Accidental Data

 I wanted to try and unpick the idea of the accidental image and why it was something that draws your attention.  I've decided that our best writing starts with a disagreement and an unpicking and us both trying to explain ourselves.  The first thing I need to get out there is the fact I don't really know what you like about the images that seem to 'glow' for you.  To me they are like the thousands of images that kids take where they do not consider anything. They just press the button as kids like pressing buttons- they are drawn to the sound of the artificial shutter release.   So it is something I find irritating and counter intuitive to consider all the images that I would naturally drag to the bin on my computer. 

It may now get complicated as my positivist brain kicks in and I want you to - list the ways you love them.  Part of me thinks it may because of what they are not, their accidental and therefore authentic feel.  They are not composed or in focus or of anything in particular. They do not look like the 'good" photographs we strive for.  I'm not in the business of defining or valuing things for what they are not we need to explore what they are - so we need more.

As you are in English now perhaps we can go back to Roland Barthe - In his Camera Lucida he talks of the photographs Punctum which seems very relevant here as it is the meaning that punctuate the studium (cultural meanings extracted through semiotic analysis.)  So the bit left out from the "rhetoric of the image".  This then is the line of thought or the lens  that we could bring to the accidental images - to transcend semiotic codification.

The images above were taken nearly simultaneously.  One is from my phone and it was accidental from my pocket. I think the mountain range is an old torn bus ticket.  The other is constructed to tell a story of the trees project.  

I took about 40 images that are very similar.  I set the aperture to the widest setting and focused manually on the ribbons. This was because auto focus did not work as they were moving too fast.  The large aperture gives a short depth of field so all the people in the background are blurred beyond identified.  I purposefully wanted to capture an image that we could use on our treescapes project.  In terms of the semiotics of this image deconstructed it is full of intentional reference.  The votive offering, the trees, the leaves in the foreground, the word 'tree ', individual acts creating something collective, the out of focus for GDPR issues.  The image is encoded but I would like to think it is a 'good" image because of something else, the intention but also the 'feeling " of the image. The technical choices make it possible to say something the attention to the affective space makes it possible to feel something.  At least better than the other 42 which I edited out.  There is little accidental about this picture and if I was leading a photographic workshop with young people I see my job is to teach about all the aspects of photography the technical and the felt.

The second image is an accident but it is also much better than the 20 or so images that were taken in my pocket as I laid under a tree.  It is better because it makes propositions.  Perhaps its more important as I'm reading John Bergers the shape of a pocket .  The image has no intention or no considered studium yet it does make a series of propositions.  I don't think it is an image that we could use in treescapes, it says nothing about my work with Abi and although it is relevant here it could become a distraction. 

The next step then is to read Camera Lucida or at least a bit of it and the rhetoric of the image which is easier.  You can then collect the accidental pictures from treescapes and we can look at them together in. relation to the Punctum and the Studium and you will have a structuralist paper for your new job in English.  More importantly you may be able to articulate to others what propositions the accidental data is making within the treescapes project.