November 20, 2016

How do your view yourself. A participant in your life or an outsider looking into your living moments.  Do you equate living with posting your life for all to see as an extension of who you are or who you want to be?  Is being viewed by others, the real manipulation of our growing shallow presence.

The image trend I see is for quick pics and quicker posts. This is not photography in a real sense of the word. It is becoming a life sentence of performances, your life is a screen play, a story board of inconsequential moments that have dried up your imagination. Instead of living your life you are selling your life through make believe realities that have nothing to do with real connections with others and especially with yourself.

Do you feel posting on corporate media sites is an act of renewal of your quest to create something meaningful through focus and awareness of your surroundings and connections that are calling for your attention.

The act of posting is not a purposeful response to your moments. Commercials of ourselves have become the new reality of our lives. And we don't even get paid to produce them, we give them away. I think by that very act of giving them away you have demeaned your life as trivial and have accomplished the ultimate media scam of crowd sourcing and free material that they then can mine for your ad enjoyment. A constant beat of buy, buy and buy some more.

Social media introduced us into the entertainment and commercialization of our lives for profit motif.  Not profit for us but for the information they gather on your wants and obsession and exploit those with targeted ads of stuff you would never care about if you were living your purpose and in tune to the intended distraction that inhibit your growth towards the rewards of self sufficiency and your true voice, your calling.

Corporate media's feel good moments and then quickly back to an over abundance of violence and suspicions that crime is always lurking in you present moments, keeps us in a circle the herd mentality.

Your precious moments are now overwhelmed with the fears that corporate media bombard you with every second of the day.  Is this a means to militarize the police under our noses to inhibit the true voices to surface?

Social media is undermining unique individual perceptions that flow naturally between nature and an open mind. Our differences are being homogenized into structured imitations.  Our images are beginning to look all the same, our feelings are being surrounded by look alike ads for instructions on how we must respond to external stimulus. Our vocabulary is diminishing as we use short letters and symbols to express our "feelings" as if that can sum up a human beings moments in their time line. Symbols are the collective media presence. They reduce our inquisitive nature and teach us to live on the surface of their created reality and don't even attempt to dig deeper underneath the false facade of their wealth and power.

Relationships between me and my subject.  If we only see through organized categories we loose the ability to be open ourselves to new ways to see and live.

When creating images you must get out of your tendency of abstract specialization that deter you from connecting your internal vision with your outer presence and then with your intended subject.

Don't rush along the outskirts of image making, immerse yourself into the flow of your time and interconnectedness that brings forth a worthy unique expression that seems to magically happen when you are listing to your inner voice say, "calm down and wait, this is your place and your subject will be here presently."

We all can shoot randomly and come up with acceptable images that fit the uniformity of our costume lives.  And with that uniformity there is a growing fear to be unique in your expressions.

Connecting with purpose and clarity in this moment gives you a certainty of expression.  By being present your are opening your mind to the moment and not the description of your moments.

If you over think a subject, bringing thoughts that hinder your natural immediate response to your theme, you will miss that split second composition that ties your creativity to the image just made.

If you are not in the same playing field with your subject, there is an imbalance an untethering of willful purpose that makes your attention disconnect from the visual clues of composition.

Social media puts importance on your posts that give them information on your background for more ads and on any conversations between you and others that gives them insights on marketing strategies.  If we would use those same techniques with ourselves and begin to understand what drives us we might break free from the trap of media's corrosive analysis of our humanity. for profit only.

We have to get back to one on one conversations, be present for others just as you need to be fully engaged and present when creating images.

When you are communicating through a mechanical device you are removed from the real world. Reality now has a short sighted vision, a narrow path to follow, which excludes the environment you are in by demanding your full focus to be looking at whats on your hand held screen.

Instead of an intimate look at the small details of nature that make up our own lives we sacrifice those connections by allowing a device to become a barrier to seeing and a barrier to living a connected life in the real world of eye contact with others and your individual surroundings.

Our sense of being present, a feeling of your will of purpose will begin your journey to better photographs.

When making photos you must immerse yourself with your subjects in moments that last.  These durations build a relationship of trust.  If you allow ego to become the dominant force in this relationship then you will only express the commercial side of your mental makeup.

Photography takes time to create an image worthy of your inner being.

November 20, 2016

Joel Meyerowitz was asked, "What do you hope for when you say the work teaches you?"

"Well, you hope that by working-working out, working toward that-you'll produce an opening, you'll stumble through your senses upon a photograph that's instructive-a doorway-something more than just beautiful, or well made, or a combination of those elements that are photographically interesting-something that you can't quite handle that posses you, something simple and visible but filled with mystery and promise-the mystery of "How did I know to make that?"- and the promise of a new understanding of photography and something about yourself."

Eternal recurrence, what a depressing shallow grave we would all live in. Recurrence of time amounts to a script from the past from which we cannot deviate from. Social media is that script.  It is not knowledge to inspire one to become more but to entertain and distant oneself from living a life of truth and purpose.

Listless knowledge giving fake myths of benevolent beginnings.

How do you resolve the paradox of being aware but detached, to let things proceed without interference, yet gain an insight and a willful purpose to time your exposure at the crucial moment of your seeing the possibilities.

Being present without pushing, pulling and over thinking but just being there and ready to make an image through connection not domination.

Detached but connected to the rhythmic currents moving through the beauty of nature and its importance to our mental health.

If we only take from nature and do nothing to give back to nature, we are missing a true commitment to openly interact with it as a subject of intense importance to our creative outlook.

But even further we will never assume a role of conversion from destruction to cooperation not only with nature but with our fellow human beings and our foundation for survival is in peril.

If we assume we are gods of some sort, then we have abandoned the the right of passage beyond this earthly paradise.  If we think we are going to be anointed by a benevolent god for our destruction of our earthly home then we are not only delusional but blasphemers to god's purpose.

If all we do with our brain is organize, categorize and institutionalize our responses to an outer reality then we are becoming herded beasts afraid of our own inner purpose.  We are beholden to the corruption of money and power who's only return is more greed and abuse of our civic duty too protect mother nature from its destruction.

The force of external distractions work hard to disrupt our inner insights by creating infinite barriers to self realization.

Place and time dictate our very life and it's goals. We are given our time in this present moment to become more than a collector of things.  If we allow corporate media to commercialize our lives than it will further fragment us into colorful cloth easily changed and transformed into the next greatest product.

Your inside force is being channeled by paths of external manipulation, as if social media was a cure all for one's constant angst at the new order of power and greed. We are expressing this doubt and confusion by shrivelling up our need to be ourselves and end up following the herded masses to a corral of complacency with little demanded and thus living our future in a poverty of mind and matter.

We live in this new era of instant knowledge threw hand held devices.  But this knowledge is not your expressions but the elites propaganda of their desires and destructive controls over a population getting get fed up with the shallowness of our commons being privatized for money.

It is better to express yourself as who you are and not as a character created through social media, where everybody is looking for instant approval.  Approval is your own inner self creating images with willful purpose.

You must fight through created barriers of doubt and confusion that hinder your ability to manifest your original internal landscape.

What if I leave myself in it's narrow view of this world, would I know the empty body left behind.

We all want to be somewhere else and not present in our now moments.  This constant drum beat to move on, never landing on something of interest for more than a few seconds is the new skipping stone life by which we never go to shore and stand in our own shoes but are conned to enter swift currents that we can't control and will never be satisfied with, where these rushing waters take us away form our true purpose and force us to live a shadow life of ourselves.

Our knowledge base is shrinking into a reluctance to seek beyond the cliches created by ad men and dig deeper into the substance of our lives and where you want to be and not where corporate media wants to put you by stereotyping your purpose as foolish and always asking where is the profit. Stick with your own intuitions and transcend the shallow representation of humanity that corporate media wants you to believe.

October 23, 2016

We are strangers in a wasteland of personal greed.

Social media does not connect, it separates us from each other.  It puts a barrier between friends and family and reduces one on one interaction.  With these hand held devices we begin the slow retreat into ourselves and lose the necessary connection to the external gifts of nature.

Social media is a created facade of interacting with reality whereby we engage in surface reactions to a deeper cosmology. Displaying our lives as a model of joyous shallowness.  All social media is a tool to sell to comatose consumers.

Instead of enhancing discussion and vital interaction between real people and ideas it reduces the intent of the discussions to an underlining purpose of extortion and trickery to get the herd to buy their products.

When we interact now we don't have to see and be present with whom we are interacting with.

We don't know what this present time means in our interaction to see and respond to a real live person's behavior, his mood and his frustration in living in this cocoon of information that doesn't begin to address the slow darkening, muddying the waters of the human species.

We text, we view, we post and we believe this is interaction now with another live human being.  We are putting our faith in a technology that doesn't care about us and doesn't want us to live in the present. Any post sent out to the vast universe of frozen eyes perpetually looking at a screen is a past moment.  It was repeated and repeated as if this past moment uploaded onto social media networks of vendor is a rapture of live moments.  By doing this we are constantly being reminded of the growing canyon between a connected life and a disconnected one. Our past becoming our present and our future undermined by an insistent call to consume.

Being willfully present means you are connecting with your surroundings and are reaching out to subjects that appear in your visual language.  The bigger your vocabulary the bigger your resources for making great imagery.

When conversations begin now it is not verbal but electronic, a silence dimmed to understand the visual as an all encompassing fact or truth. This screen we are mesmerized with reduces our ability to verbalize and communicate our own views on subjects that need to be scrutinized.

How can we speak openly with our close friends if we continue to view media as our friends and not our beginning decline in human interaction.

How do we speak openly with each other if in the back of our minds is the very real possibility that someone will post our thoughts online, ready or not.

Our vocabulary is being shortened to pics and symbols that mean what we want to say.  These symbols and pics diminish who we are and our place in the network of life. We are being abandoned for a higher cleaner intelligence that will mold us all into a herd conformity of homogenized look alikes. These artificial intelligences need us corralled for ease of communication and the messy by products of individuality.

The computer mind will only deal with the present and the future.  The past is not nostalgic but imperfect.  Thus it will want to have us all live, a look alike life, of 1's and 0's.  The past will be a creation of the present turned to promote the new future of working gnats.

Relying more and more on an outside collective mind for answers and opinions we run the real possibility that we will not only lose our individuality but also our future happiness.

When you look up something now is it a partial truth bent to an advertising purpose to keep us complacent in questioning our growing fascist existence.

Our conscious mind and our unconscious mind is being moved away from intimacy to entertainment.
To a buying mentality to keep pace with the shortened lives of purpose and closeness with our family and friends.

Herded by the need to be seen in this Hollywood production of life this bombardment of superficial details erode our ability to step back and redeem our lives through hard work and self control.

The herded pen tightly squeezed into stereotypes and then acknowledged not by your unique perspective but by your likes and dislikes on a corporate media site. Then sold consumer products that don't solve any of the growing deeper problems that are festering on a wishful doomsday Dr Strange Love movie set.  We are prodded and stimulated relentlessly to buy at any cost products that will not help our ability to survive but destroy it.