On Editing with Emotion
Exploring a style particular to Dayanita Singh’s way of editing images | 15 minute read
Imagine someone say, “I feel an emptiness”. It sounds beautiful. Almost instantly, you feel it stir something within you. A certain feeling takes over.
But what is this stirring, this feeling? And can it be described in words?
It’s a bit like playing the game ‘taboo’. “Describe emptiness without using the words empty or emptiness”, they say. And you think—a hollowness? A vacant-ness, a vacuum…? Perhaps, ‘a clearing’ might resonate best, as you think on. But let’s not digress here.
So, emptiness. Say it out loud maybe. Emptiness…emptiness. Murmur it, maybe once, twice over. Note the emotions that come up. Does something else—a piece of music, a setting, an object or an image make you feel the exact same way?
What can one call this common something, this factor ‘x’, and why is it important to observe it?
Photographer and photo-book artist Dayanita Singh, who has a career-long relationship with musicians, and hence music, borrows a word from the art for this feeling. She calls this particular something, this stirring, a “dhun”—like a tune in music. And like a tune, it is both the beginning and also the core, the underlay of the work that one builds on. Like a mood or the soul of something; constant and ever evolving.
“To me, emotions associated with photography are generally what one feels in the womb area or the gut, around the navel”, she says. And this is where one begins, when editing images like Singh does, “with emotion”. By tapping into the dhun and staying with it. Holding onto it, like it were an anchor, and letting it guide you. By finding what else aligns with that emotion—what other images in your archive, in your several bodies of work, match this dhun.
Listening to images
But how does one tune into the dhun? How does one arrive at this feeling, which, to begin with might be both vague and specific at once?
Or might, as one treads down the path, become well defined, only eventually.
Reading an introduction to author and feminist theorist Tina Campt’s critical book ‘Listening to images’, becomes a poignantly articulated point of departure and parallel to this journey.
The idea took birth the night Campt lost her mother. She recalls, with tenderness, her family gathered in the basement of their home to bid her mother goodbye. While some sang, her father chose instead, to hum her mother’s favourite song. In that humming, lay a great intensity. One that far surpassed the power of words. Campt looks at this “quiet hum” as an invaluable response, “…in the face of the unsayability of words”. This memory continues to connect her to “feelings of loss” to this day. Campt, while researching her book, connected this “felt sound” to prisoner photographs from the Breakwater prison in South Africa,1893. These images, falling under the genre of identification photography, were “compelled photos” (attributed to Susanne Regener), taken without the permission of the subjects. And for the specific purposes of creating a record to control, track and trace, by those who held authoritative power over the subjects. In this quietude of the prisoners’ seeming submission to the makers of the photos, Campt gleaned a sonic frequency that the images emanated, that as she states, “…must not be conflated with silence.”
“Quiet”, she says, “registers sonically, as a level of intensity that requires focused attention.” Quoting from an online source on audible frequency, she shares—“Frequencies below 20 Hz are generally felt rather than heard, assuming the amplitude of the vibration is great enough”. And when applied to the prisoner photos, it is these “lower frequencies” that register as felt sound, “… sound that, like a hum, resonates in and as vibration.”
How this applies best to photography as a medium is something to be acknowledged. Photographs, as opposed to the moving image or the painted one, are more often than not, of real people and real places, objects, events and things. Of life as it is were, captured in that fraction of a breath, when the shutter is released. And yet, time and space within photographs seem to endlessly expand and contract. This ability, of the possibility of perceptibility far beyond what meets the eye on the surface of the image, also emerges from the ability to tune in and really listen to images.
Returning to Campt and her elaboration on the phenomenon in a salon held in her honour by the Barnard Center for Research on Women, (video available on YouTube | link at the end of this piece) she says, “The practice of listening to images (that Campt aspires to) …that practice is one of lingering and attending to photographs in all their complexity. And trying not necessarily to hear something in them, not necessarily to see something in them, but to look beyond what we see. To be able to engage that which we have to inhabit in order to understand them.”
Presence, and the Potency of Images
To be able to listen then, becomes a prerequisite to editing or even to creating images. And to be able to listen to the image also requires images that emanate vibrations equally strong enough to be heard.
Images that speak the loudest though, are not necessarily the most action oriented. They could infact be the quieter/ quietest ones. Those which carry an ability to resonate with you at deeper levels of the subconscious or help draw out the strongest emotions.
And for photographers working on an edit, the first image is usually as daunting as a blank canvas is for an artist, or a blank page for a writer. But to pick an image which has the potency to become both a conversation starter, and that which holds the girth to draw in the many images to come within its fold, is paramount. The first image for Singh, though crucial, might not always be the final choice. One only knows the once the process is complete and when the final edit emerges.
So how does one pick the right images? What does one look for?
Our feelings here become our signposts, our receptors to what is being communicated by an image. So every time you’re seeing an image or listening to it, and you feel what Singh describes as “knots, tightness or a thrill” in your body, you know you’ve been able to tap into the frequency of a particular image.
An edit then becomes a continued dedication to these emotions, these feelings. To this dhun, which demands enormous presence and discipline. The reasons, why you think an image is great if it does not meet the frequency that you’ve tuned into, become superfluous. As they say, one needs to be able to kill their darlings or be ruthless to external factors like beauty or an interesting backstory to the image while editing. “To be faithful to the dhun,” as Singh reiterates.
It also doesn’t matter, Singh shares, if the image is a tiny bit blurred or not the best quality. What’s important is that it was made, and by that virtue is part of a larger archive, ever-more valuable with its patina of time.
Intent
Singh also stresses on the intent of the maker, which translates to the integrity of the image. To listen to an image also means sensing the authenticity of its purpose. And with images that allow for listening, the intent with which the image was created, almost always comes through.
Why do we make a particular image? Why do we make the images that we make? Why do we create the work that we create?
These are questions crucial to address, especially with the current social media scenario, where the presence of an audience is all pervasive.
How then does one still create work, “getting past one’s fetishes” as Singh says, to “get to zero”, where the work has been distilled to a precise form, edit and language.
On form, Singh’s views are just as specific. She believes that the form emerges from the work and that is the only way for a successful edit to happen. Fixed notions about whether a set of images will become a book, an exhibition or just a set of three prints, are best avoided at the onset. “What gets made eventually is always more important than what you wanted to make,” states Singh decisively.
She believes this clarity is something that happens with time, as time creates distance, and hence objectivity. One is able to detach themselves from their work and look at it with the eyes of a stranger. Or with a familiarity, a knowing, which is more focused. Like meeting a version of the self, bearing the gift of hindsight.
Learnings
Looking back at a book-building workshop taught by Singh, that a few of us attended in the summer of 2018, one realises that these were some of the basic foundations that she laid out for us to create our structures on. We got to Singh’s home for the week-long workshop with heaps of images from different bodies of our work and laid them out in neat bunches on the long editing tables that Singh loves to work on—something that enables her to move and view the edit/flow all at once.
One of the first things that Singh did, was pick the different sets of images and mix them all up, quite like one tosses up a salad. Initially, it was difficult to fathom what she was trying to do. She picked up one image and set it down. Then another from a completely different set came next, and then another, and so it went. When there were about eight to ten images in a certain order, there was a story that had formed. Singh was teaching us to create meaning out of images, a tool she uses to build and break, and build over.
While this is not to say that a story or an edit cannot be made from the specific set of images which belong to the same project, but the idea here was more about how a story can be constructed from very disparate images, taken at different places and points in time. And also that, what disparate images, apart from being a hark back to the contact sheet, can also mean, is that your story/ edit is that much more layered. This helps create narratives rich with meanings which might not be obvious, especially without the context of the images preceding and following them.
Movements
A good edit then is one where the viewer is holding many images in her mind, while looking at the one before her. But unlike a story shared in words, a visual story is literally that—visual. So along with context, one also remembers visual cues, symbols and patterns, picked up from images encountered previously in the edit, en route to arriving at the current one. These add to the context or the dhun, keeping you on the path, either moving forward, backward or taking a detour.
Speaking of movements and detours, a cherished memory of the workshop with Singh is of her untiring back and forth pacing between images at one end of the table and something she felt worked from the other end of the table. While Dancing with My Camera is a book that takes from the idea of moving around with the camera to get the shot you need, creating an edit is also a dance in its own way. And Singh encourages the building of a “physical relationship with your work.” I initially did wonder why that is so important and a couple of things came up.
In the creation of a book, where the book is the final product, or an exhibition where you are displaying a series of prints, both ends are physical, tangible things. Unless one creates from a, (borrowing from Campt’s use of the term) “haptic” process, there will always remain a disconnect between the source, the raw material and the final form. Maybe this is a good way of testing the power of listening too. You could view the same image on a screen versus in print and see how the two feel to you. What dhun plays out in each of the two forms.
What also came to mind was Lars Von Trier’s highly controversial film “The Idiots”, where a young mother finds a way of processing her grief, having just lost her baby, by joining a group of provocateurs. The group’s contentious choice of behaviour is a conscious act of revolt against the structured, manicured ways of society. Using the self, the body, without constraint, dancing, shouting, jumping around and pushing everything to the hilt, the narrative hopes to force out emotions that might not come up easily. Moving the physical body and using the sense of touch—holding or feeling, does this. With deep emotions that need a release, it is the psychological that finds an outlet via the physical. Psycho-somatic therapies like yoga being a case in point. Editing with physical prints is a process quite akin to this, where the feelings that the images evoke are best drawn out by creating a tactile bond with the work, through movement and touch.
The Khaali: the silent notes, the discordant notes
Can the absence of a movement still be perceived as one? What is absent, if you’re very much still looking at an image before you?
In Hindustani classical music, the khaali is an empty or a silent note which breaks the rhythm or the buildup of the beat or the count that musicians play to. It is a note unlike the rest. In that, it offers the listener a pause. And through that, it either realigns the tune or elevates it to a plane higher than what it was at before. It also breaks the monotony of the structure.
In image editing too, one needs to weave in the discordant notes that disrupt the flow of the edit. “Otherwise it can all become quite prescriptive, no?”, reveals Singh, who strictly advises against creating a story which looks “too composed”.
So how do disruptors help? And what do they look like? What purpose/s do they serve?
A disruptor is any image that doesn’t flow or fit in with the rest of the edit up until that point, in terms of its language. A simplistic example would be a sudden burst of colour in an edit with images in otherwise rather muted tones. What this does is, it jars or surprises the viewer. And quite like the khaali, it realigns the narrative by either giving it a pause or a jolt. One turns the page and moves on with the story. And if one has been listening to the images carefully, it dawns upon you that what you’ve just been served, is a palette cleanser.
Conscious Choices
Disruptors might look randomly placed; an anomaly in an otherwise well forming thought or flow of emotion. But Singh stresses on the fact that they have been placed very consciously to have the impact that they do. Just as every image in the edit is a deliberate choice, where the editor is aware of why she is placing a certain image as opposed to another. In that sense, it is imperative for the photographer to also be the editor and hence the auteur of her work. And in case of it being a book, to have complete control over the edit.
Speaking of auteurs, as a student of literature in college, one of the course papers we studied was film adaptation, where we looked at various literary texts reimagined for the cinematic medium. I recall my professor mentioning the 'Movie Brat’ directors like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese amongst others, who being film school graduates, were well versed with skills like editing and cinematography, other than film direction. Later, studying cinema and film criticism, introduced me to the work of the auteur filmmakers like Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. Collaborating closely, like the former, with their editors and cinematographers, to create work with their own definitive imprint on them, they truly were the authors of their films. A photographer creating her photo-book needs to ensure that her vision and voice comes through just as distinctly. And for that, an involvement in the work from ideation to execution is vital.
Singh also believes that a book, or at least the complete draft/ the final edit, should ideally be created independently, in isolation, without the intervention of external views and suggestions. One can be guided to articulate one’s thought/s through conversations, or be introduced to techniques and tools, like Singh did with us at the workshop. But the process of editing is best carried out in solitude. The emotion, the dhun, the listening is an internal journey, personal to the photographer, and one that she needs to make on her own. The delineation here needs to be very clear. Between the personal being exclusive, and the public inclusive. The latter only at a point conducive to the process.
“People will most often like images that they might have seen before,” Singh shares, explaining the perils of involving external voices in one’s editing space. While she is instead, “…after an emotion that they might have experienced before”. As private a journey the editing of the work can be, Singh is also a firm believer of the power of dissemination and accessibility once the work is created. For someone who describes the book as “a conversation with a stranger in the future”, letting go of the work, to be shared, held, heard and savoured by unknown hands and hearts is also a part of the process. And clearly, a cherished one at that.
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