May 28, 2016

At one time photography held a higher ideal of life's values.  Images were seen representing a real scene perceived through the eyes of a talented image creator.

Now photography is a disappointment, a homogeneous replica of a fragmented society with nothing better to do than live our lives in snap shots and sound bites without depth of thought, feeling and insight. What we take pictures of now are banal expressions of an objectifying existence.  An all seeing inner eye watching us from the outside.  This outer eye reveals the shallow objects of peoples lives and the longing for immersion in their truth but they can't seem to break free from the monolith structure of materialism and greed.

We have been turned into copies of each other, trained to look outside ourselves for answers.  The answers exist but only in our capability to recognize our truth in ourselves away from the mass incarceration of our minds by frivolous needs. 

Snap shots have replaced the immersion of yourself in your life and in nature.  When we see anything now we tend to bring up the barrier between the subject and your vision, the camera phone.

This is a safety blanket that is used for distraction and conquering the scene before you by placing it in a frame and once captured and published on social media, the potential that was present was never realized because of this urge to move past not with your time. Images have become a skin deep means for you to ignore the scene present in your inner landscape.  Just conquer the external world with a click and your illusion of unessential reality is preserved.

We are becoming passive sponges of infinite details and pictures that mean nothing.  What is real and what is make believe are now interchangeable.

These devices we hold in our hands are overpowering our need for intimacy and privacy.

We look at the screen and the eye candy window opens up and it is powerful and stimulating and new, with excitement more real than breathing and being present in your life.  We are swept up in a fantasy world of stunted words and triviality and it seems we have found a home in the collective hoarders home.  As more and more windows open we fall into the rabbit hole and land in a world of distortions and distractions.  

We are exposed to an overpowering mass propaganda machine on steroids, 24/7 a continuous bombardment of foolish and useless information. The illusion is strong and we seem to think we are connecting with someone beyond us but really we are connecting with ourselves innocently exposed to the world.

Picture taking, takes the present from your view and keeps you in memory mode.  By taking pictures instead of experiencing a moment you are blindly removing yourself from the experience and later reminding yourself of what happened by looking at a snapshot of that experience.

It is a struggle to live in the now and not be pulled back into the past by an overstimulated need to take pictures of, instead of enjoying the moments unfolding.  You need a willful purpose to become yourself in the present deterioration of our human thought communities.

When you make photographs you are in the present focusing your mind's vision on your potential subject.  You are aware and excited as you structure your design of the scene in unity with your internal sight and the intensity of connecting with your subject.  

When we go places to experience first hand the wonders of this world we feel jaded because the actual real subject doesn't look as good as the travel ads you saw. The good thing is you acted and listened to your inner calling and made an effort to travel.  The bad thing is your expectations were already firmly seeded in your mind of what you wanted to see by an external presence, someone else's view of your travel destination.  Instead of traveling to this place with an open mind and to discover for yourself your own internal, image visions. 

The photograph takes from us our feeling of being present, the first hand experience.  It seems to take away the anticipation of a scene especially if we have seen our subject through countless images manipulated in photoshop to enhance the second hand viewing experience. We seem to like the second hand experience more than the real deal.

Why can't we sit still in our lives just be and soak up the moments presented to us.  Not with fear and anxiety but with a truthful respect and a deep connection to our special place and time in this world. We seem to always push ourselves beyond the present moment. As if there is something more important just coming down the road.  Just one more curve, around the bend and all will be OK.  The problem is we take ourselves to this new place without changing our inner baggage and expectations.

We have replaced our quality time (our true moments of discovery) with what we do to survive.  This makes it harder once you get off work to focus on your true calling. What happened to your dreams?

And as your true path of discover begins to fade from view and you see those dreams you had dissolve into what ifs, you begin to look for distractions, a compensation for that loss of purpose so you put blinders on by turning from meaningful experiences to limited perceptions of fantasy and amusements.  These  remove us from our hectic pace of life's ever changing power to divert us from our real nature. Corporate media exploits the herd instinct of cautious behavior.  Fight or Fight.

By continually making life look violent and the continuous sounds of more wars, the propaganda machine wants to scare us into complacency and quiet desperation.  And this scheme they have used through out our history is a big money making scam. They can easily sell things to the cattle if they are pinned in with others of like minded fears, imposed on them by corporate ad men selling protection and pleasure.

We have a growing impersonal technological automated system of feeding the populace new commodities of cheap, over saturated accessible products.  We are no longer producing anything of substance that really matters to our whole being.  We take and take hoping for those little moments of self awareness that at least for a few seconds make us feel alive and in tune with ourselves.

Here in social media land you don't have to think or be responsible.  All you need to do is click your mouse and away you go down the distorted hole of unreality and lost purpose.  Keep moving forward through fenced corrals toward a better future that never materializes.  Don't stop now the media exclaims! The game is yours if you can take it from our iron fists.  These are the carrots put in front of your greedy eyes.  What you clamor for is their illusion of success.  Real success is creating your will to explore your inner world reflected in nature.  If you don't live your moments then you are being duped to live someone elses.

Think how easy it is for corporate media to isolate you from the things you want to do.  You must be strong and active in understanding that you control media, you can easily influence what information is presented to you through your media device.  To allow the media to choose the information you receive is like preferring static to music. 

                              

May 15, 2016

Photographs are a memory enhancer.  They remind us of our past, our family, friends, events and the things we shared when we were together.  These were personal relics of our past and they had meaning and purpose when we took them.

We take pictures to remember our lives.  Images give us a sense of power.  An immediate reflection of an event no matter how banal and this inspires us because we have taken from our perspective a moment and now have that moment forever.  Pictures are an objective means of analysis.  They are themselves really stepping stones through the space and time we travel in.  Image authenticity depends upon the closeness you are to your subject.  If it is a family member then in all probability you will assume the snap shot represents a true moment captured of your relative.  It will be put in a scrap book and forever more you will remember that moment through the image you are viewing.

Pictures do not stop time.  It is a copy of a moment in time, the expression captured was just a quick facade for the camera. Images are just surface reflections of our internal wants.

What distinguishes us from the herd is our individuality.  And what we photograph, to have meaning for us and for us to share a part of ourselves through our images, is purpose and connection with external subjects.  By having a need to take pictures of something without empathy or interest for the subject means you are just snapping pics of things.  These things have no ultimate meaning or purpose but imitation.

Our family memories, our friends memories, our personal memories are not our own anymore.  There is break away from private moments and public moments.  We have now moved over the line of intimacy with our close friends and family to an all out deterioration of the family unit and our private moments of living who we are.  We are now spectacles to be posted and ridiculed on corporate media sites.  We are reduced to posting our lives in seconds instead of cautious reflection on what we want to present and say.  Everything is speeding up beyond our control and as we get caught up in the tidal currents of celebrity and needy likes, we lose the footing of willful purpose and creating images and words that have special meaning to us and hopefully to others.

The way around this merry-go round of manipulation and surveillance of our lives is to stop and think what am I really doing to our community of people that I share my time with.  Am I going to post something of values or am I going to give into the herd instincts and follow them down a path of exploitation and alienation through focusing my life through a small screen with no connection to who I am and no caring about what I want to express that really matters to me.

Being heard by others is necessary for our ability to feel needed. But we are not heard or listened to
in the important sense of friendship and family but now as strangers posting on other sites with limited words. Social media is an addictive force in our lives.  To be seen, to be seen and heard, to be seen and heard and liked that becomes your center of the universe.

To be part of this abstract technology that allows corporate media to gather info on its willing participants is unnerving.

Social media is self gratifying.  It reduces your world to a screen and that becomes your relationship with the external world.  It is your best friend, all your information is inside this small device. We are being absorbed in this social media collective as if this is living a real life.

Once corporate media gets a whiff of a trend which is so much easier nowadays, because of the amount of free information we give them about ourselves, they can easily make these trends into a selling and buying opportunity.  The great American exploitation of our exposed wants to buy products with hollow meaning. They know our income levels, they know our mental states, our emotions and these are easily manipulated into material needs of safety.

Do we even have a cultural memory now?  When we forget something we just ask our device and this becomes our new memory separate from our own consciousness and others.  Our memories are now being deposited on these devices so we don't have too use our own brains to remember.  That would be to much work, lets just ask social media for all our answers and we happily accept a summary of events instead of remembering our own moments we have lived through.

We don't use sentences to express our feelings, we use short symbols that speed up our thinking process which in turn reduces our ability to use whole sentences with thoughtful responses. Instead we use cliche's and symbols that have taken over our need to compose our own individual words and respond in a reasoned way.

The screen opens, eye candy for the senses. We now can hear, see, and react spontaneously to an outside web of mass propaganda.  The window lights up in your palm, music plays and like Pavlov's dog you react immediately to the hand held device as if it is your creator.

An alternate world draws you in from the outside, the cold world you have been struggling in. It appears benign and you get some likes and start to feel better about yourself and the collective mind begins to dominate your life, hindering understanding with propaganda of wealth, fame and exploitation.  Social media keeps the masses placated through vicarious moments of others continually separating you from your real life experience.

May 8, 2016



A good image doesn't always happen right away.  You have to work at truly seeing your chosen subject in different lights, perspectives, compositions and more.

We look for instant gratification. We don't want to work at anything over a longer period of time.  Just look, snap a pic and your gone.

Interesting people pass us by on a daily basis and we don't acknowledge them at all, we just keep our eyes glued to a small screen.

Our photography is getting cheapened by the need for speed and exploitation to post at once.  This leads to a break down of our communities as a connected group of individual people.  We are poised now to just skip over surfaces without looking underneath the subject or scene.  Surface details it seems now represent the truth of a chosen subject.

We are being trained as cattle not to dig deeper into the subject of your image creation.  Don't get to close to a new understanding of your inner landscape but just hurry by your life, pass it by, by not listening to your inner desires for more than just a cliche ad for jeans.

How many times have you gone back to the same place over and over again to get an image that really gives your viewer a sense of the place you know and are intimate with.  This shows your focus and willingness to make time to express an important internal purpose about the subject you have chosen.  Recurring attempts to make images with meaning gives you a feeling of empowerment, a willingness to slow down and take your time by making time to slide out of your fast paced time line and enter a slower more aware sense of seeing this world.

As social media dominates our lives more and more we lose sight of the world in the present tense.
We need to reclaim our lives.  Our lifetime is blossoming before us and yet we treat it as an artifact of the past.

Life is happening in your presence and your willingness to stand still and see through your own eyes and not through a mechanical device to exploit the scene for social likes is the redeeming of you life.

Giving your life more value than a twisted snap shot that can and does sum up your days in needy praise.

When did we lose sight of our internal strength to see beyond the frivolous and dig deeper into the world we are creating and not the world that is being created by media to entertain you and distract you from truths being hidden under the guise of communication?

 A slight of hand to keep you distracted as your lives are displayed as ads for the next big trend.

The only trend you should be following is the one that makes your life meaningful not by the money transaction but by a personal real world involvement with your subject and an empathy to create an image that will satisfy your hunger for originality.