The photographs that make up the deck were created using different techniques, each of which played a functional role in the figurative transposition of psychological states that we wanted users to perceive. These techniques range from black and white to colour, from images suggesting movement to photomontage. I will devote a section to each of them, drawing on contributions from symbolic psychology, the philosophy of images, aesthetics, and the history of visual arts and photography, in order to highlight the reasons that justified their use. In fact, every card carries a distinctive motif, sign or value that was already planned at the shooting stage. This is what the famous photographer Ansel Adams called “previsualization”: the ability to see the final image mentally and anticipate the desired result through appropriate compositional choices.
BLACK AND WHITE: THE ESSENTIALITY OF FEELINGS
Black and white is the original language of the first cameras and is as old as photography itself. Early photographs, dating back to the invention of the daguerreotype in 1838, were clearly distinct and recognizable compared with other expressive forms such as paintings; paintings had always been in colour, whereas the photographic reproduction of reality produced images whose perceptual quality was characterized by shades of grey. Another important phenomenological aspect was photography’s extreme sharpness and precision, which made it a technology that could be relied upon for the objective documentation of reality. If a painting tended to represent the subject according to the painter’s will, transforming it, the photograph was the indexical trace of the subject and presented it in its apparent objectivity; apparent because, and here lies the paradox, it was entirely unrealistic due to the absence of chromatic colour. Besides functioning as an aesthetic element, black and white also has an equally distinctive neural component. Using, in part, brain circuits different from those normally involved in colour processing—which varies according to the wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum of light—the human brain instantly and intimately encodes differences in tonal values. Because of this physical-optical peculiarity of the primary visual cortex, black and white can emphasize the emotional qualities of an image by abstracting from colour and from everything superfluous.
B/W is, if I may put it this way, the realm of Romanticism, so much so that many artists of different backgrounds and training have, throughout history, devoted passionate aphorisms and famous remarks to it. The photographer and journalist Ted Grant, for example, said—albeit in a somewhat striking formula—that when we photograph people in colour we photograph their clothes, while in black and white we photograph their souls; the point is to underline how black-and-white images, unlike colour that may stop at the surface, seem to dig deeper and capture the essence of a person’s emotion. To paraphrase another quotation attributed to the German filmmaker Wim Wenders, one might say that life is in colour while truth is in black and white: if imagination and hope colour our subjective experiences, truth and the concreteness of facts—of which photography is genetically imbued—exist in a more austere grey scale. Consequently, states of mind such as pain, guilt, burdensome difficulties, personal ghosts and fears are visually rendered in the PdT cards in black and white. It is connected with geometric composition, the enhancement of contrasts, the emphasis on forms, the contemplation of lines and the three-dimensional quality of the frame. In other words, for a photograph to strike the unconscious directly and have an emotional impact, it must be reconsidered and “framed” by preserving what is essential and removing what is useless or redundant. B/W forces the eye to focus on textures and shadows, revealing hidden and unspoken aspects of the subject: without the liveliness of hues, attention is directed more strongly toward elusive details such as facial expressions or wrinkles, while also emphasizing gazes and what those gazes carry, from movements of joy and positivity to their negative counterparts. Far from being limited to genres such as portraiture or self-portraiture, this also applies to architecture and buildings, made of inanimate matter yet capable, when filtered through black and white, of taking on a life of their own. From both a theoretical and a practical-technical point of view, colour is a derivative, the result of a secondary interpretation that is added and synthetic, and this applies both to the retina of the eye and to analogue film or the photosensitive sensor of modern digital cameras.
COLOUR: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EMOTIONS
Although the historical primacy of black and white over colour is evident, this does not make colour a useless or accessory ornament. Rather, we should think of it as an additional possibility, an alternative path equally worthy of exploration. Since the earliest days of photography, many scientists and pioneers experimented with chemical techniques to reproduce colour faithfully. As early as 1861, the physicist James Clerk Maxwell carried out the first demonstration of colour photography using three photographs of the same subject taken through red, green and blue filters. This showed that colours could be reproduced by additively combining the fundamental components of light, whose properties Newton had already analysed: first in the celebrated 1672 article A New Theory about Light and Colors, and later systematically in Opticks in 1704. Beyond purely theoretical and technological achievements, colour, as we know, also has psychological significance, to the point that disciplines and specialist fields have emerged that study it in its own right. Colour psychology examines how colours influence human emotions and behaviour. More specifically, this relatively recent field is based on the principle that the impact of colours goes beyond aesthetics. Every colour is associated with a given wavelength that is transmitted to the brain and ultimately to the hypothalamus, part of the limbic system involved in the generation and regulation of emotions. Different colours, in short, can evoke different physiological responses. Red generally attracts attention immediately; if one of our photographs contains an element with a strong red hue, even if it is relegated to the background or occupies an apparently insignificant position relative to the foreground figures, the eye will involuntarily fall upon it, and this is precisely what arouses our curiosity. Blue, by contrast, appears darker and tends to recede from view. Yellow is the brightest colour in the visible spectrum; while there are many blues and greens, corresponding to a great variety of light shades, yellow occupies a narrower perceptual range and even a slight variation can make it shift toward orange. In addition to hue and luminance, saturation must also be considered. Saturation is the purity or intensity of a hue. A highly saturated colour is vivid, full and has a strong impact. Other colours, by contrast, may be very light and tend toward monochrome: soft lights, delicate shadows and so on. What has been said so far concerns the individual level. Colour also has a social and ethnological dimension, because every culture is sensitive to particular chromatic codes, although some meanings are widespread. In the West, for example, yellow can evoke holiness—as in Christian iconography—as well as gold and wealth. Halos, aureoles, the starry decorations of medieval cathedrals and divine words inscribed in gold or yellow all carry this value. Red is commonly recognized as a reference to passion, anger or danger, as in road signage. In countries such as China, by contrast, red is considered auspicious and therefore very distant from our usual associations. Green, besides being semiotically connected with nature, evokes hope and biological growth; many wisdom traditions, including Eastern ones, also associate it with earthly paradise. In some Southeast Asian contexts, by contrast, green may be associated with decay and death. In the photographs selected for the PdT cards, colours are used evocatively and allusively in order to facilitate an emotional encounter with users.
MOVEMENT: REPRESENTING PERCEPTUAL EXPERIENCE
By images in movement I mean the representation of perceptual dynamism, which was also a distinctive feature of Impressionism. The movement developed at the same time as the widespread diffusion of photography which, thanks especially to the calotype invented by the Englishman Fox Talbot, was beginning to replace the traditional role attributed to the painter, namely the imitation of a likeness of reality that was often more ideal than concrete. I stress the ideal aspect of artistic representation because, in fact, pictorial imagery, at least until the advent of heliography, had always been bounded by an Albertian type of perspective. The Albertian image can be described as a window opening onto a fictional and rhetorical world in which the artist creates rich worlds endowed with beauty and harmony. Artificial perspective, theorized by Leon Battista Alberti and governed by geometric principles, is placed at the service of the painter’s discretion: the painter works as though positioned at the apex of a pyramid extending from the eye and enclosing the visible world. Composition, which involves selecting and positioning the subject within the image, becomes the pictorial narration of a literary fiction or poem. The universe of painting is therefore a constellation populated by hieratic, perfect ideals, free of vulgar elements. It is here that photography, far from merely reproducing Albertian perspective without any originality of its own, introduces a new type of aesthetic perception. Alongside the Albertian image, the scholar Jonathan Friday places the Keplerian image. Unlike the former, the Keplerian image corresponds precisely to the personal and emotional point of view of an observer. If, in the pyramid metaphor, an Albertian image stands at a certain distance from the apex, the Keplerian image represents the world from the apex itself. If the frame of the first type of image displays a fictional world shaped by the painter’s intentional imagination, the Keplerian frame coincides with our visual field—with the way the eye optically forms an image—and therefore contains a representation of the world seen under a particular aspect. A painting produces, if this forced simplification may be allowed, Albertian images, whereas the photographic medium returns Keplerian images. It is through the separation of these two modes of seeing that photography profoundly influenced later art. From ambitions to reproduce rhetorical discourses based on mythical and religious figures, painters moved toward a more plausible rendering of the action of the human eye and of how it is affected by the objects it sees. Photography, with its innate ability to capture the instant through snapshot framing, encouraged painters to focus on fleeting perceptions: blur, lack of depth, moving and poorly defined figures, perspective misalignments, distortions and much more. Among the characteristics of Impressionism, besides the shift to working en plein air, are contrasts of light and shadow and mixed, vivid colours that record the painter’s emotions on the spot. In the case of PdT, the sensations are those of the potential spectator or passer-by who glimpses the things surrounding them, or who is engulfed by the things themselves. They are cognitive states projected outward that “colour,” in surprising ways, our world.
PHOTOMONTAGE: CONSTRUCTING IMAGES OF INNER LIFE
Photomontage played a central role in the production process of a large part of the PdT cards. This post-production technique, like black and white discussed above, is as old as the history of photography. Henry Peach Robinson, a British photographer and founder of English Pictorialism, was among the first to use it, and in 1869 discussed it extensively in the volume Pictorial Effect in Photography: Being Hints on Composition and Chiaroscuro. Pictorialism was a movement of the late nineteenth century that sought to elevate the photographic medium to the level of painting and sculpture in particular. Pictorialists rejected the mechanical and, even worse in their eyes, automatic process of reproducing reality that distinguished photography in its deepest ontological essence. Photographers wanted to cleanse photography of its original sin by introducing the manual skill and aesthetic sensibility necessary to make it an artwork at least comparable with its older sisters: gum bichromate printing, soft-focus lenses that produced blur, and above all the combined printing of several negatives onto a single positive. Although the conceptual assumptions of Pictorialism remain debatable today, since for years they prevented photography from finding its own existential dimension and distinctive vocation, the movement nevertheless produced works deserving attention, especially in relation to the subject of this section. One of Robinson’s early photographs, Fading Away, shows a girl dying of consumption, that is, tuberculosis. The father turns his back on his daughter and looks outside, holding his arm in a contracted position that seems intended to conceal his pain. The young woman is watched at her bedside by figures who are probably meant to be her mother and sister. The models, placed in a setting suggesting a comfortable middle-class family, are posed so as to create a harmonious composition, apparently at odds with the gloomy atmosphere of the photograph; the premature death of a young girl was an absolute taboo in the Victorian era. It is a softened vision of death, taking place in a domestic space defined by female presence. Pictorialists therefore shared, in addition to formal concerns, some of the same subjects as the Pre-Raphaelites in Britain and the Vienna Secessionists: domestic life and the body. Returning to aesthetic significance, for Robinson the beauty of the image was an indispensable requirement if a photograph was to become art. This implied the controlled and deliberate montage of different elements in order to obtain a single coherent visual composition that also becomes a meaningful narrative. Fading Away, in fact, is the result of assembling five separate negatives, each photographed at different times and showing the participants in the staged scene individually. This made it possible to depict an idealized and artificial version of death, accompanied in one print by lines from the Romantic poet Shelley that reinforce, for David Bate, the idea that one can “die well.” Some doubt remains as to whether the girl is acting the part of someone suffering from consumption, because she also appears alone in another surviving photograph entitled She Never Told Her Love. Whether she is suffering from a physical or psychological illness, Robinson’s skilful calibration of this pathetic scene derives above all from the power of assembling the original negatives. What the photographer captures, then, is not simply reality as it is present in the exact instant of the shot, but his private point of view. Besides Robinson, many artists of the avant-gardes, including Surrealism and Dada, were attracted to photomontage. Because it consists in juxtaposing and partially superimposing multiple photographs that merge into a single image, photomontage increases the creative possibilities available to the photographer and graphic designer. The intention is not to deceive or cheat, but to emphasize the distance between the raw photograph—the single, locally situated shot—and the photographic image as a final product constructed ad hoc, capable of evoking paradox, incongruity, opposites, oxymoron, inner conflicts and many other facets of human experience. The PdT cards work in this way as well, through photomontage together with the techniques considered above.