Picturing Reality
Translating everything into photos imposes a strange way of mediating the world. It creates a time delay to experiencing the past. Makes everything that you are currently living into an experience best and fully enjoyed in the future. It reflects a perspective on the world that accumulates and catalogues experiences like a stamp collection, rather than experiencing something for its own goodness or ends. Photography as a substitute for memory treats every moment as unique, but then tries to capture them for memories again in the future.
Time plays an interesting role in photography as a practice. In some senses, photographs develop a sense of a time and place, but also interrupt the event, displacing it. What makes an experience in the world different from a dream of the world is the experience of bringing people into conflict with a variety of indescribable, and to some degree unstoppable, forces. Resulting from this is life, experiencing, the feeling of living. The interaction between one and the many, thought and bodies constructs experience. Photography deconstructs those forces and that moment by freezing them and examining them under the magnifying glass of time. By making sense of things through the lens of the future (or past, depends on your perspective) the cataloging of experience takes on new force. By demonstrating and fully investigating every part of the world through a photograph, it is nothing more than a thought, a self-contained dream of reality frozen in its own economy of emotion.
Photography also messes with your head, by tying your self-image to an externally verifiable referent. Your outwardly projected notion of self comes from a buildup of history and memory; sticks and stones make your ‘bones’ by subjecting you to trials and errors of life. Imaging technology ties that self-construction to something found external to memory. In developing images, a new type of person develops: one subjected to manipulations of publication, subject to the development of a referent (you, nominally) beyond immediate control. Self image develops in the hands and time of people to which you have no direct access, the images return like a one hour photo: something new where there once was nothing, an image where a tree once was.
Duncan
Time plays an interesting role in photography as a practice. In some senses, photographs develop a sense of a time and place, but also interrupt the event, displacing it. What makes an experience in the world different from a dream of the world is the experience of bringing people into conflict with a variety of indescribable, and to some degree unstoppable, forces. Resulting from this is life, experiencing, the feeling of living. The interaction between one and the many, thought and bodies constructs experience. Photography deconstructs those forces and that moment by freezing them and examining them under the magnifying glass of time. By making sense of things through the lens of the future (or past, depends on your perspective) the cataloging of experience takes on new force. By demonstrating and fully investigating every part of the world through a photograph, it is nothing more than a thought, a self-contained dream of reality frozen in its own economy of emotion.
Photography also messes with your head, by tying your self-image to an externally verifiable referent. Your outwardly projected notion of self comes from a buildup of history and memory; sticks and stones make your ‘bones’ by subjecting you to trials and errors of life. Imaging technology ties that self-construction to something found external to memory. In developing images, a new type of person develops: one subjected to manipulations of publication, subject to the development of a referent (you, nominally) beyond immediate control. Self image develops in the hands and time of people to which you have no direct access, the images return like a one hour photo: something new where there once was nothing, an image where a tree once was.
Duncan
posted by Duncan at 12:11 PM
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