‘ …there is no approach, approach suggests moving nearer, getting closer, suggests that we are not already near or close enough’
Stanley Cavell
Find a scene that has depth. From a fixed position, take a sequence of five or six shots at different focal lengths without changing your viewpoint. (You might like to use the specific focal lengths indicated on the lens barrel.) As you page through the shots on the preview screen it almost feels as though you’re moving through the scene. So the ability to change focal lengths has an obvious use: rather than physically move towards or away from your subject, the lens can do it for you. But zooming is also a move towards abstraction, which, as the word itself tells us, is the process of ‘drawing things away’ from their context.
Zooming also allows you to capture details at higher resolutions and this has been memorably explored in cinema. The film Blade Runner (Dir. Ridley Scott, 1982) provides a prescient vision of the future of photography from just before the dawn of the digital age.
The blade runner Deckard (played by Harrison Ford) treasures his old, silver-based family photographs but, like us, he uses a screen for viewing images at work. With his ‘Esper’ machine he can navigate around an image in virtual three dimensions by using voice commands. The resolution is incredible (think Google Earth) but at maximum resolution where you would expect to see pixels the image just dissolves into film grain.
In Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow Up (1966), David Hemmings plays a disaffected young photographer (based partly on David Bailey) who accidentally photographs a murder. Hoping to understand the situation that he’d unwittingly witnessed, he frantically ‘blows
up’ the negatives to the limit of intelligibility, but the result is inconclusive. The frustratingly unresolved situation is a favourite motif of Antonioni as a comment on modern life.
‘Google Arts and Culture’ offer a digitally immersive exploration of cultural institutions around the world through a combination of very high-resolution images and Google’s own ‘Street View’ technology. While Holbein’s ‘The Ambassadors’ shot on a gigapixel camera is admittedly impressive, zooming in to it ultimately just resolves to craquelure and dust.
https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/about/users/
Taking inspiration from the examples above or from your own research, create a final image for your sequence. In EYV the important thing is to present your work in context, so make it clear in your notes what you’ve been looking at and reading. The focus here is on imagination and research skills rather than the technical aspects of zoom.
Zoom
Esper
Blade runner is an iconic film in the cinematic world and also one of my favourites. Having it used as research in this module has surprised me and I had to watch it again.
The Esper is a super computer used by the police in Blade Runner. It is briefly described in the official Blade Runner Souvenir Magazine, but a 1982 presskit for the film provides the most detail:
“A high-density computer with a very powerful three-dimensional resolution capacity and a cryogenic cooling system. The police cars and Deckard’s apartment contain small models which can be channeled into the large one at police headquarters. This big apparatus is a well-worn, retro-fitted part of the furniture. Among many functions, the Esper can analyze and enlarge photos, enabling investigators to search a room without being there. Bryant briefs Deckard with the help of an Esper and Deckard examines Leon’s photos with one as well.”
Blow up
I had a vague recollection of seeing this film at some point but wasn’t too sure. I researched the film to refresh my memory and put it into the context of this exercise.
Don McCullin created the iconographic photographs that in the film are blown up by Thomas to discover something about the alleged crime. However, the blow-ups only offer ambivalent proof as they become more and more blurred and abstract by the continuous enlarging. Even photography that supposedly represents reality like no other form of media cannot help in shedding any light on the mysterious events in the park.
The Ambassadors
I took a look at the Google Arts and Culture site and the image taken of Holbein’s The Ambassadors and zoomed in as far as I could. I took a screenshot of the result depicting the craquelure.
All 3 of these references show the limitations of the zoom function in both fiction and factual. I also looked at the limitations of Google Earth /Maps which uses a combination satellite and aerial photography to form composite images that still have their limitations when it comes to zooming in.
My Shots
For the final image, I took it into Photoshop and reduced its size and resolution as far as I could. This made the image unrecognisable due to the lack of detail. It did give what was left an unreal and somewhat etherial qualities.
However, taking inspiration from the film Blow up, I rendered a magnifying sphere in the centre of the image focusing on the detail.
This seemed a little surreal and reminded me of MC Escher’s Hand with Sphere.
Reflection
This exercise has helped me to understand how the same image can be framed differently using the cameras lens rather than moving the camera itself. However, it does have its limitations on quality and clarity of the final image.
References
Speculative Identities. 2021. Esper | Speculative Identities. [online] Available at: <https://speculativeidentities.com/research/esper> [Accessed 23 April 2021].
Art Blart. 2021. surveillance and the camera – Art Blart. [online] Available at: <https://artblart.com/tag/surveillance-and-the-camera/> [Accessed 23 April 2021].
Google Arts & Culture. 2021. The Ambassadors – Hans Holbein the Younger – Google Arts & Culture. [online] Available at: <https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/the-ambassadors-hans-holbein-the-younger/bQEWbLB26MG1LA?hl=en> [Accessed 23 April 2021].
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