Imperfect Symmetry

There are three concepts that converge on my photography - or rather, my image creation. As with most of my thinking, all three are part of a dialectic process: thesis, antithesis and synthesis. I'm not a scientist - not remotely. What I have to say is highly speculative. If they read this, scientists will have a laugh . . . probably. However, I find these concepts very interesting: Imperfect Symmetry, Imperfect Ideals and Imperfect Perception. I speculate that, at some very fundamental level all three have big influence on everything.

Imperfect Symmetry I'll start with the Big Bang, which is, as far as we know or understand, where everything starts. Energy and particles emanated from 'the singularity' in all directions. The distribution of these particles was 'even', gravity acted on each particle with the exact same force in every direction. Had that been the case, the symmetry of energy and matter would have been perfect - an ever expanding perfect sphere. That's not quite what did happen. For yet unexplained reasons, there were small fluctuations in the distribution of these particles, so that when some of them came together, they exercised slightly more gravity than their neighbours, thus attracting more particles, and as the groups of particles congregated, their collective gravity increased, thus attracting more particles and so on. Eventually these bits of matter became galaxies of stars, planets, moons, comets, etc. If there had been absolutely perfect symmetry, all the Big Bang particles would have simply expanded evenly forever. Even if the fluctuations of the particles had been symmetrically distributed, we would have ended up with a universe which was also in some way symmetrical.

But it's not. Whatever shape it might have, flat, spherical or saddle-like, it's not symmetrical. Physicists say that shortly after the Big Bang, perfect symmetry was broken (something to do with quantum uncertainty, but don't ask me). So, I sustain that imperfect symmetry is necessary for change and evolution. Imperfect symmetry is not the same as chaos, or total randomness . . . there is order, but there is change. Imperfect symmetry is the first concept that has a bearing on my photography.

Imperfect Ideals The second concept is related to the first in the sense of 'perfection vs imperfection', but now it involves human concepts, rather than physics. The perfect straight line, the perfect circle, perfect square, perfect sphere. These are, of course, human concepts that don't exist in nature, nor even as part of the reality that human beings have created. The only perfectly straight line is in the mind - it's an ideal. The same goes for beauty, morality, knowledge . . . crime! - you name it. If there were perfection in reality, in whatever field, there would be stagnation. You can't, by definition, improve on perfection. Development stops. In this Platonic sense, any form we create in reality is only a shadow, an imitation of its counterpart in the world of the Ideal. After more than two millennia since Plato, we still strive to create these forms, these perfect ideals, without ever being able to do so. Surprisingly, I find myself thinking about Camus' Myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus is condemned for all eternity by Zeus to roll a huge boulder to the top of a hill, but the boulder inevitably rolls back down again before he can ever reach the top. Camus concludes, as I recall, that life is absurd, purposeless and what gives it any meaning at all is the act of pushing the boulder - not reaching the top. In the same vein, we pursue ideals, but cannot ever fully reach them. Nonetheless, Plato would have been amazed by how close we are in our time to creating some forms which are pretty damn close to what he could only imagine. In the Greek world nothing was straight or smooth, everything was a bit crooked, a bit jagged. But it was less crooked and jagged than, say, the Stone Age. Today we can draw a rectangle on a computer screen with edges that are within microns of being perfectly straight. We can polish mirrors and lenses to reflect galaxies that are light centuries away. However, as soon as we print the rectangle onto paper, the line is bent. If we reproduce it on any surface, no matter how firm or smooth, the line will be ever so slightly jagged. And our telescope is so defective that we can't even distinguish a gigantic planet in the nearest solar system. We need to polish some more. Still . . . Plato would be impressed if he showed up today.

Imperfect Perception Now moving into the field of human perception, the third concept is related to Gestalt theory. If we only have a partial view of something (which is what we always have - we never have a total view of anything), we tend to invent the rest of it in accordance to what we think it should or might be, rather than what it actually is (which is something we will never know totally). If presented with a circle and two dots presented horizontally, most people would say it was a face. But, of course, it`s not: it`s a circle and two dots. However, in people's perception two horizontally placed dots frequently represent eyes. Two dots on a piece of paper are enough to hold a baby's attention, so this Gestalt thing would appear to be innate. It doesn't take much information for people to reach a conclusion about what they see, despite having very few details. And, at the level of absolutes, no one ever will see the whole . . . probably. God might - if he exists.

Gestalt theory (and by the way, the German word 'Gestalt' means 'form' or 'shape') sustains that humans have an innate ability to recognise symbols as representations of reality, of recognising the whole even when details are missing. Children's drawings, for instance, are usually representations, not of what they see, but of what they know, of what they think should be. In their drawings, children share a language that is practically universal. Children from Africa, America, Asia, Europe . . . they all use very similar marks, such as lines and dots; diagrams, such as circles to represent the top of a tree or a human head; schemata, such as suns with 'rays' emanating from their periphery or humans who have practically no forehead, and 'mandalas', which are all-purpose shapes such as circles and squares with a cross in the middle.

Recognition of symbols then, is something humans are born with and as they grow, they learn new symbols and how to interpret them. I would think that something along those lines has happened to cultures with the passing of time: cave paintings, pottery decoration, hieroglyphics, representational art, use of perspective, abstract art, conceptual art . . . Once people have started to learn symbols, what they perceive is very much dependent on their culture. People before Classical Greece, for example, would have seen the sea's horizon as a straight line (and probably the limit of a flat earth). We now know that the horizon is not really straight, because the earth is more or less spherical But, it looks straight. If we could show a photograph of the Earth taken from space to these ancestors, they wouldn't understand what it was. A spherical earth was not conceivable. In the Middle Ages (in Europe, anyway), painters depicted reality as they thought it should be, rather than as it is. They didn't portray perspective and when they started to do so, it was all wrong. The size of people didn't rely so much on where they were in the picture (large in the foreground, smaller in the background), but on how important they were - big if important, small if not.

Having learned that the Earth is a spinning sphere whizzing around a star at the edge of a galaxy in a big universe does not mean we're very much closer to 'The Truth'. We know from past experience that the human race has come to know things it could not conceive of three centuries ago: motor engines, microbes, nuclear weapons, the Internet, etc. If we were able to bring a medieval person into our time, put him in a car and travel at 80 miles an hour on a motorway), he would not know how to interpret this experience. He cannot conceive that speed, nor the car's technology, nor the engineering that is a motorway, nor the rules that govern its use. It's all gobbledegook. An example I always think of is the fly. A fly flies into a room, finds nothing interesting, tries to fly back out, sees light, flies in that direction and straight into a closed window. In the fly's perception a transparent window pane is not conceivable, so it keeps flying into it time after time and dies on the sill, not realising that all it had to do was go around the window. We people of this modern age and of technologically advanced cultures must have equivalents to 'a window pane' - to paraphrase American politician, Donald Rumsfeld, something "we don't know that we don't know". If an alien popped out of nowhere into our living room and showed us a picture of the 'worm hole' he or she used to get there, we would be nonplussed. Just as our ancestors would be when showing them the picture of Earth from space. But, at least we are aware of the possible existence of worm holes, whereas ancient people had no idea the Earth is round. They 'didn't know that they didn't know'. All we can interpret is what we do know or what we know that we don't know. There will always be "unknown unknowns". We will never have the full picture, never have the full explanation.

One clear example where we only have a partial picture of the truth or totality is creation itself. We can't understand how our world, our universe came into being. Our response? We invent an explanation, we make up a story: God (or gods) did it. We need an explanation and that story is more easily grasped than, say, quantum mechanics or string theory. Having said that, the Big Bang might explain what happened, but not how or why it happened in the first place. The explanation is that there was 'a singularity', an infinitely dense point with no volume, no space and no time. That singularity exploded. Why not just say, "let there be light"? There's a window out there that we can't see.

Much of my photographic work tries to convey these three concepts, imperfect symmetry, imperfect ideals and imperfect perception - though not always at the same time.

In photography, perfect symmetry is easily achievable (By 'perfect' I mean within the parameters of the naked eye). In architecture symmetry has always played a very important role. Say Gothic architecture. Take Whitby Abbey in North Yorkshire. The construction is certainly striving for perfect symmetry, but in those days they didn't have the tools nor materials to replicate precisely enough to achieve full symmetry. With digital photography and software, perfect symmetry is quite simple: Cut the image in half vertically, duplicate that half, flip it horizontally, carefully put it back together so that the pixels meet with their identical mirror image counterparts and, Bob's your uncle. Repeat the process this time cutting in half horizontally and flipping vertically and we have four-way symmetry. Then multiply it by 9 and we still have perfect symmetry. But if we carry one in that vein, there's no sense that something else is going to happen in the picture. The image is stagnant. Nothing more can happen, other than more of the same.

So, perfect symmetry is not what I'm looking for. I look for a symmetry which is not perfect, which has small fluctuations, which means it is a dynamic image. Imperfect symmetry.

Equally, I'm not looking for perfect ideals - those exist only in the mind. So I try to represent some of the shapes of things as they might have appeared in the mind of the engineer who built the road, the designer who designed the tram, the farmer who rolled the hay . . . or the architect who built the building (getting rid of as much perspective as I can, so the façades are similar to the blueprints). I try to find geometric shapes and reproduce them as perfectly as I can, as close to the ideal as I possibly can: perfectly straight lines, perfect circles, perfect squares, etc. This means we are approaching perfection (the Ideal), but will never reach it, because once the Ideal is reproduced in reality, it is subject to the laws of reality. So, for instance, the ideal straight line is one-dimensional - length -, but as soon as we reproduce a line in reality, no matter how thin the line is, it will have two dimensions, length and width.

Finally, imperfect perception. Here I try to limit the amount of information, by giving a partial view of what might be a whole (of course all views are partial, but our mind separates elements of those partial views and turns them into independent wholes: a building, a car, a person, a face, an eye, an eye-lash, etc.). I try to provide as little information as possible but enough so the viewers can form an idea as to what it is they're looking at.

Funnily enough, my thoughts on these concepts relating to images came in reverse order to that which I've stated it here. First came imperfect perception. I started this line of thinking with a collection called "Gestalt Blue Skies". These images are partial views of objects set on the background of a blue sky: a postbox, a gas-works, a banana plant, curtains, scaffolding, etc. They illustrate our power to complete the picture without having all the details of the individual object, but at the same time, I was trying to show that all the details actually are there to explain, not only the object, but everything. The details are all in the Blue Skies: that's where all the planets, moons, stars and galaxies are. !

This train of thought took me onto another collection called "Platonic Views". Usually these are landscapes where I transformed natural shapes into ideal shapes. The horizon becomes a straight line, a roll of hay is perfectly circular, an island is totally symmetrical . . . These are shapes that only exist in the mind. They are ideals. What I try to do is reflect those ideals in an imperfect way, but a lot closer to the shape in the mind than would have been possible even thirty years ago. It's what we strive for and will never achieve . . . the boulder we must push up the hill. These are imperfect ideals. This is what got me thinking about symmetry. I tried to make pictures as symmetrical as possible, not by splitting the image into two and then flipping it, but by starting with a reasonably symmetrical image and then altering parts of the picture to increase symmetry, but never completely, leaving bits that break the symmetry. We, like most animals, are symmetrical. In fact many sustain that one of the characteristics of human beauty is their symmetry. There are whole books written on the subject. While symmetry is attractive, perfect symmetry is just plain weird. I did portraits of people and made their faces perfectly symmetrical (not the rest of their bodies) hoping to represent two aspects of their personalities. Because they are done as portraits, rather than as studies in symmetry, the results are a bit unsettling.

In the end, I am trying to express the essence of things. That must sound awfully pretentious. What do I really mean by that, which won't sound so pretentious? Hmm. I'm not sure. Maybe I'm just pretentious. However, notwithstanding, the 'essence' of something is what makes it be what it is. Graphically it is sometimes reasonably easy to portray the essence of things. A few shapes, a few lines and the essence is expressed. Logos and icons (not necessarily religious) do this very effectively. With very simple symbols you can tell which is the gents' and which is the ladies', that there is roadwork being done, that there is a speed limit, that something is poisonous, etc. Reducing the visible reality to its bare essentials is more complicated, because we're no longer dealing with signposts, but with people's character, social basics, cultural icons, aesthetics, emotions, perceptual abilities . . . Richard Avedon was a fashion photographer, but he is now more remembered as a portrait photographer. Wherever he went, he always carried a roll of white paper, which he used as a backdrop for his portraits. He would stand his subject in front of this backdrop, talk about something which made the subject feel uncomfortable and snap. Usually the photos were full frontal, plain with nothing to distract from the face of his subjects. He portrayed people in their essence, taking away the usual mask and presenting them starkly. That is similar to what I'm trying to do: present the essence of visible reality with the bare minimum elements, as it is, without emotion: Deadpan.