Mingcheng Song

The six image prompts presented at the panel.

In 2001, Susan Sontag joined E.O. Wilson and Roger Penrose to discuss images and meaning in science at MIT. The three panelists were asked to compose ten minuets worth of free response to a set of images, depicting various scientific phenomenons. Roger Penrose went first, unsure of the assignment. He went over each image, briefly describing their supposed themes, and tossed on top a few words of his own reflection in that general field. Following Roger Penrose, Susan Sontag pointed out the way in which he was talking about those images was effectively treating them as representatives. The picture of an atomic bomb reminded him of the ethical responsibility of scientists, the picture of earth rising as seen from the moon reminded him of questions of space travel and so on. In each case, the images became the conduits where the eyes lingered very little. She continued to add that, in fact, the images' celebrity, as well as their lack of connection to each other, exactly encouraged the sort of shallow thinking that diverted attention from the visual--the quality that separated images from text.

Susan Sontag really stuck a chord with me here. When I first saw the images, they really just seemed like they were picked right from my middle school science text book. You can't say that they aren't compiling images, the kind of ubiquity they achieve even among the "science illiterates" is precisely because of their appeals, such as their comprehensiveness, precision, and novelty at the time. Maybe such effectiveness is to the detriment of an image's longevity, especially when it's designed as an aid to some abstract ideas. When you get the point across the first time, no more "work"(looking) is subsequently required to communicate. It is then the image becomes a representative of the thing itself.

I'm trying to think about the implication it has when an image isn't didactic or illustrative but instead is operating in relation to other images. A chimera of sorts that's capable of channeling certain responses but is difficult to name. Maybe I just inadvertently described something more adjacent to "aesthetic" or "style" in the process of image-making. In a recent application, I introduced myself as a storyteller, and now I'm beginning to think about what it means to construct a narrative through a still image. Does it lose its potency when a reader thumbs through all its pages? To think the man in white shirt with arms raised at gun point in Third of May, to think the horror in the half severed head in Judith Beheading Holofernes, they draw you to relive the moment every time. Perhaps snippets and narratives are not one and the same, the former prompts you to ask questions within the image itself. There are more that I'm struggling to elaborate at the moment, but I'm certainly more alert to how and what I'm sampling in an image. I don't want to be bogged down by having to justify or imbue meanings to each and every source, that seems entirely like another style of working. However, I'm slow to get a handle  on the chemistry between the many decontextualized ingredients that often find their way to my screen. It seems like that chemistry, a certain emotional charge, is core to the composition, though I end up telling the more literal tale when approached with the dreadful question of what is it about.