Steven Dixon

Persistent Buildings, Ephemeral Subjects, Expanding Sky

The essential paradox of the photographic image is the claim it makes upon us about its "having been". We cannot help but be seduced by the supposed and lyrical mechanicality of the operation of the camera. Positioned within a specific space, in the rigid guides of place, and replicating a fleeting but consequent moment of time, it's very specific and succinct operation calls out a single note of time and space. A timorous action which itself as self-determined looker captures a slice of an event in the gentle weave of paper and chemical, lens and shutter. This magnificently indifferent mechanism, embedded in the piercing immanence of events, details a step back from the hazy confluences of matter and motion and seems to detail a serene regard of what "is".

But what whispered claims the complex interactions of the camera makes of us, lie in some nebulous configuration of what we are to make of it, and all of the myriad elements of which it, as a supposedly single entity, the camera, (its process and the image so perplexingly produced; the uninterrupted and undefined confluences of visuality; motion, matter and structure of the event) so hopefully observes and efficiently reproduces. From a peripheral regard the camera affirms as "there" and "then" while presenting its result within the "here" and "now". This paradox is one where first we are to casually confront the chasm in which the photograph exists.

Kari Soinio in his new body of work, City of Ghosts (2007-09), begins his exploration here in this gap which presents us with the vibrating polarities of the first and pointed paradox of the camera. Both within the enlivened event of the street and as devious voyeur, with neither callous nor kind comment, the camera pulls away from the accidents and cores of the event and inevitably enfolds us in the actions of the register. The sly position of the camera, looking up from its subhuman stance heightens the questions of our mere obliging observation underlining the question of being "there" and "not being there". The circling back of this lower position calls out to the two calling paradox of the "being in the event" of the camera and the "un-causing viewer" of the secreted camera and the now unseen viewer of the photographic image. At its base the strategy of Soinio positions us to see the art work as both Agamben and Ranciere do in their respective works "The Man without Content" and "the Politics of Aesthetics" - a placement between the gaps of competing claims and clamoring of oppositional categories which play themselves out on the surfaces and depths of the artwork. This, to them, as with the quiet and devastating maneuvering of Soino, is what distinguishes the art piece and the fundamental paradigm of art from the jostling population and frantic procreation of images and the visual within the culture industry itself. This resting of art in the undefined groundings of the gaps and lapses. The always betweeness of the paradox.

The Disruptive distribution of Meaning

The photo, and how we are so lovingly and gently asked to think of it, the camera is placing for our regard a register of reality purportedly unmixed with anything but the "what was". This image becomes the two pronged placement of the dilemma as the image as "there" and the image as "here". The gap which thereness and hereness elaborates and stealthy articulates is expanded within the City of Ghost series by concurrently noting the fertilizations and associations with a nesting nearness of the embracing paradox of "embeddedness" (one is there and part of the occurrence of the events) and the distance of the unseen and un-causing "witness" (one is observer to the event but has no effect on it). There comes to the surface of the photographic image, as defined by Soinio in the use of vantage point and focus, not merely a single paradox, but a reregistering of all paradoxes of the photographic image as entwined and cross-pollinating one another's meaning systems. Closeness of these two logical systems of paradoxes becomes luxuriant bed of elemental associations, to cross between and yield to new and reworkable meaning associations. Gaps and associations, the free floating position between the poles of a paradox and the reassociations of divergent poles and the new readings generated, now is the tactical move of Soinio. This logic of reassociative movement and the plenum of the gap are again eerily echoed in the up and down of the line of sight of the camera and, therefore, of us ourselves. The gravity of the "worm's eye" vantage point, that down on the ground, secured and haphazardly tied, is contentiously countered by the soaring flight of our and the cameras sight. The materiality which lies and is implied by the working of gravity at the point of the vantage is belied in the spontaneity of vision (which we may call "ephemera"). However this lineage of paradoxical associations is founded lastly on the paradox fostered and necessitated in the paradox of the gravitas and ephemera. The worm's-eyed view is in the final prognosis the only possible position. The vantage point of which we cannot escape. Yet this very position gestates the activity of the ephemera. Gravitas becomes the vantage point, the position of "to be". The ephemera "to see". In Soinio's exploration of the exposition of the art paradigm and the photograph there becomes no specifically defined or hierarchal determined (i.e. truer or more correct) associations between the poles. Simply put, the cycles of motion between the poles of a paradox call up sympathies, associations, identifications, and relationships, new relations on the fruitful field of associative movements and meanings.

Histories and phrases

One may lay claim to Soinio's questioning of the aesthetic regime of art as a breakdown of the fundamental possibility of the neutral representational ability of imagery and in its place confer a distribution of ideological connectedness which is based on the culturally assigned positions of binary categories and the paradoxes they involve. For Soinio the camera and the photographic image are well suited to this analysis. The idea of representation as possibly neutral and simply "carried out" and at the last "indexical" still in some way tediously clings to this method of image production. Such a naturalizing reading of the photograph is tellingly dismantled and deconstructed in the work of Soinio to further elaborate a cunning and shockingly fresh position for us to further critique the ideology and distribution of meanings from within the concept of representations.

However, the body of work in the City of Ghosts is more than this (and how can one say only this "more" to such a critique, but this is the danger also of words) and does not find its final and conclusive point in this critique of representation and the dismantling of the regimes of the aesthetic.

Based on the wandering and circulating landscape of signs and logics, which Soinio presents to us, we can understand the structural apparatus of the photographic image as being construed to elaborate a fundamental division inherent in the regime of the image. On the one hand the image is a phrase of space where elements comprising the image are related to one another within a certain grammar. This grammar is a way for us to relate the elements together to form an idea of the relative "positions" of the objects and how they stand in regard to one another. On the other hand the image of the photography asserts a moment of historicity. It makes no claim to a current set of spatial relations but instead affirms a moment of the event of the world which informs and details the "past" and which, therefore, contributes to the accumulation of actions and moments that defines the shared ground of the present and it's arrangement.

The Phrasing of the Spatial

The phrase of spatiality of the photograph is a distribution of elements in regard to one another which ask for an ephemera interpretation of events. The positions of visualities and elements are crossed over and constructed in the phrase of the image to position each of the elements in specific and defined ways. The human in the forefront of the Soinio images in the City of Ghosts series transgresses a space "lower" and more "fleeting" than the "further back" and "higher up" than the building occupies in its staid and unmoving locality. This construction of the phrase of the image's spatial arrangements demands that we apply a certain and specific "grammar" to the reading of the photograph. This grammar, as the expressive construction of the phrasing of the space, details a possibility of readings based on the relations of elements defined as objects one to the other. The transitory and the permanent, the momentary and the rigid, which counter poses, in turn, a explicit and meticulous ontological status of the concordant elements. The gravitas of the vantage point shared in the phrasing of the spatial circulates between the foregrounded subjects (and can we not just say people here!) and the view (vantage point) of the photo image. The building, in the phrasing which Soinio makes, is placed behind and distance. This relationship between the vantage point of the camera and the foregrounded subjects connects them together as transitory (and therefore having a "low" ontological status) and the untouchable and the removed buildings (eternally true) in the background giving each of the elements a differing ontological status in the logic of the image. This ontological indication is further underscored in the grammar of the image by the "out of focus" of the foregrounded subjects. Though the gravitas is ensnared with the images of the people passing "close" (in the phrase of the space of the photographic image that is) to the mechanism of the camera (and as reflected in the photographic image) the use of the grammar of the phrasing - out of focus, in motion, close up, etc. - the intrinsic ephemerality and temporariness is underscored in this locale of the "people" displacing the ontological status to the stasis of the backgrounded buildings. Determinate nature is therefore given to the backgrounded building elements more so than the related and foregrounded subjects. This heightening of the ontological positioning of the buildings in extremis of the individual subjects of the foreground underscores the platonic evaluation of the "Jacobs ladder" of existence and therefore the flow of determinations within the image phrase. As ontologically secure and existent objects are in the platonic conception those which are more "actual" and therefore are determinate to the construction of a "true" statement the buildings become the attribute of a correct image phrasing than the "shadows" with have only a fleeting and questionable ontological status.

However this does not complete the entire spatial phrasing in the City of Ghosts series. Soinio's images are primarily phrased with three distinct visual elements. We have noted the foregrounded subjects which tie to the gravitas and circle over the disorienting gap back to the ephemera highlighting the temporariness and tensions which are entailed in transitory events. This is juxtaposed to the elemental phrasing of the buildings which demand a reading of distance and consistency which reflect the heightened ontological status of the buildings and detail the permanence and absoluteness of the "continuing" object. This gives these elements in the phrasing a secure position in the logic of the real and though we "relate" per gravitas to the subjects the ephemera (associated with the circulation of the paradox) extends the reliability of the permanence of distant object by its untouchablity and, therefore, the consistency of the universal.

Additionally, one further element is presented in Soinio's phrasing. Embedding all of the buildings is an expanse of sky. This sky as element in the phrasing lies "behind" the building yet oscillates between a reading of "behind" and enclosing in the spatial phrasing. This sky, as most sky's are, is easily overlooked by the uniformness of its appearance and the ungraspablity of the surface of the sky as object. Yet here it is positioned in the phrase of the image as beside, around, and behind the objectness of the building. The sky recalls the indeterminate expanse of the gaps which exist between the polarities of the paradoxes. It is a field of irresolvable positions as it itself has no intrinsic signs which remain stable in order to find a gravitas. The vantage point by which a secure phrasing may be accomplished definitely is only at the extreme poles of the paradox. You are "here" or you are "there", you are standing still or you are moving. The inbetweenness of the paradox is replicated in the element of the sky and its ambiguous relationship to the intermediate element of the building. Additionally at times this sky is anointed with clouds and haze which details a possible position within the undifferentiated expanse of the sky but which is ultimately undermining to any overriding possibility of consistent status. The locality of the sky, the undifferentiated and indeterminate, embeds the furtive demand of supposed ontological primacy of the building and undercuts its evaluation within the phrasing of the visual.

The Apparatus of History

The assertion of historicity places the spatial phrasing as an absolute sign of the arrangement of elements of the world of which the camera is merely a form of register. The photographic image is therefore a marker of the arrangements as spied by the historical placement of the photo apparatus. What actually "was," and therefore what sequence of past objects and their interactions (events) converge and congeal to, form the present moment. The spying of historical events, as captured by the camera as device, is meant to give us an "accurate" assessment of what went into the construction of the present, and what all events of the present share as their founding. The phrasing of the elements indicate absolute historical objects and how the intrinsic interactions were carried out to be shuttled to our moment of time and detail the "reason" the world is now as it is. Historicity is therefore the universal shared of any moment in time. The Camera is the explication of this universal shared and becomes the position to understand the confusing nexus of the current.

As one may see this ties to the paradox of "hereness" and "thereness" but in the stead of transversing the space of the paradoxical gap and circulating among the differencing ideological and associative pauses possible in this space the historical view elaborates a ontological locale for the photographic itself. Each shutter moment becomes "is", "is", "is". The unfolding of history passes each of these "is's" to "was" but ontologically gives them the position of untouchable and incorruptible. It "was" you cannot change that. Each moment of the historical and its arrangement cannot be altered and they, in toto, go into comprising the arrangements of the present and the shared experience we supposedly have. These moments of accumulated "is's" are the mechanism to further imply an enhanced regard to the ontological status of historical construction.

This ontological device of history is underscored and undermined in the titling of the Soinio work. Each photo image is tied to the mechanism of the camera through the explication of the physical locale of camera. 6th Av., or Riverside Dr. are the markers of space while the hereness-thereness paradox of the photographic image itself (vis-a-vis the camera as internal device) details the past of the image. This underscoring of the physical and temporal matrix of the camera as device and the historicity of the resultant image overdetermines the ontological nature of the image's historicity.

Such a determination of the image circumvents the possibility of an open reading of the photographic image. Historicity implies that the thereness of an image is tied to brute ontological nature. The viewer may "see" it, but it, in itself, merely "was". The notion of presence is mirrored by the viewer in seeing the image, being "present" in the photographic image, which is directly tied to the operation and occurrence of the device of the camera as embedded in a historical presence. The "being present" of viewing is collapsed to the being present of the apparatus of the camera. Historicity is reaffirmed in the matrix of unalterable arrangements of objects in the flow of time of which presence (being there) is the only alternative. Interpretation as reading is devalued in the notion of presence and the collapse of the image and camera to the index or register of the camera and "seeing".

Yet Soinio's logic has already undermined this position. The titling through giving a placement to the camera does not define a time. The "when" of the image is left to an understanding of when it may have occurred (the shutter was "clicked"). In this movement of the spoken and the finally unresolved of Soinio's titling, the relationship to the phrasing of the spatial is indicated and the viewer as interpretant is positioned to carry out a reading of the presence of the photographic image and the relationship this holds to the embedded events in which the camera as located. Understanding of the photographic image becomes a reading of the supposed indexicality of the photograph and generates a circulation of the contradictory phrasings of the spatial in the photographic image and the set of assumptions set into the meanings of the photographic image by the "now" of the viewing experience.

The Strewn field of Meanings

The phrasing of the images in the City of Ghost series, as we began to detail above, places three visual elements in relation to one another and in relation to the embedded position of the camera. The foregrounded subject, the building behind the subject, and lastly the sky, which seems to enclose, frame, and be backgrounded to the building. The transitory, fuzzy expression of the subjects (people) positions the subject element within the spatial phrasing of the image as more inexact and less solid in its ontological nature than the more highly placed and distant building. What will last in the movement of time is therefore accorded to the building which is out of reach of both the subject (and the camera as circulating in the gravitas of its placement) and of motion and time. This is the perfect platonic ideal which is interpreted to be the ultimate ontological set of which other "lower" material objects may only imperfectly share. The buildings become then two determinates for the foregrounded subject.

On the one hand this determinate is carried out by the higher ontological status of the building. This is determinate in the purely causal notion that the (and one often cited in philosophical argumentation) real can cause action (or "more" action) whereas the unreal cannot. Something can effect something else, but nothing has no effect on reality or on the objects populating it. In this way the higher ontological status of the building can have effect on the transitory and ephemeral but the ephemeral has little or no effect on the real. Determination of being, and the causal chains that lie between entities, are one-sided and moving in solely one direction. The higher ontological being can effect and determine things but the temporary and transitory has little or no effect on objects and the world. Because of this the subjects of the lower space of Soinio's photographic images are to be thought of as being determined but not in any way having the possibility to determine or effect, but the higher ontological position of the buildings.

On the other hand, and one which is called forth in this ontological positioning, the building (and the layout of general overall building planning called civic planning) as determinate structure is in fact a static structure which is determinate to the actual flow of individuals in the building itself or the city planning in which this building(s) is nested. The floor plan of the building is determinate to motions of subjects planning a grid of managed and limited actions which the building requires. The rigid structure of the grid positions the subjects to like activities and encoded procedures. This erasure of possibilities contains the drifting of countermovement. Subjecthood then begins to collapse into the detailed set of prearranged actions which the map of the building, and the possible relationships one may have with it, specify for the individual. This collapse of possible avenues of activity for the subject removes from the individual specific aspects of what it is to be defined as a subject. Wherein subjecthood may be defined as the ability to make choices, the over-determinate nature of the building in many ways begins to collapse this simple notion of the subject of choices into the antithetical pole of object which merely "is". The collapse of the object/subject polarity becomes a means to eradicate the open positions which are entailed in the gaps of the object/subject dilemma (one more paradox introduced on the surface of Soinio's work) in order to close down the driftings possible in this gap, as well as to circumvent associative realignments. The indication of the collapse here is a social critique which lays by the underlying social agendas which mean to devalue the subject vis-a-vis the object through the utilities of social and city planning, the heightening of the ontological status of the structures of a society over the individual, and the questions of historical being over the transitory.

Soinio's critique becomes underlined in all this in the phrasing of his image. The Subjects moving, blurry and transitory. The buildings permanent, sharp, solid and sharing in the true being of the defined visual. And the Sky….

We have touched on the question of the Sky but it is telling that Soinio leaves such a large section of the pictorial plane to its placement. We have noted above certain characteristics of the undetailed notion of the sky but it is in the logic of Soinio's work that this will become the final statement of resolution of the phrasing of the spatial and the elaboration of continually irresolvable possibilities. The sky as the undefined surface with embeds and encloses the restricted determinates of the building harkens back to a field with no tangible surface excepting its visual presentation. The object sky can be pointed out and pointed to by the camera but where it "is", above us and even as bed for the monumental façade of the building, is open to question. The visual constant of the sky-field is strewn with logical connections in that the field itself may not be settled upon. The pure visuality of blue lays claim more to the gaps and open field which lie between the dilemmic poles of Soinios logic of paradoxes and the reassessed bindings and associations than to the determinations of bare ontological estimation. We move with the ephemera of non inertial visual speed across the uniform but undefined surface of this sky replicating the motions within the gaps of metaphoric poles and the empty and fruitful possibilities and transitions of the gap. Older and more permanent than the buildings and even more distant and untouchable than them, the Soinio sky asserts its ontological superiority to both the subject and the object, but cycles into the fleeting motions and undetailed pathways of the subject. The sky replicates the gravitas and points to the vantage point which is the active "to see" without the closure of a single determinate "seeing". This connection, which reinvests the openness of reading, endows a rearticulation to the distinction between subject and object which the determinate pathways and ontological estimations of the building conspired to collapse. The Subject is reaffirmed and the possibilities of the gap reinserted to the photographic surface. The final paradox which is detailed in the City of Ghost series becomes a cycle between the up and down, the high and the low. The pole of the sky up in the phrasing of the space cycles back to the down of the subject. The determinate and hidden nod of ontological superiority may be sidestepped in the cycles of potentials and possibilities.