By the Numbers
In 1951 the Palmer Show Card Paint Company introduced the first paint-by-numbers kits, which were sold under the marketing slogan, “Every Man a Rembrandt.” The kits, which were essentially coloring books for adults, sold by the millions. They came with a canvas, brushes and numbered jars of paint in various colors. The canvas was imprinted with the outline of a picture, sort of like a jigsaw puzzle, with every piece numbered. By filling in each numbered space with the corresponding numbered paint color, a picture gradually emerged: a landscape, a seascape, a Parisian street scene, a facsimile of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper” or “Mona Lisa.” It occurs to me that my digital camera works on more or less the same principle as those old paint-by-numbers kits. There are no spaces to fill in, of course, just numbered pixels — some 12.8 megapixels altogether (12.8 million pixels) in the “classic” Canon EOS 5D camera I’ve been using for the last 20 years or so. Those pixels are like the tiny dots you’ll see in a newspaper photograph, only much smaller. The setting I normally use is 300 dpi, or 90,000 pixels per square inch, much smaller than you can see with the naked eye. Each of those pixels is coded with a number using a binary system, essentially a string of zeroes and ones that translate into many different combinations of red, yellow and blue hues, as well as a grayscale of shades between black and white. Those zeros and ones add up to every image I capture with my digital camera and everything you’ll ever see on your computer or smart phone. While I’ve been content to put a frame around a small patch of reality to create my photographic landscapes, programmers have been building virtual worlds using massive strings of zeroes and ones. The purveyors of this enterprise boast they they are able to generate immersive photorealistic environments that are indistinguishable from physical reality. To date, this technology has mostly been used in online computer games. But it would be naive to assume the rapid advance of generative zeros and ones will end there, particularly if there are potential revenue streams involved. Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrum suggests we may already be living in a virtual world without realizing it. He reasons that computers will eventually be so powerful they will not only generate perfect facsimile worlds down to the last detail but also produce conscious beings to inhabit them. That, of course, may already have happened, and those conscious beings would be us. Bostrum argues that an advanced civilization might run large numbers of simulations of their own ancestors, meaning ourselves. This raises an intriguing question: How do we know we aren’t in one of those computer simulations? And how could we tell? I would start with the lint filter in my clothes dryer. If I open the door to my dryer and pull out the lint filter, I should expect to find lint in the filter with the look and feel of real clothes lint. Did some advanced generative AI program produce the simulated look and feel of lint? And if so, why? What about the soap powder and bleach on the shelf above the washer and clothes dryer? What about each grain of sugar in the sugar bowl on my kitchen table? Would each grain of sugar taste sweet to the tongue? What about the contents of every piece of junk mail and every bill stacked up next to my sugar bowl on the kitchen table? Not to mention the contents of every shelf and drawer in my kitchen, as well as every food item, fresh and frozen, in my refrigerator. And that’s just the stuff in my laundry nook and kitchen, to say nothing of the rest of the house and the whole of the world beyond, down to the last blade of grass and grain of sand. What possible motive can there be to write the trillions of lines of code necessary to create the illusion that some computer-generated facsimile of myself exists in a computer simulation of what I like to think of as the real world? If our world were generated by some sort of algorithm, we would expect to find a mathematical basis for its operations – which, of course, is exactly what we do find. Ancient astronomers noticed that celestial bodies, originally thought to be gods, moved across the sky in precise patterns. By the second century BCE, the Greeks had developed mathematical tables for predicting solar and lunar eclipses. They were the first to discern an underlying order and harmony to the universe that could be expressed numerically. “All is number,” proclaimed Pythagoras, a Greek philosopher best known as the discoverer of the Pythagorean theorem. He meant that in an absolute sense. He and his followers regarded themselves as a kind of sacred priesthood for whom numbers were divine, replacing the gods of the Greek pantheon. Little did Pythagoras realize how the maxim, “All is number,” might one day play out in scientific disciplines undreamed of in his day: to time and space, to the properties of light and gravity, to the laws of motion and thermodynamics; and to particles smaller than an atom. Even though elementary particles violate all the laws of classical physics, they still conform to the laws of probability. Rather than try to explain the often bizarre behavior of these particles, many quantum physicists subscribe to the “just shut up and do the math” school, which recognizes that quantum physics works, even if no one can quite explain why. As for any metaphysical implications, physicist Stephen Hawking sniffed, “Mysticism is for people who can’t do the math.” Even though just-do-the-math may be the rule in the scientific community, the broader implications have not gone entirely unrecognized. Albert Einstein, for example, wondered, “How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought, independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality?” Echoing Einstein, fellow physicist Paul Dirac asked, “Why is nature constructed along these lines?” He continued, “One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and he used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.” Dirac would no doubt have been horrified if anyone had taken this latter comment literally, since he was an avowed atheist. Dirac and many of his colleagues might fairly be categorized as latter-day Platonists, meaning that they believe mathematics occupies its own separate realm apart from the physical world, similar to Plato’s realm of perfect Forms. Chief among the current advocates of this view is MIT cosmologist Max Tegman, who believes our reality is based on mathematical structures that exist independently of physical reality. These modern-day Platonists probably would not go so far as to say that numbers were divine, as the Pythagoreans did. The universe is somehow constructed according to principles of advanced mathematics with no actual mathematician doing the computations. So we are left to wonder how these mathematical laws arose in the first place and how they operate upon the universe. Is it from outside the physical world, or are these laws somehow embedded in it? Meanwhile, in my small corner of the universe, Adobe Photoshop is now offering a “generative fill” tool that can be used to replace portions of a digital image or expand it with essentially made-up visuals. Photoshop has long been able to clean up minor defects in an image by painting over the affected area with pixels borrowed from the surrounding area. But Photoshop’s new tool is taking digital “paint by numbers” to a whole new level, making things up as you go along. Indeed, generative AI programs are already capable of creating photorealistic images without recourse to a camera or photographer. Flesh-and-blood landscape photographers are understandably nervous about this. But then again, if Bostrum is correct and we are all just “conscious” algorithms operating in a facsimile world, then the arrival of Photoshop’s generative fill tool is just one long strong of zero and ones worrying about another string of zeros and ones.
Abstraction
"Another World" by Eric Rennie (2018) My photograph, "Another World," is one of 35 images selected for a juried competition entitled Abstraction at the PhotoPlace Gallery in Middlebury, VT. The show, which was juried by visual artist Janet Jeffers, runs from August 2-23, 2024. One might think that a realistic medium like photography would not lend itself to abstractions. But in this instance I was able to produce an abstract image by photographing a spherical glass paperweight closeup using a macro lens. This particular image appears on the back of the exhibition catalogue. A Frame Around the Moment
"Railroad Underpass in Fog" by Eric Rennie “The whole genius of haiku is that they don’t mean anything,” wrote Frederick Buechner in an essay entitled “The Remarkable Ordinary” in a volume of the same name. Buechner gave as an example this little gem by the 17-century haiku master Matsuo Bashō: An old silent pond. Into the pond the frog jumps. Splash. Silence again. How could that haiku mean anything? It describes a small moment and is told just as quickly — all of 17 syllables and then it’s done. So what has transpired here? A haiku, Buechner says, “tries to put a frame around the moment.” Buechner starts small, with a simple haiku, but he then goes on to say that writing, art and music are all essentially trying to do the same thing: to put a frame around the moment. But why? Here Buechner makes a distinction between what the Greeks would characterize as chronostime, which can be measured by a ticking clock, and kairos time, or time as we experience it qualitatively. When a writer or artist or musician puts a frame around a moment, it is kairostime that he or she wishes to capture, as if to say, “Pay attention to this.” Buechner does not mention photography, but it immediately struck me that capturing the moment is precisely what I do as a fine-arts photographer. The cameras I use have all sorts of buttons and dials for adjusting the focus, focal length (depth of field) and such. But the adjustment I start with is the time of the exposure, which is calibrated in seconds or fractions of a second. Getting the right exposure depends on setting the proper shutter speed. Photographing a moving subject in low light without a flash is difficult, because the slower shutter speeds required to get the right exposure will result in a blurry image. Even a stationary subject may require a tripod at longer exposures due to camera shake if the shutter speed is slower than about 1/30th of a second. Getting the shutter speed wrong can result in an image that is overexposed or underexposed, depending on the level of ambient light. The way a fine arts photographer approaches his or her craft will differ from other types of photographers. A crime-scene photographer is interested in facts. A sports photographer is concerned with capturing action that is significant to the outcome of a game, akin to what photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson referred to as the “decisive moment.” A fine arts photographer is aiming at something closer to the visual equivalent of a haiku, a small moment that has no significance beyond itself. The exposure setting on my camera is calibrated in chronostime, just like the cameras used by a crime-scene photographer or a photo-journalist. But the moment I seek to put a frame around is an expression of kairostime. My favorite example is an image by a Swiss-born photographer named Robert Frank, whose collection, The Americans, remains one of the most iconic works of the postwar era. His subject matter was mostly small moments captured on the fly as he toured the country on a Guggenheim grant. The photograph I have in mind was a bit different. It was taken at the largest ticker-tape parade ever held in New York City, honoring General Douglas McArthur on his return home from Korea in 1951. The image was shot from well back in the crowd along the parade route, with no particulars of the occasion beyond a bright snow shower of ticker tape cascading from the office windows above. Several women hold up open compact cases, hoping to catch a glimpse of the motorcade in their mirrors. MacArthur isn’t even visible in the photograph, and yet there is no mistaking the excitement of the occasion. The moment Frank captured is pure kairos. “The photographed world stands in the same, essentially inaccurate relation to the real world as stills do to movies,” wrote the late culture critic Susan Sontag. “Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.” Sontag’s complaint was two-fold: first, that photographs present a slice of time, not a flow; and second, that they alter reality by putting a frame around it. “To photograph is to frame,” she wrote, “and to frame is to exclude.” You can certainly argue that Robert Frank’s image of the ticker-tape parade parade in New York City falsifies the event by excluding General McArthur. But then, the photograph isn’t about General McArthur. It’s about the women in the crowd excitedly holding up their compact mirrors to see over the crowd in a snow shower of ticker tape. It’s a small moment with a frame around it, and as such it is essentially no different from what any writer or artist or musician tries to do. All of us are in the business of saying, in effect, “Pay attention to this.” As a fine-arts photographer, I work in chronostime in hopes of capturing kairostime. And If the photo gods are smiling, the moment I put a frame around will be timeless.
Fullness of Time
"Flyaway Hair" by Eric Rennie (2013) English has only one word for time, plus many words for the increments thereof (hour, day, year). The ancient Greeks had two words for time: chronos for time we can keep track of with a clock or calendar and kairos for what the poet William Blake once characterized as “eternity in an hour” — time that we lose track of altogether. It is this seeming paradox of timeless time that marks every manifestation of the divine. We are now so steeped in a sequential understanding of time that it may come as a surprise that it wasn’t always this way. Indeed, as developmental psychologist Jean Piaget and others have documented, a child’s basic concept of time — chronos time — is not innate but is learned through his or her interactions with the world. A small child only gradually comes to understand there is any other time besides right now. My then 2-1/2-year-old granddaughter, for example, learned to calibrate the passage of days as the number of “sleeps” — as in, “Grandma and Papa are coming to visit in two more sleeps.” As it happens, aborigines in central Australia also mark time in “sleeps”; they say they will return to a place after so many sleeps, or nights. The language of the Amazonian Amondawa tribe, which had no contact with the outside world prior to 1986, includes no words for time or increments of time, such as “month” or “year.” Hunter-gatherer tribes generally might be aware of seasonal changes but, unlike sedentary farmers, they are not involved with annual cycles of planting and harvesting. They therefore have no need to mark time in longer increments. When our early ancestors needed to keep track of human activity beyond a single day, they looked to the night sky. Neolithic bone carvings and cave art appear to show the waxing and waning of the moon in what may be the first primitive calendars that could be used for annual cycles of planting and harvesting. Ancient civilizations — among them the Mayans, Babylonians and Greeks — were careful observers of heavenly bodies and developed methods for predicting solar and lunar eclipses. The invention of sundials and water clocks enabled the ancients to divide the days into hours. This was often viewed as a mixed blessing by those who found their lives were no longer regulated by the sun but instead by these implacable man-made devices. In a speech attributed to the Roman playwright Plautus, a character exclaims, “The gods damn that man who first discovered the hours, and— yes— who first set up a sundial here, who’s smashed the day into bits for poor me!” The progress of chronos time from then until now has mostly been one of smashing the day into smaller and smaller bits. Hours became minutes became seconds became nanoseconds — each step made possible by advances in technology. Medieval monks invented mechanical clocks because they needed a way to keep track of time in order to pray before the sun came up. Clocks were soon installed in bell towers to regulate the commercial life in the towns. Then railroad conductors and shop foremen began carrying pocket watches to keep things running on time. The technologist Lewis Mumford wrote that “the clock, not the steam-engine, is the key machine of the modern industrial age.” He noted that “time-keeping passed into time-serving and time-accounting and time-rationing.” Consequently, Mumford said, “Eternity ceased gradually to serve as the measure and focus of human actions.” We are so steeped in chronos time that we can only understand eternity as unending clock time. But we are now in the realm of kairos time, which is calibrated not in hours or seconds or nanoseconds but in moments. A moment, by definition, has no duration; it may last seconds or even hours, as such things are reckoned by the clock. It is a moment in which we lose track of time altogether. It is time as a small child understands it, a kind of unending now. Kairos has its root in the ancient Greek word for the exact right moment in which an archer releases his arrow in order to find its target. Similarly, photographers like me refer to the “decisive moment” in capturing reality on the fly. An example would be my image above, taken of my then seven-year-old granddaughter Alex and a friend at a playground in Brooklyn. There is no way you can pose such a picture. It's like stalking wildlife in their native habitat. You've got to track your prey and hope you catch them at just the right moment -- a matter of dumb luck much of the time, Even though the camera’s exposure settings are precisely calibrated in seconds or fractions a second, the actual taking of a picture is done in kairos time. The iconic street photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, who coined the term “decisive moment,” noted, “There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera.” In that moment, which the photographer Walker Evans referred to as a “flash of mind,” color, form, texture, light and shadow come together just so to capture the image. Click! If everything goes just so, you have succeeded in putting a frame around a small moment of kairos time. To retrace our steps to when chronos time first gained traction in the realm of kairos time, it was when medieval monks began using mechanical clocks to wake up in the predawn hours to pray. The irony is that they did this to sanctify time. Western religions have long sought to sanctify time by setting aside specified periods for prayer.· This began with the Jewish Sabbath on the seventh day of each week to observe the day on which the Lord rested from his labors in creating the world. Priests in the temple were also commanded to make ritual sacrifices each morning and evening, which evolved into offering prayers at set times every day. These practices were incorporated into the early life of the Christian church and later developed by monastic orders into an elaborate round of daily prayers known as the canonical hours. In sanctifying our hours and days, by whatever means, we are anchoring time in the still wider framework of eternity. Eternity is not so much timelessness but rather the still space in which time is contained, along with everything that transpires in time. The canonical hours are an invitation to plant oneself in this wider space, to be reminded that we are in the world but not of it. Eternity is not grasped in the passage of time but in a single moment that opens before us like a revelation. There is no longer past or future, but only right now, and the realization that “right now” is all there is.
Submerged Sunrise of Wonder
Illuminated Dandelion 1 by Eric Rennie Abraham Lincoln once quipped that God must really love the poor, because he made so many of them. The same might be said of dandelions, which brighten suburban lawns unbidden every spring. Dandelions are classified as weeds, perhaps because they require no cultivation and are not easily eradicated. But what did they do to deserve such ignominy? They have undeniable aesthetic appeal, albeit short-lived — hardly disqualifying in itself. Plus, dandelions are edible, exceptionally rich in vitamins and minerals, and can be made into wine. They have been used in traditional Chinese medicine for over a thousand years, and they remain a staple of various herbal remedies around the world. Their lineage is impeccable, having been brought over on the Mayflower for their medicinal properties. So, apart from their unfortunate tendency to trespass on well-manicured suburban lawns, what’s not to like? Small wonder that the essayist nonpareil G.K. Chesterton used the dandelion as emblematic of what he called the “submerged sunrise of wonder” in life. A convert to Roman Catholicism, Chesterton was not afraid, as he put it, “to write against the Decadents and the Pessimists who ruled the culture of the age.” He stated that “the primary problem for me… was the problem of how men could be made to realize the wonder and splendor of being alive, in environments which their own daily criticism treated as dead-alive, and which their imagination had left for dead.” Chesterton seized on the lowly dandelion precisely because it was despised, then held it up as a sacred object. In his autobiography, he called attention to “the strange and staggering heresy that a human being has a right to dandelions; that in some extraordinary fashion we can demand the very pick of all the dandelions in the garden of Paradise; that we owe no thanks for them at all and need feel no wonder at them at all; and above all no wonder at being thought worthy to receive them.” He added, “The only way to enjoy even a weed is to feel unworthy even of a weed." As a landscape photographer, I generally do not seek out sweeping vistas. My subjects are usually much closer at hand, including objects I can pick up and hold in my hand. I often use a macro lens, which allows me to get in close, sometimes only inches away. When your subject fills your viewfinder, it makes no difference whether there is only one of them in the world or dozens sprinkled across your front yard. You are forced to see it for what it is, shorn of any context. And if you are paying the least attention, more often than not you will be astonished. One morning some years ago I was out for a walk when a Bible verse came to me out of the blue: "What God has made clean, do not call common." The verse in context applied to Jewish dietary laws. As an Episcopalian. I am not bound by such dietary restrictions – or at least none that my doctor hasn’t recommended to keep my cholesterol and glucose levels down. What could this verse possibly mean? I had been walking along a stretch of road that skirted a golf course near where I live. It was early in the morning, and the sun had lit up some wildflowers growing by the side of the road. I stopped to look, momentarily transfixed by their beauty. I made a mental note of where to find the flowers again, so I could come back to photograph them. They were just common wildflowers growing by the side of the road. And yet, to borrow a phrase from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, “Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” I realized in that moment the Bible verse that had popped in head was more about what I should be seeing than what I should be eating. Chesterton had seized on the common dandelion as emblematic of all that was despised in the world. But he might just as easily have held up the common rung of humanity, many of them poor and despised. Lincoln was right in saying that God must love the poor because he made so many of them. And he commands us to love them as well. For starters, we must not call them common. We must learn to see them for who they are, creatures made in God’s image.
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