Dandelions Close-up

Dandelions Close-up
Dandelions In Black And White

Sunday, August 2, 2015





July 26, 2015

Authenticity is letting go of time just being in the moment without effort.  You don't need to pick up your cell phone camera to take a picture of something that is happening spontaneously.  Once you interrupt the flow of time to capture a moment in time then you have altered its authenticity. You have imposed your will to capture not the whole scene but a portion of the scene.  This manipulates the scene through your viewpoint and might not capture the true moment that was present.

What we have now in photography are passing moments of interest. These images represent little moments of stimulus, whether the pictures are of beauty, violence, anger, happiness etc... These moments captured make us feel alive. They represent our lives in this hectic fast paced extreme sport called living. They are our moments of still silence on a two dimensional plane. We now live through our photographic experiences.

These moments posted represent our overwhelming pressure to be seen by others.  They are an outlet for our lives to say, I did this and this is who I think I am. Photographs give an illusion of life manifested.  But this is not a true life lived.  They are our promises kept, secret but now easily exposed.  They are ourselves reflected in others eyes.  The power of photography is that it claims to be authentic because I have a picture of it, therefore it is real. But having a picture of something that has already happened doesn't make the content of that snap shot authentic. Yes, the people are there and they are smiling for the camera because they have been trained since childhood to know the correct response when a camera rises to someones eye.  Just like models in ads.

We learn quickly not to show our true emotions when interacting with others.  Put the facade on your face and say with a smile as you wish.  Another words a shallow existence.

We all feel the collective force on our behavior.  We are taught through our early lives the right from wrong, good and bad behavior, moral and ethical responsibilities.  This learning process was the responsibility of our parents, our family.  Without the family none of us would be citizens of our communities.  If we don't have a base of common sense and altruism then we would be accepting of behaviors that are damaging ourselves and our society as a whole.

But now we are allowing an outside force, the social media collective, to be our our moral compass.
We are being bread to consume.  We are being manipulated to believe social media allows us freedom of expression but all it allows is a mechanical mimicry which interferes with living a deeper personal life.

Business are exploiting these sites that have been created, by gather personal information and using this personal info gathered to sell stuff back to those consumers sharing their lives openly.  What a gold mind of information given away without a dime spent on paying for the content.

Instagram claims "that 63% use it to document their lives, making photographs no longer a part time hobby rather an important function of their daily routine, like eating and sleeping. They don't take images to pursue a passion but rather as an integral part of every day life."

But they will not be photographers but followers.  Herded by social media into thinking they are experiencing a life when in fact they are living a life through other peoples imagery, (and of course some of these authentic images will just by chance have the latest and greatest trends in fashion, imagine the coincidence), hoping to connect with a real live person but actually connecting with a screen with pics and limited words that express an impression and not a life.  A vaporous experience of fleeting moments, time ripped from its moorings to be presented on a social site as real and to be exploited by corporations.

Susan Sontag, "There is a rancorous suspicion in America of whatever seems literary, not to mention a growing reluctance on the part of young people to read anything, even subtitles in foreign movies and copy on a record sleeve, which partly accounts for the new appetite for books of few words and many photographs."  Also she wrote," Photography expresses the American impatience with reality, the taste for activities whose instrumentality is a machine."

Words take time to understand, images have almost instant recognition.  And instant gratification.  Pictures are easier to make quick judgements on with no need for long analysis. Words can fool you with misinterpretation.  Words can be used to manipulate you into believing in the opposite of what is good for you.  Words are symbols and sentences are concrete lanes to deception.  But mostly words take time and effort to understand.  You have to do your research and analysis in order to get to the root truth of words.

People would like to believe pics are real but they are not real. We are a scattered brain society that jumps from image to image, from tweet to tweet as if this documents our reality.  Yes, the youth are more in tune to the visual.  They have grown up with camera phones.  But these new ways to communicate only give the user a surface representation of the world they live in, a surface reality intended to keep the young eyes following the bouncing ball of consumerism.

Hart Crane said (writing about Stieglitz in 1923), "the hundredth of a second caught so precisely that the motion is continued from the picture indefinitely: the moment made eternal."

People want to live forever.  They have posited religion as a means for eternal life but god is subjective and others don't see my god and I don't seek theirs.  Photography manifests our lives and gives us the ability to pass our lives through pictures into a future without us having to be present.  Photography is now the new religion. In this reality we seek immorality through pictures of our lives for generations to come, to view us and think of us after we have past.  Which is appropriate since snap shots only capture a past moment not lived.

We are being duped and pulled from our lives by the drug of social media.  Photography is more than a click of a shutter without feeling.  Good photography comes to those who search and experience their subjects through feeling of connection.  Taking images with purpose slows down your need to take a scatter gunned approach to shooting anything that moves.





















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