January 17, 2016


Sontag, "A capitalist society requires a culture based on images, it needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race and self.  Cameras define reality in two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society.  As a spectacle (for the masses) and as an object of surveillance (for the rulers). The production of images furnishes a ruling ideology, social change is replaced by a change in images."

The mechanical sight of a camera is a curtain that feels nothing and chooses nothing.  But can bridge sight into a narrow frame that can become an image worth making.

The camera gives human beings the ability to judge others.  It is amazing how many people expose themselves to mindful tyranny under the social media's facade of communication. Social media is exploiter under the guise of community.

It really is a way to advertise your life and state this facade is who I think I am.

Images advertise our internal needs.  They announce our current self image, that is always changing.  Social media analyzes people's trends on their sites and use these trends as suggestions for consumer ads.  The hook is always deeper in the mouth if you think someone likes you as you are.

We have accepted the social media dictum, all is seen, observed and judged, as cameras proliferate our society, spy on us in streets, homes and buildings.

We have given our private self to the masses through corporate controlled media.

We look past our social and political needs, to instead, move more toward narcissistic entertainment. We begin to rationalize the continuous brutal greed as necessary to fulfill our wants. Instead of a real dialogue with others we put a barrier between us and them through image creation or should I say image facades.

We are under the spell of material objects.  Not a relationship built on trust with the external reality but now subjects to be exploited in a status driven grab for vanity.

Image proliferation will only grow in magnitude as we become gold miners in a false pretext of authentic subjects none of which has importance or value to enhance the lives of others.

In today's market place image creation pacifies the crowd to partake in an activity that has value not in what is produced (as a representation of an emotional connection) but in what is said about it.  If it gets traction on social media then it is worth the exhibition of internal self. And for the ad makers, it is a gold mine to be exploited and continually duplicated until the water faucet of hits and sales dries up.

We lose sight of the real game of corporate media, the slight of hands as they feed us dopey humor or tantalizing mayhem, to keep us in an abnormal state, sedated with images of possibilities that we will never experience.

We objectify ourselves in photos, present ourselves to the outer world, and at the same time we subjectively wish we could connect with something real.

Our feelings shown in exaggerated theatre, exploited by media to further gather unlimited amounts of information on us to exploit us like cattle in this ever expanding consumer society.

Images are not real, they reflect, look back on our present experience. The future is only endings of moments in the now. What kind of feeling can you have in the present if all you are thinking about is the image you created during the first hand experience.The aftermath of an experience is the end not the beginning of the actual experience.

It would seem we are satisfied with a copy rather than the original. We have entered Plato's Cave and it appears we are satisfied with a shadow of, rather than the real deal.

January 10, 2016

We misinterpret the camera's ability to isolate and suspend time.

The image is not real, it is an imitation of a fragmented moment that has passed.  It is only a piece of a bigger picture.

But because we want to believe an image has magical powers, and we desperately want that image I  now hold in my hand to be a past memory brought to future time it must then represents a truth, a person or an object as they were, a thing as it was but no longer.

We want to find continuity in our lives and the substitute to living fully in each moment is to live through moments captured by a mechanical device that has no other power than to freeze fragments of our sight as if this constitutes a real entity.

But it isn't time itself that has been captured, the image created is in time and ages just like we do. It is propaganda, looking at life disappearing can bring anxiety, we need to be sedated by distractions that keep us from inevitable truths.

A photograph is a means to abate time's awful march toward death.  As time passes by, we need a means to draw comparisons with times illusions.

We need to be able to compare the present with the past to give credibility to the life we are living.  Memory is itself a trap of the minds need to feel time passing.  We are now in a stage of obsession with time through image creation.

The present only exists through comparison.  A linear time line that we hold onto in sinking water.  Time eventually catches up with us and our ending begins to be seen. How do I want to be remembered becomes the mantra of more images being taken to fill your life with artifacts of your aging.

Images are made to consume without ever having to worry about running out.

This instills in us an obsessive behavior to create a separate reality for ourselves. If we take pictures of our lives then we will become immortal.  We will live in a past, created for no other reason then to live beyond our individual timeline which is unknown and is fear based.

The future is not known but the past can be represented through snap shots that will outlast our mortality.

In a real sense we are trying to be gods with supernatural photographic powers.

I annihilate the very purpose of living in the present.  I disrupt the unity of my life with nature.  I create a third reality that is false and extraordinarily disruptive to living a good life and that oppressive reality is consumerism through entertainment.

January 10, 2016

Cliches are correct views for the narrow minded.  Photography is a monologue between you and nature. If everything can become a good image then why focus on your relationship with the outside world at all.  Just click and move on.  Every once in awhile you might get lucky and get a picture that has some meaning but the overall result from shooting without thought backed up by intense feelings for your intended subject is drudgery and a simplistic view of your discord with nature.

Without relationships we falter and lose balance.  Get caught up in the show of self and not the revelation of self through inspiration from others and purposeful image creation.

Do you feel comfortable dealing with external stimulus in the present moment?  Or before you relate to what is in front of you you choose first to reflect on the scene and then make decisions on how you want to photograph the present subject before you even bring your camera out.

Both of these means to an end can and will create good images.  One method is anticipation and readiness for action from the get go.  The other is a more analytical dissection of the scene and where you want to put yourself when shooting to get the maximum inner representation of your purpose.

There are times when I use both methods.  When you come on a scene already in it's full glory you better be fast and nimble making instant judgments on composition, angle of light, lens selection etc...

What you don't want is to be so deposed to over analysis, looking over every lens before you shoot, determining whether this one or that one would be better.  Sometimes just shooting is a way forward, getting your photographic eye immersed in the scene and then through a growing inner connection with nature you locate your intended subject.