Dandelions Close-up

Dandelions Close-up
Dandelions In Black And White

Sunday, June 21, 2015



June 20, 2015

Susan Sontag wrote in the seventies, "From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects.  Painting never had so imperial a scope.  The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experience by translating them into image."

Decades later we now have the digital revolution and with it the explosion of imagery on the Internet.

And this exposes the Pavlov's dog mentality of photography in today's waste land of fragmented realities.

Sontag wrote, "A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it-limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir.  Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. The very activity of taking pictures is soothing, and assuages general feelings of disorientate that are likely to be exacerbated by travel. Most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter.  Unsure of other responses, they take a picture."

We acquire products everyday.  Homes full of things that make our lives seem more weighted with memories and objects that represent where we have been and maybe where we want to go in the future.  These short-sighted products represent acquired memory, a wishful fulfillment of our desires and our dreams and gives our life a manifested purpose.

Our excess, our obsession with accumulating things is because we live in an age of anxiety (W.H. Auden) and are unable to live with our subjective consciousness, so we live through the external objects of attraction and possession.  We seem to never question why we are drawn to certain external stimulus over others.

Images are the hip thing to acquire and quickly become passé as we move constantly toward physical experience on a shallow level.

This superficiality gives us the illusion of stability in our lives but it is an illusion of the present becoming a past experience.  We can never be satisfied trying to stop times forward motion.

We are always trying to duplicate a past experience, hold onto it especially if it brought us pleasure.  In photography we repeat composition and exposure when we are satisfied that the snap shot taken represents our forced perception (prejudices) on the subject.

We want to posses things.  We want to define what something is and not have to think any further on the matter.  This drives the proliferation of imagery.  We are on constant capture mode, we don't have to think anymore concerning what we are interested in taking pics of because now everything is photogenic.  Everything is an expression of my outer facade.

We are a species that imitate behavior.  The images being created now represent our surface connection with our memories over our present moments in our own lives.  We seek memories over infinite choice.

How scary a new subject can be and also frustrating when you have to interact with your subject, exploring the many choices you need to make in order to create an image worthy of your time.  You will have to choose your composition, light, perspective and the most important question, why choose this subject over another.  What does this particular subject have that the others don't?

Sometimes you can't answer that question but you just know intuitively that there is an image present and with time and effort it will manifest itself to you.

Are we seeing the end to purposeful image creation, of course not but social media is making good images hard to find.

We herd easily, wanting to be driven along worn paths that end up getting us nowhere near where we want to be.  We constantly put barriers up between us and our environment.  We settle for a relationship with others through a hand held device, not of intimacy but propaganda.

We fear the world and its burgeoning technology and its complexity, so we look for the easy way to go and the camera now is a comforting action that allows us distance from the subject and gives us a "work to do mentality" to take pictures of and not interact with our subjects.  We are becoming reclusive, apart from living in the now and losing touch with our communities.

Stop the constant head down, looking at a small screen.  Look up into this world, interact with it on a personal level not through corporate media sites.

Each of us is unique and we will approach our subjects differently. A one size fits all never works in creating good imagery.









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