levitation – Camera Obscura

Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela

Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 16:14:00 +0000

Suspended
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

Text and photos by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela.

I can still recall the excitement I felt when I first saw a ‘levitation’ image. It brought to mind Victorian trick photos of women’s bodies floating under the hands of black-clothed magicians, like case studies of psychoanalysis, Freudian symbols of female hysteria. I also thought of the magical worlds in children’s stories: The Neverending Story and Peter Pan, epitomised by images I admired like that of young photographer Chrissie White, where a girl hovers toward her bedroom window in a purplish night-time scene. It seemed like levitation was the most exciting thing you could make happen in a photograph, and all down to careful shooting and some fairly simple Photoshop compositing work afterwards.

Reverie
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

My own efforts began in 2008 in a hotel room with Reverie (above). From this I embarked on a series of images which culminated in The smothering (below), a self-portrait that has come to be my most popular both online and in physical exhibition, spread-eagled over the web and exhibited in multiple cities internationally. But it is this image that has in turn made me wonder critically about the whole ‘levitation’ concept itself. I’m almost glad that it’s nearly sold out as an edition print, because it comes to resemble a period in my photography, and angle to my work, that I’m somewhat inclined to airbrush away just like the hands around my ankles in Photoshop. Why is that?

The smothering
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

Most people who view this picture ask ‘how’. Almost everyone who sees it asks how I made it. They may even open up a conversation, not with ‘how do you do’, but with ‘how did you do it?’ It hung at Photo LA where even the art buyers queried the process. The interest was based solely on its technique. To me, the ‘how’ in art is only interesting if I also hear the ‘why’; the two are inextricably linked and make the story behind any image. Technique by itself is the domain of photography ‘how to’ magazines, the Blue Peter-esque ‘here’s one I made earlier’ where the viewers are shown how to copy something, step by step, stroke for stroke, without thinking, without feeling; just doing, for the sake of it, like making papier-mâché Easter eggs.

© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

I am fully aware of my role in promulgating the popularity of levitation, by my writing and presenting about the mechanics of its production. Of course, I am not the ‘pioneer’ of that or of any technique; I was in turn inspired by other sources and then participated in co-inspiring a new wave of others to ‘levitate’. I’ve presented on it at tradeshows, festivals and in talks, written about it in magazines and in my two books that grace bookstores worldwide, and done workshops specifically about levitation imagery on both sides of the Atlantic. I have chosen to do each of these things, primarily because I don’t think there is any ‘secret’ about the production: by showing the technique, I hoped I could demonstrate that it is all but a technique, to be used within a wider artistic process. Note the important difference between inspiration and imitation: the ‘inspiration’ artistry talks of should be that which is manifested by a feeling, not the urge to emulate an exact image or notion of the singular ‘idea’. And it’s the latter that inevitably occurs with levitation, which in its nature of eye-shocking immediacy, becomes all about the visual: a domain of DIY for anyone to try, and it’s the hyped herd’s tight focus on the mechanics alone that is unsettling. I can’t help but feel a knot in my stomach when I see a tutorial break down the ‘step by step’ on levitation, with my images cropped in on the action, straight down to the nitty gritty, like the ‘money shot’ in porn.

© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

The crux here is to highlight a nagging feeling I have about the nature of levitation images. When I went through my initial tricks phase (in 2008) I felt as if I could not make a picture unless it had levitation in it. Fair enough, all artists go through phases. It is utterly natural and an artist’s attraction to something is their instinctive way to create. I liked the fact that a series of trick images was forming under my eyes, all with floating, falling or hanging women; a tapestry of elevation that for me was personally inspired by the symptoms of anxiety and a sense of unease.

Sprung and The jitters
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

But in these photo-sharing times, where anyone can make a picture and then share it with the world (something I have to be thankful for in my own career), so has the technique of levitation flourished. The dominos started to fall: someone would see someone’s image and ape it, then someone would see their image and ape that; endlessly creditless like a gushing river intermingling water from unidentifiable sources: the trend heightened, and the levitation photos came. My images formed a trickle dropped from one source pool, in turn falling into another, helping move the flow of a popular but superficial technique.

© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

A tsunami of levitation came forth: a world of people laying across invisible tables and implied chairs, veiled by motion-blurred hair, peeping out from underneath textures, toppled backwards fossilised, reaching towards objects shot in another time and place; pictures that range from ‘jumping mid-air’ to a complete collage of electronically-sewn limbs. Compared to when I first saw a levitation photo, like any new thing I had not seen before such as HDR photography, I gaze at levitation like an adult might gaze blankly at porn, wondering back to how the novelty of such a sight would first enthral them. Whilst modern digital photography and the internet has opened up so many people’s expression of creativity, a side effect is that we end up seeing so much of something, its wears thin. The internet becomes a public pinboard of so many ‘magical’ pictures that the democracy by which the technique became proliferated dissipates the magic itself. I examine the proficiency of the Photoshop handiwork like a miserable mistress in a tapestry class instead of feeling fascinated that such a surreal vision can be achieved with photographs at all.

© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

I think back to my levitation phase, when I could think of nothing else but levitating, and almost sigh with relief that it’s passed. After all, once you do a levitation photo, after you make a subject float, after you apply the most seemingly astonishing thing you could put in a photograph, how on earth do you do a picture of someone, just sitting or standing, ever again? To be able to present any photo or series and ‘feel’ its power of communication, there has to be a conviction of its worth, and levitation jumps so high up the barometer it almost goes off the scale, like putting two spoons of sugar into your tea every day for a month and then trying to drink tea without it. By employing the richest, most hyperbolic, and fantastical vision, the notion of a normal photograph can become bland. Your photographic tastebuds can get burnt by that hot sweet tea, able to be satiated only by the strongest substance. And that is not to say there is anything inferior about fantasy, surrealism and magic realism; composited images continue to form my main vein of work. But levitation poured a substance so rich into my blood that it soon became hard to bear. The strongest surrealism employed for a portrait: that of human flight, leaves everything else crashing back down to earth with a resounding banality, diminishing appreciation for anything less than spectacular.

© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

I personally find a lot of inspiration in paintings and illustrations, probably more than other photography. I am attracted to surrealism and pictorialism, and I have always embraced how heavily contrived works simply bear different values and production stories to more candid images. Whilst everyone has his or her own reason for wanting to make a levitation picture, I believe it is very difficult for levitation in particular to be done as part of a wider concept or message and not as an end in itself: it is too distracting. It is the message itself.

The adrenalin
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

Whether the creator is aware or not, levitation is usually always instant gratification. The viewer doesn’t have to think when they look at it. In the way that modern media moves the mainstream to emotion over reason, we love levitation, because it doesn’t require much effort at all to enjoy the picture. No background dialogue, historical, political or otherwise is needed (part of what drew me to it), nothing necessarily poignant but the sweetest-stitched tableaux, the melodic notes of visual pop music. It is universal, communicating across culture and age, the obvious impossibility of defying gravity, which can be rendered by anyone with a camera and Photoshop: or even just a well-orchestrated jump. For the creator, things get tricky – so to speak – as life continues after the inevitably heightened response following their first ‘levitation’. The audience’s expectations of that creator become simplified. They want more of the same instant kick, that rich diet to which they’re becoming pleasantly adjusted. Anything other than levitation is a consolation prize. I have felt as though anything I did post-levitation phase was at risk of boring my online viewers, a hangover after a wild night out. They saw suggestions of levitation where there weren’t any, and they sometimes still do. I feel as though I have somehow truly ‘tricked’ them. Levitation left an odd aftertaste, a phantom presence in my work that I didn’t quite like.

© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

I am a casualty of the levitation war with myself. I feel like I have had to re-teach myself appreciation of a photograph, a regular photograph. I had to soothe myself with the reminder that there are more purposes to photography than to instantly titillate, wow and melodramatise. That such thing as realism exists, and that finding surreal moments within the ‘real’ can often be more rewarding.
Of course, this is just about my own world, and my conflicts between desires for both manipulated and untouched pictures, a diversity that may not be so wide in the work of other people who have pleasantly levitated with less of a bump back to earth. Like an ex-alcoholic having the occasional tipple, I still sometimes create levitation-based imagery although they’re usually within a specific context. And in truth, I have seen photographers who have attended my levitation workshops go on to incorporate the technique successfully into commercial and fashion work. In my own personal work, I have wiped the palette clean and rebuilt new images upon it, introducing titbits of surrealism slowly back in, like a child’s rationed chocolates after teatime. That way I actually enjoy the pictorialist, surrealist treats more. It’s like stripping back your make-up routine so that it doesn’t take so long to wearily apply the make-up every day, and to not look so different with the make-up off at night. I can appreciate a photo again – and as ever, I love how it can develop into something else in Photoshop – but with subtleties, and new ‘tricks’, something that may even go unnoticed at first, or brew into a wild cocktail. Tricks that are enmeshed primarily in reality, some far more saccharine than others, and going back to the tea analogy, it’s fitting that I actually have no problem switching from sugary tea to sugarless tea in the same day.

© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

I didn’t really think too much about the reader is supposed to take away from this article. It’s not rosey and pleasant and joyous. In a sense it’s the opposite, like pricking the balloons on the girl levitating above a cornfield and watching her tumble into a heap. One of the main challenges of looking at any photography is challenging oneself: to see things differently, to see it from another perspective. I seek a balanced diet in photography by trying to understand other people’s tastes – trying to view my own ‘taste’ objectively from time to time – and when I do happen across another person’s levitation photo, to see it through the vision of their own freshly excited eyes.

This is the first article of a series of three essays:

For more informations and photos, please visit Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela website.

Ivo Mayr part2: Passanten

Ivo Mayr — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 19:47:44 +0000

Text and photographs by Ivo Mayr.

Passanten

The series “Passanten” is the third and final of the series with the theme of Antigravity. It originated in the context of a grant with which I was to create an artistic portrait of the town of Koblenz (a little, idyllic town along the Rhine River).

The character of the town is determined through several factors: its geography and architecture, but more so through the people who live in it. Since I knew neither Koblenz nor anyone within the town when the project commenced I decided to first become familiar with the town and its inhabitants. I took a room in shared accommodation, bought a bicycle and rode around the town and surrounding landscapes. Soon I felt like part of the town and was not swimming on the surface.

I developed a concept with which I could combine my passion for antigravity and my interest in the people of the city. I decided to actively approach people and positioned myself in exposed places that significantly contribute to the image of the city. I then asked people passing by for a staged portrait. They were people who got my attention through their clothes, charisma, pose etc. I portrayed them off the ground, hanging on walls, trees and lanterns. Like lost items who are placed clearly visible to everyone where they have been found (eg a glove on a fence). Through placing the people at typical locations of the town I could integrate documentary and historical aspects in a casual way. This way new perspectives on familiar places could be gained. This included the historical centre with its picturesque streets as well as the “eyesores /blemishes of Koblenz” which are just as typical for the town.

In my previous work I used people more like figurines who expressed a state through their pose or posture, the individuality of a person didn’t matter. This became very different in the series “Passanten”: the people are main actors. They give distinction to the picture with their uniqueness and distinctiveness. Since I never knew who would cross my path a lot of the significance of my work comes from chance and the spontaneity of the people passing by. Even though I could decide who I would find interesting and which pose they should take on the photo I could not manipulate their appearance (Styling, Charisma).

When I commenced my work it was initially uncomfortable to address people on the street and ask them to be in a photograph in which they would hang on a wall. I felt like a sales representative who wants to sell something. But most people were very open and interested in my work. An example photograph which I showed to everyone eliminated all doubt and suspiciousness. The positive feedback really supported me in my work and I became more confidant.

In this manner I got to know lots of different people who told me a lot about them and their city. Not all pictures were created directly at first contact. I had to ring up two “celebrities of Koblenz” to make a date over the phone and with one extended family I had to establish trust over several weeks before I could take a picture of three of eight siblings.

After a while I came to a certain fame. This went as far as some people contacting me to let me know about “beautiful motives” that I definitely had to photograph. On person emailed that he had to show me something that was of a sure interest to me. From his balcony he showed me a building that had fallen down in the Second World War and had since wrecked the view onto his garden He was hoping, I think, that as a official photographer of the town I could inform the public about this situation. The ruins in his garden were of no interest to me; he as a person however was of great interest. He was very surprised when I asked him whether I could portray him hanging on a wall. He was pleased to participate even though it was a difficult enterprise given his weight of 150kg.

I was very positively surprised about the readiness of older people to participate in my pictures because it was physically challenging to be set in scene. The oldest person, a lady, was 92 years old.

I also formed a very nice acquaintance with an elderly man whose profession is to manufacture umbrellas. It is a trade that was passed on through many generations within his family. After I took photos of him I visited him several times in his workshop which seemed to be from a different time. While sharing a glass of local wine he was telling me interesting insider stories of his city, Koblenz.

My favourite scene is an elderly lady with sunglasses, a tiger blouse and perfectly styled hair. She is hanging on a red wall in one of the picturesque alleys of Koblenz. She was very obvious within a tourist group that was taking a guided tour of the town. “You have to take a photo of this tiger-lady” I told myself. Without hesitation she agreed to the picture. We were finished within 2 minutes and just as quickly she disappeared amongst all the other tourists – there is no way I could invent a person like that!

At last I would like to talk about the implementation and the aesthetics. To create the impression of people hanging of a wall in a photorealistic way I could not get around digital manipulation. Whilst the series “Leichtkraft” didn’t need any editing (the effect was merely created through rotation) and the series “StadtLandFlucht” was only partly edited, the series “Passanten” had to be entirely digitally manipulated in order to implement my ideas. Each picture is compromised of three photos that were taken within a very short time from the same spot with a tripod. The final product is created from these 3 pictures in a very work-intensive process with Photoshop. My aim was to enhance the absurd moment of the motive through an “aesthetic of the casual”: surrounding and light make the picture look as if it came out of an everyday situation. The absurd moment is also enhanced through my decision to work with “normal” people rather than models: in the end old or overweight people who defy gravity and hang on a wall are a lot more comical than young, athletic models.

I often get asked how it was possible to hang the people on the walls. Then everyone is surprised about the digital manipulation as the picture shows no faults that would indicate it is a collage like for example a badly construed shadow. My requirements of a picture are only fulfilled when I manage to create these doubts in the viewer. Therefore I purposely work without complicated staged light situations as they destroy the natural character of the picture and create an artificial impression which would reduce the irritation that I wish to create: the observer would question the picture a lot less if he could readily see it was artificial.

Read the first part of the article: Leichtkraft and StadtLandFlucht by Ivo Mayr and visit Ivo Mayr website for more great content.

Ivo Mayr part1: Leichtkraft and StadtLandFlucht

Ivo Mayr — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 19:47:38 +0000

Text and photographs by Ivo Mayr.

Leichtkraft

When I decided for a career as a photographer I quickly realized that it is not the simple representation of the environment which appeals to me in photography but more so the possibility to create new pictures. In my artistic work I am primarily interested in playing with the viewing habits of the observer. In my productions I am showing people (mostly individuals) in urban and rural environments. In their absurd, often comical poses physical laws seem to be abandoned. Through the irritation this creates the observer is forced to look closer in order to understand the unusual picture.

The interest for the theme of anti-gravity originated in 2005. In that time I experimented a lot with the rotation of images and perspectives and discovered that a picture could have a totally different meaning by its rotation. However this only works with pictures that already differ from the observer´s expected perspective, for example a narrow part of a concrete wall. In a picture with clearly defined objects (house, car, tree etc) the observer will quickly discover the rotation because he knows intuitively where upside and downside should be.

It is from this idea of a simple rotation that the series “Leichtkraft” originated. For this series I took pictures of people in public urban space with lots of spatial elements and worked on poses that seemed to defy the rules of gravity once the picture was rotated. It can only be seen at second glance where the effects of gravity are apparent: for example the falling of the hair or clothes which provides a crucial hint.

StadtLandFlucht

In the series “StadtLandFlucht” I let the people float as opposed to the people in the “Leichtkraft” series who always have firm ground under their feet. If Leichtkraft was a rather formal and graphical piece of work you could say StadtLandFlucht is a deeper discussion of an experience that I certainly share with lots of others: the experience to live at a place far away from where I was born and raised – far away from the place that I would call Heimat (home).

The incentive to move far away was the perspective of a life in the big city which was so different from what I knew, more exciting, wider and bigger. I found a lot of these aspects but at the same time realised that I also miss a lot of other aspects of my home. In this way my feeling of home only developed when I left and has grown ever since. On the other hand I can always feel a clear estrangement when I return home. The location of home is different in reality to the one carried in memories and longings.

This mental state between having lost the roots and longing is in the centre of the series “StadtLandFlucht”. The work shows people from both worlds: Heimat is portrayed as rural and the distance as urban environment. The people at the place of their home are strongly connected with the ground. This is where they have their roots. On the other hand they still don’t seem to really belong to their home environment. Their poses and behaviour don’t match the landscape, they look like they are about to trip over or fall, lose the ground under their feet and appear completely displaced.

The people who are far away from home on the other hand are shown floating. They carry home as an idea within themselves and even a simple trigger is enough to lift them out of their environment. They appear to be lost in reverie and not belonging to the concrete of the city. They lack the roots and have no firm connection with the ground. So in all pictures, the rural as well as the urban ones, there is a common feeling of being in between and not belonging.

Read the second part of the article: Passanten, by Ivo Mayr and visit Ivo Mayr website for more great content.