Figurative Photo-Sculpture with 3-D Pointillism

Leonardo, Vol. 5, pp. 55-58. Pergamon Press 1972. Printed in Great Britain FIGURATIVE PHOTO-SCULPTURE WITH 3-D POINTILLISM Harold A. Layer* INTRODUCTION Throughout history, the pictorial artist has been occupied with the problem of translating the language of actual subject space to that of a plane. The solutions have varied from the overlappingcontours of cave paintings, to Renaissance drawings in perspective, to multi-faceted cubism, to 360-degree cinema projection. It follows that much of the viewer’s perceptual life has been spent squarely in front of various picture planes, his brain continually suppressing the richness of his binocular vision in order to interpret the illusory space displayed on flat surfaces. This suppression continues even with the printed word, a medium embedded in a simple plane that limits its linguistic structure to twodimensions . As a result, many artists have turned to the kind of abstractions that eliminate illusory space. Other artists have adopted relief construction, that is, an object without the mass of sculpture but using a physical language unlike that of painting and photography. Recently, an awareness has emerged that stereoscopy, holography and photo-sculpture are the first tools that permit the recording or creation of a sense of space without a space-to-plane translation by the artist and that permit a new approach to figurative imagery without the need for illusory spaceperception by the viewer. In addition, holography and photo-sculpture permit useful cues of motion by kinetic depth effects (motion parallax). And further, photo-sculpture, a hybrid photograph/relief object, will permit a reversing of the creative process-the construction of an actual space structure directly from a planar subject. Of course, regardless of the direction the artist takes, space-to-plane, space-to-space or plane-tospace , his medium must be spatially plastic for all cues of depth perception. It should allow him to depict various spatial elements and intervals isomorphically , by chance or at any intensity determined by his iconic or conceptual plan. The advantage of stereoscopy, holography and photosculpture to the artist is the exceptional control he achieves over the unique, but culturally atrophied, * A-V Center,SanFrancisco State College,San Francisco, Ca. 94132, U.S.A., Photos prepared by J. Diaz and D. Okimoto of San Francisco. (Received 30 August 1971.) Fig. 1, Original subjectfor photo-sculpture [4]. Pattern A : Pattern B: Top-Positive grid a. Bottom-Negative grid 6. Top-Positive grid c. Bottom-Negative grid d. Moirepatterns used to modulate original subject. Fig. 2. depth cue of perspective disparity and its resulting response, stereopsis [l]. One technique ofphoto-sculpture isthe placement of large photographic transparencies in spaced frontal-parallel planes with transmitted lighting. Each transparency displays a partial aspect, angle or impression of the complete image. For example, the closest transparency to the observer might portray a tree and the rear transparency a mountain. Or the rear transparency might display an enlarged negative image of the same tree. The physical 55 56 Harold A. Layer (4 Fig. 3. Individual images separation of the transparenciesallows the artist to exaggerate or contradict monocular depth cues-a kind of spacecompression,spaceinversion or space expansion-or even to create perspective disparity and motion parallax where none existed in the original subject. DEVELOPMENT OF POINTILLISTIC PHOTO-SCULPTURE I would like to describea type of photo-sculpture that I have developed to produce an image composed of pointillistic elements suspended in actual space. My primary goal was to find a way to regulate the dispersal of a planar jiguratiue image in three dimensions-a total translation of space-toplane -to-space but with the key referent being the plane. In other words, a picturemay contain optical information of a space subject [2] but also it may inspire in the artist’s creative imagination wholly differentspatialstructuresfrom thosein the original space subject. Thus, a means is needed to express these new iconicidealizationsfor a process in which the planar image becomes a subject in its own right and spatially independent of the subject in space that it originallyrepresented. Furthermore, I wanted the potential to create a visual mosaic that requires a stereopsis ‘gestalt’ in the viewer’s mind to combinethe pictureplanesinto a perception of greater meaning and...