With a wink of an eye.

[1]

You may not have heard the term "lenticular" before, but I am sure you have come across these images many times. It is difficult not to notice them--and that's their main purpose. Lenticulars are images that contain some kind of eye-catching animation or 3D perspective, or even both. They have been stuck on cereal boxes, department store displays, baseball cards, postcards, buttons, rings and more recently on CD covers and mouse pads. The lenticular process has usually been associated with silly and kitschy images, which might be the reason why it has never appeared worthy of any serious research. In spite of all the silliness surrounding its images, the lenticular process is actually quite intriguing, especially when used with photography.

Consider, for example, my lenticular photographic postcard of a "winking girl." It comprises a three-quarter-view portrait of a blue-eyed blond, presumably a model, who doesn't seem to wear anything but a necklace. Her nakedness, though, is well camouflaged by a veil of long curly hair falling on her shoulders. But this portrait is far from a depiction of innocent, pure and angel-like beauty. There is something highly erotic about it, something almost pornographic. It could be the woman's daring look into the camera and her open mouth. It could be the color scheme, dominated by yellows and reds--the colors of fire, heat and passion. It could be the soft bright light evenly illuminating the woman's entire face and neck, a lighting that reveals all and hides nothing. It could also be the necklace, so prominent in this photograph through its disproportionately large size and dark color. The necklace hangs down, pointing to the woman's body outside of the frame of the photograph. It points, in a way, to her breas ts, hips and buttocks--to those body parts that are circular and spherical, and thus similar in shape to the most visible parts of the necklace. The woman's hair functions in a very similar way. On one hand, it is the woman's only cover, but on the other, it's something visibly close to her naked body. The hair around the woman's face is fairly straight. It turns into serpentines only when it approaches her neckline and goes completely wild when it touches her upper body. The curls are there to adorn and accentuate the woman's neckline; they are there to hide but at the same time reveal her nakedness. The woman's hair also Invites the viewer to look outside the bottom edge of the picture frame, to look somewhere where the hair ends and where the woman's body reflects the curvatures of the curls.

But this is not how you first react to this postcard. With all the visual trickery it offers, it doesn't really give you much opportunity to think and analyze it in such detail. What this postcard does first is bedazzle you with the illusion of three-dimensionality. It is this state of heightened reality that your eyes first react to. The woman on the postcard appears as if she was physically there. Her body has volume and depth, and you seem to notice these qualities first, before you even realize what you are really looking at.

The visual enticement doesn't end with the three-dimensionality of this archetypal blue-eyed blond. There is something else here, something even more surprising. When you move around the postcard, or if you tilt it in your hand, the image moves. The woman winks an eye and smiles, and as long as you keep moving your head, or keep tilting the postcard from side to side, the blond will keep sending you her seductive wink with a smile.

What could be the function of this interactive animated postcard of a blue-eyed blond winking in 3D? I think its content and visual effects are meant to create a spectacle. The postcard is supposed to please the viewers' eyes; it is not for the stimulation of the mind. We are not supposed to think and analyze it, we are supposed to look and enjoy what we are seeing. And we will enjoy it because it gets us a bit closer to the fulfillment of our fantasy that one day we will be able to "grasp and reproduce reality in all its aspects and in all its spatial and temporal dimensions." (1) Ever since the beginning of photography we have been trying to make it look more real and lively. We added color to it, we added a stereoscopic sense of depth, and eventually we managed to set it into motion. The lenticular process is striving to do the same. By adding a third dimension of space and the fourth dimension of time to a photograph, it tries to create a more "truthful" representation of reality, it tries to capture and recreate a fragment of real life and prevent it from turning into the past.

But no matter how hard the lenticular tries to keep us in the here-and-now of the spectacle, the postcard image already points to the past; it simply doesn't look contemporary. The woman's hairstyle and jewelry bring to mind the fashion of the 1960s and 70s, which is also the time when lenticular postcards, and especially lenticular postcards of winking girls, were most popular. One could also argue that, with the latest comeback of the fashion of the '60s and the '70s, the woman on the postcard looks very up-to-date. Even if this was the case, the woman still uses the fashion of the past to define her appearance in the present. The revival of such fashions is an obvious act of nostalgia; it is an act of longing for the flowery, brightly colored past, the past of polyester and platform shoes, the past of hippies and the Vietnam War. I too feel a dose of nostalgia when I look at the winking girl postcard. It reminds me of my own childhood in Poland and a similar postcard of a winking geisha, which I used to tr easure as a young girl. Its vivid colors, amusing visual trickery, and the charm of a lady from an unknown and far-away country contrasted with the gloomy, well-known and very close reality of communist Poland.

Even though the lenticular process is supposed to be a closely guarded secret, there are some principles that are fairly well known and quite easy to understand. Lenticular images are made of a series of source images that are cut into narrow strips and then interlaced. Such a composite image is then attached to a sheet of plastic with a series of parallel cylindrical lenses. They focus your eyes on different parts of the print underneath and magnify the strips, which your brain then glues together to create a complete image. When you change the viewing angle relative to the image, a different part of the interlaced image is revealed. And if the new image is different from the one you just saw, then this transition will create an illusion of motion--an animation. In order to create the illusion of three-dimensionality, the lenticular process uses the same principles as used in stereography. The lenses direct each eye separately to a slightly different version of the same photograph, each of them taken from a slightly different angle. (2) In the postcard of the winking girl, which is both three-dimensional and animated, the lenses perform these two functions simultaneously: they constantly guide the eyes to the stereo pairs of either the woman with open eyes and open mouth or the woman winking and smiling.

At first I thought that the winking-girl postcard was created from four interlaced images: a stereoscopic pair of images with the woman when her eyes are open and her lips parted, and another pair when she smiles and winks. Apparently, the postcard is made of 16-18 images, or 8-9 stereographic pairs. (3) The reason for this might be that the lenses have many distinct viewing angles, and every distinct viewing angle needs to have a separate source image, even if some of the images are the same. But when you slowly roll the postcard to the side, you will notice that it is not a simple two-phase flip animation between an image of a woman with a wink and without, that there are in fact many transitional stages in which one image dissolves into the other. The lenticular process does not render this effect. What you see there are transitional images prepared separately and then interlaced with other source images to create an illusion of a smooth and natural-looking transition from an open eye to a wink and from an open mouth to a smile.

The invention of the lenticular process cannot be credited to a single creator. It is a medium that emerged as a result of many small inventions and constant improvements of previously developed technology. (4) Commercial production of lenticular images didn't start until the 19505 when certain developments in plastics allowed for the creation of plastic lens sheets with good optical characteristics. But the lenticular process wasn't perfected and pushed to its limits until quite recently, when advances in computer hardware and digital imaging software made it possible to create very densely interlaced images. (5) It is also thanks to recent advancements in computer technologies that the printing of lenticular images became relatively quick and cost-effective, and it is now offered as a service by numerous photo labs.

Why should we occupy ourselves with the study of a lenticular postcard of a winking girl? Well, for a start, the lenticular process creates very interesting tensions within the medium of photography, especially if the subject is as banal and kitschy as in this postcard. The lenticular process forces photography to cross its own boundaries, it takes it to an area where photography's stature and identity Is questioned. The winking-girl postcard consists of multiple images, which my brain recreates from parallel lines. It is just like watching television, with the only difference being that here I cannot just passively sit and watch, but I have to move in relation to the postcard or move the postcard in relation to me. Does such an image still belong to the domain of photography or is it already cinema? Is it a still image, or a motion picture? Lenticular photography escapes any such rigid categories. It exists somewhere between stillness and motion, between photography and film. It constantly oscillates between Roland Barthes's "being-there' and "having-been-there." (6)

Lenticular photography also has many qualities that are foreign to the photography known from our standard photo-histories. The winking-girl postcard is a flat image that behaves like a sculpture; you need to walk around it, or turn it in front of your eyes, to be able to see all its different sides, or, more specifically, all its source images. Hence, it creates a very interesting relationship with the viewer. The winking-girl postcard can be fully revealed only to those who are willing to participate in the spectacle, to those who will tilt the image in a proper way, or move their head around it. In animated lenticulars, the viewer takes control of what he/she sees; it's the viewer who decides when to start or end the animation. The viewer is also in control of the speed by which the images change. The viewer interacting with the animated lenticular is as much a recipient as a co-creator of the spectacle.

A winking eye has been the favorite subject of lenticulars since the very beginning. (7) A wink of an eye is a gesture coded with multiple meanings; it also seems to be the easiest bodily sign to simulate through animation. Besides being an obvious sign of seduction, a wink of an eye could also be read as a self-reflexive gesture on the part of the lenticular image. It could refer to all the eyes participating in the production of this photographic spectacle: the eye of the woman in front of the camera, the eye of the camera, the eye of the photographer and finally the eye of the viewer. The opening and closing of an eye in a wink is like the closing and opening of the camera's shutter; it is like photographic seeing and not seeing, which in the lenticular image happens not only at the moment of picture taking, but also at the moment of viewing. The lenticular lens makes certain images appear and others disappear; like the eyelid, it controls what we see and don't see.

There is also a bit of humor and irony in this lenticular wink of an eye. Lenticulars let us perceive stereographic depth and motion, they add a third and fourth dimension to photographic reality, and yet at the same time they admit, with a wink of an eye, that it is all a part of a joke between the viewer and the lenticular. Thus when the animated blue-eyed blond in 3D sends us a wink, it is not only a sign of seduction and an invitation to participate in a sexual act, but also an acknowledgment that it is all a part of a game between us and her, because all we can really have is a pin-up postcard of a winking girl pretending to be somebody real.

NOTES

(1.) Hubert Damisch, "The Magic or 3-D" in Francoise Reynaud, Catherine Tambrun and Kim Timby, eds., Paris in 3D: From Stereography to Virtual Reality 1850-2000 (Paris, France: Booth-Clibborn Editions, 2000), p. 37.

(2.) See Paul Bourke, "Generating Autostereoscopic Lenticular Images" at www.astronomy.swin.edu.au/pbourke/stereographics/lenticular/ and Matt Lake, "An Art Form That's Precise But Friendly Enough to Wink" In The New York Times (May 20, 1999), also at www.depthography.com/times.html.

(3.) I received this information from Lantor, Ltd., a U.S. distributor of the winking girl postcards produced by Toppan Top Stereo: www.lantorltd.com/html/winking.asp.

(4.) The lenticular process is based on two optical methods: a parallax barrier and an integral photography. For a technical description of these methods see Takanori Okoshi, Three-Dimensional Imaging Techniques (New York: Academic Press, 1976), pp. 10-28. A Franco-centric version of the history of lenticular photography can be found in Michel Frizot, "Line Screen Systems" and "Lenticular Screen Systems and Maurice Bonnet's Process" in Paris in 3D, pp. 153-157 and pp. 171-191.

(5.) Anthony Munn, the founder of Deptography, a New York-based studio specializing in the production of high-end lenticulars, claimed in an interview I conducted with him on November 16, 2001, that he pushed the lenticular process to its maximum capacity. Munn is capable of incorporating 36 frames of film (an equivalent of 1.5 sec. of animation) by creating; "a continuous photo smear across the diameter of the lenticular lens... Instead of multiple interlaced images, there is a smooth transition between frames, which Munn calls a 'time wipe smear'," a quote from Brenda Maher's "3D Mail in Motion" in Target Marketing (December 2000), p. 5.

(6.) Roland Barthes, "Rhetoric of the Image" in Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 977), 2. 45.

(7.) Many lenticular studios still use a winking eye as their company's logo. e.g. 3-D Images Ltd (www.stereoscopy.com/3d-images) or Depthography (www.depthography.com).

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[1] Photographer Unknown, lenticular postcard of a winking girl, c. 1960-70s. The sequence shows three separate views that reveal the transformation taking place. The visible image is determined by the position of the viewer In relation to the postcard.

MALGORZATA MACHNIEWSKA is in the Ph.D. Program in Art History at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York. Her areas of interest are photography and digital media.