Erich Kahler wrote in his book, The Tower and the Abyss, of the fragmented knowledge we are gaining and without syntheses of this knowledge we are unable to make a meaningful whole of our purpose in life. He says, "we have lost all control over the state of our learning, all orientation in the vast wilderness of factuality and, since there exists no whole any longer in which to determine anybody's or anythings position and the role in this world, our hugely expanded knowledge ends up in suggesting that, apart from practical purposes, everything is meaningless".
No one studies photography anymore, now they just shoot pictures, millions of pictures, billions of pictures exposed on the worldwide web each week. Ever more burdening our minds with fragments of other peoples lives and useless information. Some of these images are funny and positive and these milliseconds of info puts us in a good mood in a day of redundant work and dreary silence. But more and more human nature takes over and these images are cruel and embarrassing to the one being photographed. We laugh openly at the stupidity of others and once again feel good about ourselves that we are superior to those fools. We are dumbing down our sensibilities to others as we move further and further into a realm of instant reactions to stimulus without concern or thought for the people in the photos. We are walling off ourselves from others and are treating the outer world as a play thing and for our entertainment to satisfy our need to be and feel better than another.
Photography is the perfect vehicle to identify the fragmentation of our lives. A photograph captures a moment in time. Yanks it from the time sequence and fatally creates a separation from the flow of visual continuity. The picture now is a flat two dimensional surface that is removed from its timeline and now can be viewed as an abstraction from the real world we live in and thus has no purpose but to delight the senses and enslave the viewer for more and more gratification from the ever increasing visuals that are evolving humans into fragmented voracious voyeurs.
We must gain control of this ever widening gap between living a life and viewing a life. When we create images we must have a deeper purpose and an intent to inform and enlighten each another to our inner universe. Pictures of happy faces are an abstract concept under the guise of a meaningful purpose. These are ads for ones life as you wish you could live it. But if we were to delve deeper into the person in the photo then we would begin to see the complexity of their life and a more meaningful, deeper understanding of that smile.
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