The beginning of anything worthwhile is never to settle for a lazy conceptual eye. I am guilty of taking images and not looking more intensely at the subject I chose and creating an image.
When you get caught up in the more equipment mode of shooting, you are on the endless treadmill of relentlessly putting off your recognition of subjects that attract you. The equipment is not creating imagery you are.
If all you needed was a good camera and all your images were masterpieces, then what are you there for behind the camera's view finder.
You create images not the machine. You work alone to create your visual world, your own personal vision not by thinking in terms of camera speak with f/stops, iso, and shutter speeds. Some of my best images have been created by being in the moment and reacting quickly to a scene developing and just going with the flow and taking the shot. If what you point your camera at has a purpose, then you are on your way to making better images.
This frivolous means to an end, where the image creators think only in the past, creating billions of images that have the same mundane look to them. It gets very hard to distinguish personal lives from all the other redundant snap shots that are posted continuously on social media.
Life now is a continuous distraction. We don't react to an action taken in a particular moment, time or specific place, whereby you are conscious of your motifs without reservations or reflections.
What we see and feel now is a displacement from our reality, a barrier now is growing and making it harder for us just to live in our own moments. We are continually bombarded with corporate medias deliberate purpose of creating fear in our lives, that we are missing the overall moments that are being taken from us. The ring in our nose is dragging us toward a social dulling that is becoming an entity outside ourselves that we habitually look too for comfort or information to validate, to acknowledge, we are here, look at me please. Instead of self reliance and living our lives free from social medias tentacles of self absorption.
We are bombarded every second with worthless information, little gnats buzzing around our ears. Our wills are being tempted and then controlled by technology to move off your connective path, your new mantra becoming I must document me in the scene which will make the picture seem more real.
Your goal now is not to experience your time and space in the moment but to seek the easy passing of your life, nibbling on the edges of immersion with your moving fleeting time.
Taking pictures now is a betrayal of your conscious will to create images of meaning and purpose. We are getting more fragmented in our subjective and objective lives. The cohesive nature of our being present in our witness to our moments, is being eroded by this obsession to think of ourselves as an object in our own reality. This is what Camus and Sartre expressed as the great malaise of the existential experience in modern times.
Social media uses this growing obsession to be seen through posts as a way to gather information from us and then to sell back to us the very materialistic world we want to escape from. Products don't create feelings of empathy toward the outside world but the opposite, greed.
When making images, time seems to disappear as we connect with our subject. As we concentrate more and begin to find deeper meanings in the subject we finally begin to shed this social craze of wanting to be seen and to allow the subject to become the objective means to our internal vision.
How do you find your passion when your time is eaten up by corporate media. You can't, period. It seems that you are connecting to the masses of like minded people sharing your inner world. Corporate media is there to dominate your lives, herd you into a corral of image taking, of info sharing that exploits your personal lives for profit.
Instead of living a full connected life to your surroundings you begin to live a visual addiction to someone else's consumerism. Dreams vanish as you become obsessed with communicating with others anonymously over a screen in passing seconds.
Human beings are very inquisitive. When we don't understand something, we become determined to find out why this is the way it is and not some other way. Social media is like this. It is a new discovery. It sounds and looks good on the surface and it does work for certain limited things.
But we are slowly getting to a point where we are seeing what it truly is, an ad for consumerism. Just like we discovered cells, the law of gravity, dark matter in space etc.. we are now becoming aware of social media stealing our time and our lives from us.
In photography when we don't notice our surroundings, when our perceptions are limited by our daily routines for survival, we try and mask our frustrations with distractions like hand held devices. It is time to step back and refocus your inner strength and begin again to focus on subjects that have meaning for you. Concentrate on staying power. The power to let go of this hectic pace set in place by busy corporate bees and force yourself to relax and truly see your subjects with fresh eyes and purpose.
