April 23, 2019

Gordon Parks, “The camera revealed them as they were, human beings imprisoned inside themselves.”

Images have emotions, it is how you create your images that can instill in the viewer a deeper understanding of the world without trying to manipulate them in to buy products he doesn't need or want.

A great photograph lays bare your inner approach to your subject. There are no formula's to copy if you are trying to express your inner vision through creating a photograph of the truth objectified. 

This need to become cattle herded by corporations to believe in their ways and not your own is a demeaning representation of your inner truth. If you act without an inner voice asking why, what is the purpose of your inner gifts? what is the underlying assertion being made for me and not by me? then you are truly under the thumb of mass media and the trolls that live by the code of misrepresentation. The underlying current of social media is profit. Using your information to exploit your posted thoughts for material gain.

To achieve greatness in living a life free from the evil stereotypes that shackle our mind toward hatred you must let go of the fear the pundits words express, deliberately seeking an attempt to stifle your inner intuitive recognition of the perpetual history of lies told endlessly to distract us from the obvious greed these voices share amongst themselves. They seek to complicate the truth and put truth under many hats to confuse the issues that they don't want reconciled.

Our gift to them is our financial collapse. And the incarceration of our freedoms deemed radical when all we are asking for is to be seen and heard. The wealthy demand silence from the masses and we are to be grateful accepting pennies on the dollar as they abuse the power they stole by taking everything they can before our world collapses in wars and climate aggression.

It is their will that creates the perfect intersection of wealth and poverty.  Here at the intersection, the wealthy pass with smiles and promises of a better a future.  All the time knowing that these people waiting to cross the street will never reach the other side.  For as they begin to cross there will always be an obstruction in their way, this obstruction is called stealing their lives away financially and by taking their truth and submerging it in fear and anxiety to work jobs that will kill them before their time.

Photography is no longer an art form.  It has become a commodity. A photograph is now used as a prop to sell products using the words authentic, real and powerful while the ad places in convenient location products that express a manly or womanly lifestyle.

The image seen becomes an awareness of the photographer's role in its creation. His assignment was dictated to him for a specific ad and his intellect used the words in the rough draft as a golden light to copy as best he could in the field the idea the product represented in a casual, open feeling of liberation. When in truth the image was a culprit in the exploitation of the viewers senses, targeted to directly to him as a response he made on social Media to his friends and family. 

There is no relationship built around dogma and specifics of image creation.  Photography is a freedom to become more than your image creation.  It is a chance to broaden your intuition and your connection to the external world demanding attention, if your eyes and heart are ready to enter your own internal universe.

The photographic image use to reveal the impossible. It was a window into another world of beauty, realness, terror, anger, insight... It revealed a world we didn't know existed and it made us aware of the power of documenting this world with honesty and integrity. 

This documentation whether it was wartime, (how many image do you see today of the wars raging in the middle east), migrant workers, race riots, war protests, pollution, sports, the migration of peoples due to climate change, etc... all this was done by photographers willing to sacrifice themselves to get images to bring light on the subjects people were ignorant of. The camera was the eye into a world it seemed forsaken by god. It was a sacred commitment by the photographer to seek out images that revealed the poverty, racism and despair of the people without a voice. And these men and woman photographers changed our world with their intuitive force of compassion to fight the overwhelming reality of greed that still exists and is exemplified by the beauty of this planet being destroyed by the self indulgent power of the wealthy for profit.

These moments captured for what? Why take an image that you don't feel to the very marrow of your soul? Why look through a viewfinder if all you shoot is a shallow reflection of who you might become?

It seems we treat photography as a copy machine an impersonation of our world that we didn’t create but fear changing our role in it. We feel tied to the complexity of earning a living, doing the opposite of our inner instincts because we are afraid of the forces of greed that has exploded in this new century beyond any sense of honor or caring for the people of this earth.

We now document our lives with images to parade our facade before others. To show others our journey in the self indulgent look at me world of shallow truth and understanding.

Our behavioral vision is one of simplicity of character. Remain in your present state without growing more intimate with your own unique visions of your world. 

Your truth never revealed in your shallow expressions of your own glossy picture perfect existence in a photograph that limits the viewer to a surface reflection of your shallow depth and easily ignored as just another player skating on the surface of intuitive knowing, the deeper existence present but ignored.

Image creation, your vision, should be open and honest, a living presence in your journey through your unique existence and your images expressing a truth that you visualize each time you put your eye to the view finder.

The herd instincts are strong, behavioral forces enticing mankind to conform to the powerful structures that have risen to control ones outer shell and to indoctrinate his intellect into the understanding that the world is controlled by the elite power of money.

Photography today has become a one view perspective on a world that must demand openness. The photographer that begins to build a relationship with the external visual stimulus by looking deeper under the hood by allowing his intuition to direct himself to those moments of pure singularity, a possession of passion that embraces all humanity and nature as one and creates an image expressing his, only his unique perspective without props that undermine the honesty of photography in this media frenzy of material domination.

By changing ourselves we could begin to control the external appearance of this realities solidity and mold it into a form of beauty through our image creations that could empower others to shed their facades of physical prisons and begin to explore their unique insights into their personal inner world.

Listen to your inner voice, your destination is further away than you think and closer too when you find your path of commitment to your photographic vision.  

We all struggled earlier in our careers as we began to explore our own inner voice allowing us time to become our visionary future through the creation of photographic moments that caught the subject and we hoped its essence.  But a photograph is not the essence of the subject but the external representation of a piece of our very essence.

We can’t hide from what we take pictures of. We intellectually know what we like and what we don’t like (in our structured existence). Partly from our parents and partly from our friends as we grew up. We have been led to our likes not by our own discoveries but by an external force of needing to be accepted as a part of a larger whole. We are basically animal instincts and as such we want to be part of something. We want to be herded and liked for our conformity, to the norm, the structure of our external reality never changing. This reality is not a stone tablet but in constant flux and malleability if one looks deep into his own unique inner form. We assume sameness but that is because of fear and loss of our position in the community whether good or bad.

But our herd instincts are strong and we want to follow leaders instead of being one.  

We must begin to tear down the walls we have assimilated, barriers to our inner intuition, as we grew up and begin to see the world through our own unique eyesight.

Images have become ubiquitous, they have lost meaning. We are over saturated with similarities of image taking because the majority of people look for sameness of patterns in their lives. We seek a need to be accepted. To be plain and ordinary without faults just a person living day by day. What ever happened to individuality and desire to be your own being present in your unique moments?

We have been given a toy, a toy that distracts us by conditioning us to participate in ads aimed at soliciting viewers to buy products from companies that know more about you than you know yourself.

Tyranny oppression, cruelty, reign of terror, despot, welcome to the 21st Century of organized global criminality. 

The value of photography is becoming lessened by the proliferation of snap shots and an underlying sense that photographs are nothing more than digital files without any deeper necessity than promoting oneself on social media. Images used to be a means to communicate a message of importance.

We must fight the urge to move on, ignoring our existential physical nature. As herded animals we like to roam and see new things. We are part of something bigger and this something bigger controls our lives. But when does this need to belong infiltrate your consciousness and your intellect measures your worth and assumes that where you belong is not of your making but of earning a wage to become a boredom of false facades. A character acting in someone elses plot and your inner intuition melts into pools of sorrow and regret.

Open you mind to your unique vision. Look deeper into nature and your subjects that draw you to them. Explore beyond your inner fears, reach out into the world and see with open eyes those images demanding to be made. That is, if you can open your mind to new possibilities and see these subjects without conditioned stereotypes interfering with your inner perceptions.