RON EDEN’S PHOTO-ICONOGRAPHY
Extracts from a paper prepared by John A’Beckett
for
The Centre of Culture and Technology
University of Toronto, Canada
Something was always destined to happen to the photograph. As a recording medium, it has come closer and closer to real life. Its reproductive power has been spoken of. Doesn't it change anything to give it to the general public? Henry Ford did it with the motor car; Eastman Kodak did it with the photograph. Mass production isn't all. Someone will always want to go further. With the motor car he took the slice out of our Sunday afternoon, he drove it for its own sake or faster, faster, faster. With the photograph he made a profession out of it, doing what was the painter's dirty work: portraits, posters, instant visions, books for the drawing-room table and wedding albums - celluloid sandwiches for the sentimental-hungry mind. A direction was prematurely forced upon it. It was thrown away. The photograph became the first throw-away product. Its only other alternative was to rot, to fade with the transient events that it recorded.
For a while the news photograph was celebrated in the gallery, through its ability to capture the momentous event. A daring photographer dashes out during a great fire and snaps a picture of it at its grand peak. The potency of these pictures is the theatre of life they record. Their aesthetic is a revival of the baroque. But because the art is in the event and not the photograph, the photographer, disqualified as an artist, is assigned the role of mere Catcher of Experience's Butterfly.
The still camera has too much become a second hand instrument in the creative process. The eye first, the still camera second. Perhaps it is too glib in its seeming proposition to serve reality up on a celluloid plate; we want our dish to be more exclusive; we always, mistakenly, pose for the photograph, thinking that if we're Mona Lisa the photographer can't help but be Leonardo. Furthermore, although we like to believe there is a common vision which the photograph cannot ere from, but still there is an instinct of mistrust in this we all know that Tom's view of the world is fortunately different than Harry's.. When I temporarily lost most of my sight
Ron, what is iconography?
EDEN: It's really using photography in a different way to the way it's usually done. It is using it for a kind of creative interplay rather than as mere illustration. Of course once you use photography differently you start using the camera differently.
How did you use it differently?
EDEN: Like an Abstract Expressionist uses a paint-brush.
Why "icons" though?
EDEN: An icon is simply the relic of an era - the Studebaker was an icon of the 1 950s. Technology is travelling at such a fast rate that the icons it leaves behind it are quickly forgotten. Through the still camera I want to put these relics together into a pattern, much the same way as you put words together to form a sentence.
So you're using light as a kind of pencil for a new script?
EDEN: That's right. I must apologise to present scientific beliefs but I'm afraid light does not travel in straight lines. Light, when travelling through Spacial Time writes out the script of a new visual language. I would be interested in how this new visual language is to be spoken. in 1969, I began to take photographs with my ears. I was experiencing a new way of seeing, photographing all things sudden and dis-connected. What was this means of expression with a camera? I think of it as collecting the iconography of "Spacial Time". The result is photo-iconography that presents twenty first century “tapestries”, the collision of photography, the power of Zen and Spacial Time .
Photo iconography
EDEN: I realised that my "icons were to pop art what p or -p is to mathematics i . e. axiomatic. This work is after all, photography, perhaps the axioms of new photo-pictorial logic. We are 2000 years back, not only before Gutenberg but before pen was put to paper. I feel that I am doing with photography exactly what the ideogram stone carvers of the Indus Valley civilization were doing with communication, what the Chinese poets were doing with their highly pictorial script. Coming from the world of popular music, the acoustic equivalent of the Middle Ages, my icons are derived from music and unlike other visual forms such as cinema and painting, not the world of conversation; in other words, it comes from the world of gratuitousness, self-existence, atomic free-will and not the world of order and connection. If photography is the extension of conversation then my iconography is mere punctuation, and punctuation is sonic; there is no breaking up of the influences in my work. The sound goes straight into the sight and we see the path of its action. I have defied the time and retinal system of the still camera. I have created the temporality of Spacial Time.
Where do I feel most at home?
EDEN: Technologically, the 21st /22nd Century. Sensorically, the middle ages!
Just a minute, what is Spacial Time?
EDEN: Well I have worked out a formula for Spacial Time: Ordinary or Universal Time, ST=UT x Absolute Time?
Spacial Time is the temporal measurement of acoustic space; acoustic space is the sense of space you have when your eyes are closed.
How did you discover Spacial Time?
EDEN: As I stated earlier, I discovered it in acoustic space as opposed to visual space and from there, I wished to impose my own brand of individuality upon it; so I decided to break the time limitations of the still camera, I deliberately disobeyed the rules and freed photography from the still state and showed a subject matter's life-flow. I discovered my subjects had a new dimension of time about them. I decided to call this temporality "Spacial Time". My subjects also had a new dimension of space about them; it was the space you get between notes of music; it was acoustic space.
What has your Iconography got to do with sound, with acoustics?
EDEN: I particularly enjoy "iconographing" Pop concerts. It was at a Pop concert that I discovered the second thing about Spacial Time. Pop music is transient, it is the music of the retina, as against the brain, it is not music that has to be fed through the intellectual system before it is understood. Well this is what I felt about my icons, they were not to be interpreted by mathematical logic, they belong to another logic-pictorial logic.
Is this "pictorial-logic" of yours simply a way of describing your photography, or do you really believe you have discovered a new logic?
EDEN: I realised that my "icons were to pop art what p or -p is to mathematics i . e. axiomatic. This work is after all, photography, perhaps the axioms of new photo-pictorial logic. We are 2000 years back, not only before Guttenberg but before pen was put to paper. I feel that I am doing with photography exactly what the ideogram stone carvers of the Indus Valley Civil ization were doing with communication, what the Chinese poets were doing with their highly pictorial script. Coming from the world of popular music, the acoustic equivalent of the Middle Ages, my icons are derived from music and unlike other visual forms such as cinema and painting, not the world of conversation; in other words, it comes from the world of gratuitousness, self-existence, atomic free-will and not the world of order and connection. If photography is the extension of conversation then my iconography is mere punctuation, and punctuation is sonic; there is no breaking up of the influences in my work. The sound goes straight into the sight and we see the path of its action. I have defied the time and retinal system of the still camera. I have created the temporality of Spacial Time.
What is spacial time, apart from being the temporal measurement of Acoustic Space?
EDEN: A different logic for photography and that the machination of this new logic comes from the ear and not the eye. Written languages were based on an alphabet and this alphabet was a code of symbols - in the case of our Arabic script the symbols were abstract, they stood for no representations of reality. But I think I have found a technological language whose alphabet or word-structure is representational i.e. the symbols are based on real things - just like, for instance, the Chinese script. Computer technology has created an idiogrammatic language with a pictorial logic. It would seem that literature may become irrelevant in digital technology age.- all those icons is a pictorial logic too. These Zen Icons are part of the language spoken in the simul-sensory world of the neo-primitives inhabiting the interplanetary playground.