It’s interesting, I had gotten to a point where I stopped taking photos. I was afraid, even when my eye was not gazing through the lens. I was afraid that I was beginning to see the world as if it were a photograph. Thoughts like, “if only I had my camera,” or, “that would make such a pretty photo” whisping through my head constantly. I began to not bring my camera with me places, or at the very least I would stuff it all the way to the bottom of my bag. I didn’t want another layer of opaque gauze between me and “it”. I didn’t want to see the world as even more a simulacrum, the glowing trace becoming ever fainter in my eyes. Eventually I almost completely ceased taking photos. Months passed. I lived, perhaps. I existed, at least. I began to pay less attention to the visual. An erring motor, the night cries of birds and owls stilling my body. Living with eyes open and eyes closed. As it always is when you compromise. It would be like that whether you chose one or the other.
Now, this episode is in my past. Now, my trouble with the visual world and the photograph reaching, not a conclusion, but a resting point, I continue to take photographs whenever the urge strikes me.
Image(ined)
Just as our perception of the written word warps the way we think, our perception of the image warps the way that we see (though the movement probably goes both ways, senses all clanging off each other and the world, the twisted feedback loop that is life). In my movement away from academic modes of viewing art (which have been invaluable in a training of my perceptual faculties and undoubtedly still, and always will, color my seeing), I have found a new way of seeing images (a feeling like catching a strangers eye), and I propose that it is due to the ubiquity of the image today. Everyday I am continuously bludgeoned with the image. I crane my neck as if under barrage. I move in a fog. I see the world as if composed (I soon am led to believe that I compose the world). The screen you read this on is framed after all. But sometimes a light cuts through; the fog thins out.
It is probably unique to each person, but there are certain images that seem to alight upon us — images that arrests the seer, images that strike at some place in the body (the pupils, the diaphragm) — but that is nothing new. What is new is the world we live in, the constant flow of information. We see so many images that time ceases to be experienced as a constant flow. We chop it into moments and experience each as an image, sitting with each moment for however long seems necessary and natural. Something like the stage sets of The Color of Pomegranates; life distilled into an aesthetic-material haze. Anything the eye experiences, there is never space that does not belong to the image. There are no gaps between sensation, images harkening from Riemann sums towards a more advanced calculus as they flit past the eyes. The once strong borders between the world and the image have come to blur. There is no more need to talk of images as simulacra for reality, we see all on the same plane.
