Curriculum Materials: Amazing Animals in
Art
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Jane Tuckerman Essays: Questions: |
Technique
A photograph's ultimate appearance is affected by a wide array of technical variables such as the focal length of the camera's lens, f-stop, which controls the amount of light hitting the film inside the camera, film processing, and technical decisions in printing the final image. The questions raised by Tuckerman's perplexing photograph are answered, in part, by the artist's use of infrared film, which gives the photograph unusual pictorial effects and contributes to the SURREAL mood of the image. With infrared film, trees and grass appear white, while sky and water record as dark. The film produces an overall grainy texture as well, which enhances its dreamlike quality.
Infrared film's special quality is its sensitivity to infrared radiation, which is in the spectrum of light but is not visible to the human eye. While common photographic film records a scene in TONALITIES that approximate visual perception, infrared film records a scene with a shift in tonalities, which can suggest an unreal, fantasylike state.
Available commercially since the 1930s, infrared film was first used for scientific purposes. It has a wide range of applications, including use in criminology as an investigative tool, in ophthalmology and other medical fields, in the exploration of space, and in cinematography, where it has been used to create special effects.
Tuckerman is attracted to the intriguing effects infrared film produces as well as to its unpredictable character. About the use of infrared, she notes:
There is a gossamer illusionism in photographs taken with infrared film, not unlike the snatches of images one conjures while day-dreaming. . . . One does not know whether this mirage-like image is a recording of the present or a manifestation of something that happened either years before or will transpire at a future date.1
Another variable that contributes to the appearance of this photograph is shutter speed, which controls the amount of time that film in the camera is exposed to light. A fast shutter speed has the ability to "stop action", freezing things in motion at the moment the photographer takes the picture. A slower shutter speed increases blurring and accentuates the feeling of motion. The outlines of the large bird in the upper left of Tuckerman's photograph are blurry because the camera's shutter speed was too slow to "stop the action" of the bird's rapid movement. This same bird and the one on the right edge of the picture appear almost as silhouettes because of their close proximity to the camera lens.
1 Tuckerman wrote this statement for the exhibition catalogue Invisible Light, organized by Robert Cartmell for the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, 1980.
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