What is your attitude toward image making?
What are you demanding from the scene that doesn't allow you to get close to the subject?
What is inhibiting your connection to your subject?
These questions need to be answered given the proliferation of images that overwhelm the senses and look and feel like so many others. Originality is lost through the marketing of corporate media the billions of images now rushing into cyber space to catch a few eyes.
Our lives now seem to go up or down with likes and dislikes. We are becoming Bi-Polar in our acceptance of outside forces messing with our confidence and purpose in manifesting our inner vision.
Praise easily given. Not the purpose of the image. How the photographer made a conscious choice to examine the scene and look for a composition and light that would express his feeling toward the subject and give the viewer a look at another perspective they didn't see.
We must tame the beast, this nature that surrounds us, making us fearful to live our lives independent of the recognition game. This obsession with celebrity and the quick viral image of likes. We are caught up in the media spin of celebrity and flesh.
Now it seems, we must document every moment taking place within our own ego. As if our disconnect from the outer world is confining us into an internal drama. And we feel compelled to expose ourselves to the world of greedy eyes.
We are at a transformative stage in human evolution. We see the coming annihilation of the earth and this makes us more intense to document our lives for others to witness. It makes us feel like we are somebody in this human train wreck and thus we feel acknowledged by others.
We exploit the external for a visible extension of our presence in this ever exploding world of eye candy. All of it distractions, slight of hands, cliches to suppress the masses,
drawing our attention away from experiencing the world as an I and not an object in time and space to be viewed by someone on a social media page.
We substitute images now for the loss of community, of eroding cultural values, of human decency gone awry.
A picture now stands for an active and involved life.
The new mantra is, at least I have been noticed, looked out and perceived for good or bad by a simple click of a mouse. Not by my own standards of behavior. But instead, relying on the judgement from an anonymous other.
Our images are like any product made that can be exploited. In nature, redundancy, doing the same thing over and over again, leads to an end of that species. You must adapt in order to survive.
As photographers we must bring to the internet table a feast of personal work that stands out from the proliferation of image fatigue. That weariness we get when we see the same repetitive images over and over again. This has to effect the psyche of photographers to join the masses but resist this impulsive behavior, stand your ground and create images worthy of your effort.
