Dandelions Close-up

Dandelions Close-up
Dandelions In Black And White

Sunday, June 18, 2017


June 18, 2017

The Tao of Zen, " Fancy words and profound thoughts, after all the sidling rhetoric and transcendent experience engendered by the spell of words there remains the certain bounds set by the natural absolutes of physical existence."

We have lost that connection with ourselves under layers of daily trivia. 

What is left over after the wealth has altered equal rights we look for distractions to take are minds away from thinking about the lessening of our personal goals.

A feeling of anxiety as monopolies squeeze the independent thoughts and we begin to feel doubt creeping into our consciousness. We begin to realize that there is not enough time to do what we need to be doing with our own thoughts that give us strength.  We assume we are not good enough to take the next step, so we live in regrets.

Memory acts as consciousness and what we remember connects us to our past.  But we have substituted our personal memories of living with someone else's.

So when we reflect we don't see or hear our own unique voice.  We are no longer the center point of our living perspective but now see another presence using us as their vehicle for expression and this becomes our only perspective as we ignore our own path toward our created essence.

We now doubt our memories as we view external images rushing over us as a violent river and overwhelming our ability to understand a coherent string of time.  Herd instinct, innovation now is the eye candy to create an impulse to act not from your own needs but by someone else's propaganda for more and more unnatural things that only address image clutter and inner confusion.

The family unit, the intimacy of an inner life, now exposed to the world. We begin to feel disconnected from our lives and our private moments.  When we share now we don't write a letter or talk to the friend or family member face to face we now broadcast it so everyone knows our personal information. 

Through growing ego, a selfish need to be exposed without a real purposeful perspective or authentic sense of yourself, you are not present in the now. Your inner life is now becoming unbearable, your concentration on any topic, a strain to focus on the facts, the image becoming your words without contemplation.  Your vocabulary reduced to tweets, short and copied from other posts in the messy illusion of independence.

This short nest of speech substituting it with less and less words become a necessary drug to dissolve your inner lack of confidence.  Your inner turmoil now only a shallow denial of who is controlling your voice.

The new outer acceptance, the acceptance of your life as an object to be exploited for financial gain, nothing more nothing less.  

You don't have to think, the computer does it for you.  As your brain cells slowly leave a barren mind you give less and less of your true self until what is left is a mouth piece for repetitious tweets that are posted for seconds and then released to the infinite details that should be embarrassing to us.

Ask any question and a mechanical voice answers without emotion or nuance to her voice, just facts that bend the truth toward more and more control of your thought process and your ability to separate a con from the truth. The facts loaded by minds that only give rote memorized data to be repeated to the masses.

The outside images you see focus on canned responses without emotion.

Understood even before action takes place, memorized steps cemented in memories of illusions you will die defending.  Obstructs your vision of your sense of self or distracts from your  life adventure.

Information warfare against the independent minds of youthful skeptics.

Social media is entertainment, corporate media is entertainment, addicts you to the horrors of someone else's pain, making them a spectacle of created choice on how will this effect our viewers as a possible reflection of us on camera.


Spin your mind, twirl yourself with excuses and land deep under the precious gold of greed. Politics of created memory.  Social media creates illusions of yourself in a market scheme your being taught to participate in.  To think only of closing the sale.  The selling of yourself, an ad for a surface reflection outward, not a reflection inward to who you truly are.  We put on the Ritz and are not honest with ourselves in becoming our true nature.  

Social media is a runaway circus of visual stimulus and a redundancy of words that don't add up to a complete idea, or understanding by illumination a context that is true but we ignore this because of the adrenaline rush of images we are bombarded with every second.  Where has the value of words gone.


Your connection is to an animal hungry to get at your behavior no matter what the costs.  It wants to know all your secrets and exploit those secrets to make cash.  Disconnected from live bodies we are more and more showing a willingness to be alone, thinking we are connected.  We are moving quickly into a collective media, consumer consciousness whose only purpose is buy and buy until it we are broken with nothing to show for our effort but material things that consume the planets resources.

Belief in stereotypes ruins fluidity and self awareness.  Closing a give and take relationship.

Our social consciousness changing becoming addicted to the dopamine adrenalin rush of images and texting that stimulate your behavior to retreat from life and assume a static stance of an empty vessel.  Being filled with meaningless, superficial and shallow facts that ultimately mean nothing in the advancement of your independence from the claws of consumer capitalism.

If you don't respect yourself you lose your inner value. We should seek our world through original eyes. Social media destroys consciousness of mother culture.  We cease to be part of but only a fragment in a big puzzle that controls our hours and our days. With these soundbites of shallow meaning we accept the voices as real.But they are not us, we are an individual with our own mind and need for unique personal expression.

Sorry for the digressions lets talk about photography. One of my favorite photographers was 
Eugene Smith. His words still resonate with me as I was taking photojournalism classes in college.

He was meticulous in creating his imagery.  He had to control the environment to make an image worth its weight in meaning.

His insights to grasp the person and create a scene worthy of publication is legendary.

He was a photographer that held to his purpose and didn't allow distraction to interfere with his ability to get the vision the way he new would become meaningful to a wide audience.

He would listen to his editor but never allow an outside force to interfere with his vision for the subject.  No preconceived ideas in this man.

What is the creative self?  Is it a person with an agenda to complete a list of images to be taken in a certain order? Hardly, a creative person takes the ordinary and transforms it into an expression of his inner landscape.  He is not concerned about like and dislikes he could care less about that.  For the creative person a great image is one that he deeply felt and wasn't afraid to take.  It is knowing your subject and allowing the subject to unfold its personal nature. Whether that is a landscape, a person, an object it doesn't matter, if you have vision anything can become a work of art. 




























Saturday, June 10, 2017

June 9, 2017

What is the goal of ever human being? Is to express themselves and to be understood. But in today's climate of instant gratification we have lost that need to be ourselves and to express our own view on this suffocating reality.

When do you feel separate from others?  Is it when you are connecting with a subject and this subject has your complete interest.  At these moments the facade of life doesn't matter you are alone with your unique perceptions and it is your vision, your personal perspective that is driving you to see deeper into the subject and yourself.

Separateness, that feeling of being on your own, alone in this world could cause a sense of being isolated with a melancholy.  An overwhelming feeling of betrayal, no one will ever understand you fully or care about you like you do yourself. Early understanding of your separateness gives you the ability to be part of something and yet able to analyze the situation and determine your values and your response.

Experience to proceed naturally, not through a consumer ad fest but alone through self-awareness and then letting go of your desires for more and accept life as it is, a necessary vehicle for you to rule and believe in your self, belief where by the world forms around your talents, your drive, your thinking not someone else's. Spontaneity is a gift to take advantage of.  If you don't respect yourself, you lose your inner value.  We must think and be proactive to perceive this world through original eyes.

Silence seems to demand more in this 21 century.  Lazy minds look for stimulation and don't realize that breathing is a good start.  We need excess in order to feel alive, visual movement with oppressive colors and sounds of people screaming.  We find the ugliness of life a stimulus to revel in and this ugliness focuses our attention away from self and puts others as the problem. All focusing your attention away from self to an outside force, making your behavior acceptable in this universe of many tongues (this tower of Babel) and the minutiae of details you look at continuously, which solves nothing, does nothing but sells ads.  What is your life in your constant addiction to a small screen that doesn't inform but is tool to sell you something you don't need.

We give away our personal information, we give away our images and thoughts just to be
liked by strangers. Nothing is sacred now, all is ready to be exposed at the drop of a hat.

John Berger in his book "Ways of Seeing" dissects the historical influence paintings had on our subconsciousness and how this effects are present day manipulations to get us to buy, buy and buy some more.

Freedom now is envy of the wealthy.  We are discouraged that we can not afford the commercials we see everyday on the tv, cell phones and our computer.  This is our democracy now, not real freedom but freedom of choice on what to buy. That is what our democracy has become. In order to be happy we must shop and buy.

John Berger, "Publicity to each of us is that we transform ourselves, or our lives by buying something more.  This more will in some ways make us richer, even though we will be poorer by spending our money."

With everything for sale, we become the ones for sale, we are the ones that will get the barrage of ads, products to buy even though we can't afford them.

Look at the commercial and you will see (as Berger explains) actors that seem to be transformed by buying a product, a product that changes their lives.  As a result we are envious of them and we want the same, to be transformed into something new and better than who we really. Publicity and a good face allows us to dream that we to can become one of the glamorous people.

John Berger, "Pleasure of benefits is what to be enjoyed from the things it advertises.  Publicity is effective because it feeds upon the real.  Publicity is never a celebration of a pleasure in itself.  Publicity is always about the future buyer."

We are at a critical stage in our democracy.  Why are the ads overwhelming the senses? The ads are for the ones that have money not the ones that are struggling to survive. This is the last gasp of the ad men to squeeze as much money out of us as possible before they move their ads overseas to say China, or the collapse of the economy.

How can the ordinary be ignored as we push ourselves to see more, travel and be more than who we are, yet when all is said and done when we come home from the adrenalin distractions of fear of death, we return to ourselves and still have to live with us. We return to our shallow frame without a core belief or an answer to what to do to fulfill our lives, where is our goals, who do I want to be?   These questions are never asked.

The ordinary becomes a focus of image creation just because the ordinary is not seen, it loses its value but not to a photographer that goes under the obsession with status and power to create images with purpose and with the hope to shake awake the populace to begin to see their lives for what it is unique and beautiful.