, at the beginning, and always, photographers think consciously about what they're doing: to learn it, to absorb it, and to use it later spontaneously, intuitively, unconsciously.... Lifson: Feeling the subject...[So that you don't just see it, or treat it like a problem to be solved by the book, but FEEL it.] [Pause] Lifson: By the way...you can interrupt me any time... Cohen: I will when i have something to say or question.. Lifson: There's something else to mention quickly, about the middle landscape picture, of the rocks, and the water coming down... Lifson: Like the other two, the picture describes its subject. Lifson: But like the other two, it does something more. Cohen: Tou mean the light shaft coming down from the surface? Lifson: Light, right...But the way it hits the ground, it alludes to water, to a pool of water. [Pause] Lifson: This is interesting in itself. But the picture also suggests, alludes to organic forms, forms of the human body. All those rose colors. Close to flesh colors. The ridges along the concavities, both sides...The folds in the concavity to the left, toward the top, where the rock stops looking like rock and looks like something pliable, soft...Like velvet...So there the forms of the picture allude to made things, things human beings make... [Pause] Lifson: The visual language of the picture is on the one hand descriptive, and on the other hand evocative, and any language that's evocative tends to lift the subject matter it's describing up to a poetic plane...As with the potential for drama, the potential for this kind of evocative descriptive languge is in things all around us, at certain times, in certain slants of light, seen from certain points of view... Lifson: Those ridges wouldn't have been so much as we see them here, or those folds either for that matter, had the camera been right opposite them, the film plane parallel to them... [Pause] Lifson: Now that you've seen this in this picture...Well, the voyage of discovery, the experimentation you mention in your statement, can begin. But this is a different kind of process, and the unconscious probably will play a larger part it in at first. Lifson: It depends on taking pictures regularly, every day if possible, spontaneously, without thinking too much about framing, about picture structure... Lifson: Because what you're looking for is something you're seeing in a flash and probably wouldn't recognize when you looked hard at the subject, because...It's more about what the subject will look like once it's photographed...And for this the photograph must get made, and probably on the spur of the moment, to capture the intitial impression... Lifson: The discovery comes when you look at the results. [Pause] Lifson: From time to time there will be more things like the rocks in this light...The way the subject looks in the picture will allude to, evoke, something else... Lifson: Since you're a doctor and know the body in a way most people don't, maybe...MAYBE, mind you...The forms, colors, textures, will tend toward what in art is called "The Biomorphic" Lifson: But I'm not so sure.... Lifson: But there probably will be associations... Lifson: And as you see them and understand how they came about, you'll have a handle on this part of the visual language you've been developing unbeknownst to yourself. Lifson: Picture making here is a form of picture collecting, or of "effects collecting," because these are effects, really, but when you start to use them consciously they'll be part of your pictorial world... Lifson: Some well known photographers have found sexual forms in rocks and other natural things... Lifson: Others have found the structures and effects of abstract painting. Lifson: Others have found worlds of light... Lifson: What kind of world your photography will discover alluded to in the surfaces of the things around you will come unconsciously at first but will be a product of your visual identity, sensibility, the things you've been seeing and feeling all your life, and maybe as a child knew it... Lifson: Once discovered in the picture collecting, they can become part of your visual language Lifson: Mastered, they recede into the unconscious again... Lifson: And when the camera comes up to your eye, there they are in the picture... Lifson: It's a continuous cycle, from unconscious to conscious back to unconscious so that new things can come up from the unconscious... Lifson: Wow. Little ground covered in detail? Crawling? Or lots of ground in a swoop? I can't tell. Cohen: for me, a unique glimpse into how a different type of mind sees the world [Pause] Lifson: This is important. I wish to choose my words carefully. Please be patient. [Pause] Lifson: But first, by "sees the world," do you mean, mostly, sees pictures? Or pictures and the artistic process? Cohen: No, I mean the entire mindset/language/imagery with which one perceives the world and interacts with it; photography would only be a subset of this Lifson: But this is what makes art--by which I mean, here, any good picture; even a fashion picture...This is what makes it so important. [Pause] Lifson: Vladimir Nabakov, the author of..."Lolita"... and a critic of the first order, wrote that the best definition of art he could come up with was "sensuous thought." [Pause] Lifson: It's those differences of seeing--of thinking sensuously about the world--that make each good picture maker's pictures important. Lifson: They convey to us, in immediately perceivable sensuous terms, the uniqueness of his/her thought, especially thought about things in life that all of us think about all the time: love, children, animals, nature, our relationship to nature... Lifson: Their thought joins our thought...after which, we see the world more richly, live in it more vividly, more fully, think about it from new perspectives, come to new understandings, and the fact that these perspectives and understandings originated in someone else's doesn't mean that when they've joined ours, when we've assimilated them, what we make of it all isn't ours. It IS ours, it is uniquely the understanding, the perspective of each one who goes through the process... [Pause] Lifson: Now with respect to what I've been saying about both pictures and the process of making them, fifteen years ago I might have agreed with you that this is my take on things...If this is in part what you meant... Lifson: I'm reluctant to go on lest I'm addressing myself to a point you didn't make. Cohen: I wasn't meaning to imply I disagreed with you, or thought there were other/better ways to look at things; I simply meant it was a very different way of perceiving than I am familiar with. Lifson: Good. What I always want to do is teach in such a way that holds sacred the photographer's way of looking at things, of feeling things, of being in our common world, and of being in relation to it. Lifson: For I believe that if his/her pictures come to express all that in clear, accessible, permanent form, as sensuous thought, my life is richer, fuller. All our lives are...An important voice is being heard...Important by virtue of its individuality, and its self-consciousness with respect to that individuality, and by virtue, also, of the photographer's respect for, and belief in his/her individuality. Lifson: The route to that expression being through pictures, it's my task, I believe, to make the act of picture making itself available to the photographer. [Pause] Lifson: Pictures are a language of their own. Highly developed, over four or five thousand years. Lifson: The elements of that language are concrete, discernible, describable, transmittable. Lifson: The artists among the dwellers of the caves of Lascaux learned them from somewhere and handed them down generation after generation. Lifson: If they had speech they taught them with words. Lifson: If that art came about before language, then an older artist taught the language of pictures to a younger artist by holding the younger artist's hand and showing him physically how to make this or that kind of a line, get this or that kind of effect. Lifson: My task is to make you aware of those elements. Here, in this brief session, [to make you aware] of those elements that you've already discovered for yourself in part by absorbing them from other pictures and in part by trial and error, guided, it seems, by an eye and by a heart that already knew and responded to them...What you have probably been doing is excavating your visual sense from where it lay dormant all the years before you started taking pictures, and from where it's been struggling to express itself since you began, with the aid of the means you've had access to, i.e., other photographs, and the pictures we seen in our picture-crowded visual environment. Cohen: Well you have certainly 'opened my eyes' to a new way of looking at photography; this much is clear. Lifson: But my task is to make you aware of them not as parts of your pictures I like, but as concrete versions not of your visual language but of the visual language of pictures generally. Here, drama, the poetry of allusion, and how these are created by such simple concrete discreet things like edges, variation on and contention between forms, colors, tones, lines, and so on... [Pause] Lifson: We haven't talked about line, which is an enormously important element...But now that I've used the word, you will be able to look at photographs including your own, asking Lifson: "Where are the lines?" Lifson: "What are they like?" Lifson: "What do they do to the forms they describe and contain?" Lifson: "What do they do to the things in which they're found...?" Lifson: [All kinds of lines:] The lines IN a dress, the lines IN a group of tree branches...As well as the CONTOUR line of the dress, of the tree... Lifson: The lines IN the tree bark... [Pause] Lifson: Now you can look for and at these things, asking questions...Making tentative answers...Comparing this photograph with that one just with respect to lines... Lifson: The hard part has begun, but it's also the fun of it. Cohen: I find I'm always happiest when I am learning new things. Lifson: Here's an exercise. Lifson: You'll need the nearest library with a copy of the complete DISASTERS OF WAR by Goya. Or order the Dover Reprint from Amazon dot com, it can't be very expensive. [Pause] Lifson: There are 82 or so etchings. Now by and large each plate is either the same size or has the same dimensions. So in this way, in 1802-04 or so, Goya was acting like a photographer. The frame is always the same... Lifson: Now this is an exercise in watching another artist have fun...Such fun it makes you long to get even 1/10 that good to have the same kind of fun if not the same degree of it... Lifson: Each frame is like [a photographer's negative], empty until [the picture maker fills it.] Lifson: Turn the pages rapidly, looking each time only at how he fills it now, and now, and now, and now....How many ways he found to fill and order it. It's amazing. [Pause] Lifson: Then, go through the book again, looking only at the forms of the human figure...within each frame. How many ways did he discover to draw [it]? From the left, from the right, from the back, from the front, lying down, sitting, praying, falling, running, hanging from a tree, whole, chopped in pieces, right side up, upside down... [Pause] Lifson: Then look through it a little more slowly until you come to the first picture of a human being with another person behind him/her, in such a way that the background person's head is seen jutting out from behind, from the side of, the foreground person's body. Lifson: Then go through the book looking only for that motif, a head coming out from behind another person's body...And see how many ways he found to do that! For example, Lifson: How many heads from one body! Lifson: Where does the head, where do the heads, come out from? Also amazing. Lifson: Now you add just those three things together...How to fill the frame, how to draw the human figure, how to make a head come out from behind a body, and when you think that he was trucking along figuring those things out at once, at ONCE! Just those three! (And there are more, like light and dark, to say nothing of the various human EMOTIONS frame to frame...) The fun, why, it's unimaginable... Lifson: Except that it's repeated every day by picture makers thinking about the things you're doing...How to make a tree into a hero, how to build the drama out of these trees by the playground, how to get the surfaces of this thing to resemble the surfaces you FEEL they resemble, in other things, how to use that top edge, how to use the other edges, how to get two planes to operate together like in the Hoopoo picture, and in all of this, get the way YOU YOURSELF, UNIQUELY FEEL about this...Your emotions, your feelings, and as such, your VERSIONs of what many people would feel there...Your sensuous thought, which, Lifson: VIA the language of pictures, can become part of our thought and feelings...Well, it's fun,. Lifson: And we haven't talked about animals. I should say a few words about animals, in reply to the questions of my statement. Lifson: I've looked a lot at pictures of animals--not birds so much, but animals. Lifson: The ones that seem most successful...And the paintings and drawings of animals, before and after photography, that get reproduced most often...The great ones, and the pre-eminently good ones, in short...Are those in which the animals are doing something. Behavior. It gives the animal character, and it gives the animal form. Lifson: Often, these pictures have human beings in them. The animals are either reacting or responding to the human beings, or setting up a world in contrast to them. Lifson: (Drama again, of one kind or another.) Lifson: Birds are a problem, a big problem, for the photographer. The extent of the problem can be seen by studying Audubon, or a book called "Fine Bird Books 1700-1900" by Sacheverell Sitwell. This latter has a plate from each of about 50 spectacular bird books from those two centuries. Everything one needs to know about making a good bird picture...Where to start, anyway...Is in this book, I think. Lifson: Probably the most famous European drawing of birds is by Hieronymous Bosch, it shows an owl landing on a tree, with a few littler birds on the branches, one of them looking terrified. This too, is an important picture for photographers. Lifson: There are more great pictures with domestic animals than with wild animals. Cohen: Ben, please don't see this as being rude, but it is getting late here, and I have to be up fairly early in the morning to perform some cataract surgery, so I really need to be wrapping this up for now. Lifson: One of the greatest sources for a photographer interested in photographing domestic animals is the low relief scultpures in the Egyptian tombs at Saqqara. Jantzen's "History of Art" has a good picture of one group, but if you can find a book on the tombs, with lots of illustrations, this would be better. Lifson: OK, no more about animals... Cohen: I would like to thank you most sincerely for all you have shared and taught. Lifson: I talked a lot, it wasn't real inter-active, but I did so want you to know, in precise, concrete, pictorial terms, what you've been doing, where the visual strengths of the pictures lie. I hope it didn't seem like pontificating. I wasn't doing that. Cohen: No - I received it hopefully the way you intended - sharing of knowledge, experience, ideas, insights, to help me gain a broader understanding of photography from an artist's perspective. Lifson: And I did so want you to have a sense of these strengths so that you can develop them consciously as you go on with your photography and what it's discovering for us via a language--that you didn't know you were speaking--but which is in fact the language of pictures ever since there was such a thing. Cohen: I think the language metaphor is very appropriate to what you're trying to communicate to me. Lifson: Good. I think there's to be a few exchanges of short emails over the next month. So when you have a dozen or so pictures that you've made consciously along these lines, post them and we'll exchange letters. Don't worry about whether the pictures are good or bad. The focus will be on the presence of these elements of language, how are they working...And so on. OK? Cohen: Sounds fine to me; again I thank you for the generous sharing of your time. I will be in touch as things unfold in this exercise. Lifson: You're welcome. It was fun. Bye. Cohen: Good night