Framing Waves

I’m primarily concerned with the idea of light and the way that the mechanism and body function in cahoots with the context of subject and light – as ways that the photographic image concerns perception and perspective. These are some of the bigger issues that I'm grappling with as I finish my paper.

Starting with Cache, he defines three formal elements of image: inflection, vector, and frame. For my discussion, the two parts I am most interested in are the vector and the frame and the relationship between the two. Specifically, what the frame consists of and how it catches the inflection and vector of wavelengths of light. To begin with the vector: if, as Cache states, “All landscapes can be described as hills and valleys, and time is said to flow” (44), it might be best to also view the vector-based wavelength of light as that philosophical extension of a full spectrum of a vector. (The photograph might link here to Bergson’s philosophy of the void: The image as a created void in the wavelength of light. Is this similar to the Eastern idea of the void, the state of all existence? If so, the photograph, the image, the void in the wave of light, should hold an embodied understanding of the spectrum of life. A photograph as a “dharma,” a point-instance of enlightenment.) This has been an issue I'm dealing with and trying to figure out.

Cache goes on to discuss the ideas of framing in the cinema, stating “The framing of emptiness within the fullness of light defines the screen…It is nether frame nor screen, but a passage from the screen to the frame; it is the architecture of the cinematographical mechanism that has become so crucial in our times" (65). What I take from this is that cinema has provided the ability for the image to link more clearly to a wavelength but still stays constant within a frame, delimited in what Hansen labels “the body.” Following this, Cache’s reading of Bergson’s concept of the image that “provides for convergence between a philosophy of the full – all images are something with a philosophy of the void – everything in only an image” might possibly support this light wavelength hypothesis. But what is the function of the present, of the viewing of the image? What is the relationship between the image, the present and reality?

Deleuze might best be employed in his explanation of how "Bergson was here working out new philosophical concepts relating to the theory of relativity: he thought relativity involved a conception of time which it didnt' itself bring out, but which was up to philosophy to construct." I think that the ideas of relativity come into play here as well, but as a wavelength more than as a frame ... unless the wavelength of light is to be "framed" only in relative terms and contexts.

--Mike vW