July 31, 2016

Keith A. Boas,"Photography is the ideal medium in which to challenge assumptions, because of all art forms, it is one people most expect to represent reality... The creative photographer grapples with these expectations, shaping or altering reality by the way he or she approaches a subject."

Imagery becomes another reality from experience. Like a talisman it is a good luck piece that gives you an illusion of connectivity to the real experience. But in short it is not a representation of that experience it is an antidote to your life's time line. 

It is only a memory in a physical form. A remedy for your willingness to pursue surface experience instead of the emersion in your life experiences. In a fraction of a second your experience was lost, you were separated from your real experience by eye candy as you automatically brought the camera to your eye and pushed the shutter button, but in that split second you lost the physical presence of that moment and how it would have connected you to the next moment (that would have led you to the real moment of exposure, a connection to your subject that was intense and deeply felt).  The true experience wasn't loud or obnoxious, it was just present waiting for you to discover it with intense concentration and an openness to your inner voice. It was calling your name but you limited your reaction by an uncreative snap shot that diminished any hope of you seeing beyond the social media conditioning of greedy eyes for the distractive representation of our human condition.

By not connecting to this moment passing you are now on different footing. A different path begins as you huddle around the camera to see your past moment but miss the explosion of color from a passing car waving goodbye to his love.

Another words you missed the true moment by taking the easy way around your perspective and settled for a quick fix to the continuing moments of distractions interfering with your momentum of creating meaningful images.  More and more experiences do not lead to better image creation. Especially if you are not on your true path.    

Just like a cloned mind one is following the leader down the rabbit hole of objectifying your life through snap shots that delute the possibility of living your own perspective and unique vision.

This conditioning by media to promote the mindless details of our lives and expose them to millions of people diminish the human spirit and destroy openness and acceptance.  It allows ourselves to huddle with like minded, anonymous people and laugh at others as if they were not laughing at you.  

Good photography brings people together and unites us, it does not separate us from our common spirit.

Just as we accumulate things in this buy and posses climate of material greed on steroids we are also losing our ability to recognize a phony life.  A facade put on to stimulate our shallow perceptions. A trickster waiting to take advantage of our hopes and dreams.  

We are losing our humanity.  A human species that doesn't look at the whole scene but settles for the easy slice of the pie as a doubt creeps in, that annoying feeling that just maybe there is something more present worth searching for than the bland homogenized copycat snap shots of an expensive meal on white linen. 

Opening your eyes to the world can feel like an overwhelming explosion of details rushing in on your senses. This creates a need for a filter.  A filter that can eliminate all the chatter and allow us to make quick decisions and judgments so our lives are normalized and conditioned toward safety and less thinking.

I am old enough to remember childhood, looking out at the world with fresh clean eyes of newness of the experiences you were having. We wanted to be in nature and explore and see new things not in a big sense of knowing but experiencing the present moments through the eyes of innocence.

Now it seems youth wants to live like their parents through a mechanical device and ignore the external world and only listen to the echo of words they know to describe the moments that are only there for the next snap shot or text.

These kids become adults and as adults they have learned to define their lives through words that label and diminish their experience not words that open up the experience to enhance their living experience. Adults look first through a reflection before they take action.

This pause is represented by the camera click the shutter release as you lose the intense moment of life for a snap shot of its memory and not the experience itself.

Adults project their inner fears onto nature, this allows the separation of thoughts of deep needs to a  physical reality we think we can control. 

Words establish ones place in the surrounding environment.  We define our world through words.  But words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by nature.  A nature that doesn't know words meanings and doesn't care.

As adults we lose our ability to stay the influx of defining words of our experiences.  We don't just live the experience we must tweet it, face book it, look at me social media I am living the dream. 

It would be easier just to experience your life first hand and not distract yourself with a device that blocks your ability to become present in your moments.

But from childhood we have been taught to separate ourselves from the world.  Exploit it for it's rich information and then destroy it as an impediment to man living in cyber space.

We are now writing with light the details of a life like a writer who doesn't live his own life but settles for words detailing his experiences and forgets that these details taken individually are parts of his life.  What he has done is parceled out his life in fragments and not lived them as a cohesive whole for himself. 

You will not get your perspective beyond your unique visual presence. Photographs exploit this need in us to use our imagination to create other worlds beyond our short existence.  Your gift at birth is a space to be in and a timeline to live in.  This gives you an opportunity to create an image worth discovering.  Not out of fear or hidden motifs but through genuine feelings toward your subject and others.

July 2, 2016

Forgetting to live your personal life.  Always on display.  Never a moment to become yourself. Away from the social morass of muddy information, meaningless to your real goal of self awareness and the creation of willful imagery.

Fearing life and not embarking on it. A lessening of your ability to act as an individual. Our evolutionary tendencies to follow not lead.

Think of your social media site and the overwhelming amount of information and minutiae of details you can find that really have no purpose for you or how you want to live your life.

Social media can paralyze you into non-action. Controlling how you perceive the world and how you interact with it on a shallow surface labeling.

To experience the world on a deeper level we must throw out these stifling stereotypes and open up our minds to seeing the world differently, with new eyes.  Wide open eyes willing to take a new step toward their interests and find new ways to express old ideas. 

Peter Galassi, "Alone, the Surrealist wanders the streets without destination but with a premeditated alertness for the unexpected detail that will release a marvelous and compelling reality just beneath the banal surface of ordinary experience."

We live under extreme pressure to conform to the status quo.  This wanting to be part of something is used against us and constrains our artistic awareness.

Just let go and move beyond your first inclination to take a snap shot.  Stay still and just look, let your mind meander through the scene looking for a movement of awareness, a feeling that something is present that needs to be explored not exploited.

Let all your senses reach out to find that stillness of sight,  that can create an image reflected from your inner core. An image that communicates to you that what you have found is unique only to you and your conscious choices you made connecting with your subject.

June 12, 2016

Words are daily manipulated to change the meaning of photographs.  To instill confusion of what you see and by doing this making it easier to use propaganda to convince someone something is happening in real life instead of a created existence in cyber space.  We are becoming a video game society easily tempted with bells and whistles to entertain us but not educate us on the true nature of social media's ever expanding role and control in our lives.

Joel Meyerowitz from an introduction to Cape Light, " All I'm trying to do is pass experience.  I see things-this is my life- I look: I make visual images.  It's the best in me- the only thing I can do.  It's what I've done since I was a kid, I feel things. We are emission centers.  We receive sensations and we put them out.  That's what artists do.  I can receive on any given day, more or less clearly, depending upon how in touch with the signals I am. If I'm in a good place, where there's a lot of visual activity, I become super sensitive.  I receive many signals, and I pick and choose among them.  As they get deeper into my center, to the core of this receiver, I feel more strongly about them, and I say this is the one that I am moved by. "

As a photographer are you receptive to the inner/outer relationship of creating good images by immersing yourself into your intuitive receptors.

Inanity, a lack of sense or ideas.  A stillness, a gap between you and the the world.  Humans are becoming inanimate objects.  Lifeless beings more concerned with their mechanical devices than living their lives present in each sacred moment.

There is a hallow feeling now spreading across the worried faces of people, as if they are aware of their lives changing but don't know into what.  This creates anxiety and a need to be seen and heard,  Look at me please, I exist!!

To take time to feel and truly see something external to their needy ego's demands to be seen is almost impossible when they succumb to the social medias betrayal of individuality.

This inner vacuum extends into their lives they are trying to comprehend.  Social media is becoming the new collective consciousness of the masses.  A chance to be seen and heard and appreciated for your efforts.  Except social media is a distraction from living not a way of living.  It is hollow and a cheap way to expose yourself as it sucks up your time, placates your inner worries with brief moments of likes and dislikes.

Where is your common sense and your purpose in life?  It certainly can't be re-blogging simplistic answers to universal and complex questions of our existence.  If it were that easy then we wouldn't need social media.  But if social media confuses you and separates you from living your life then you have fallen into the scam of powerful interests.  You are being exposed to fruitless hours of addiction to a screen that only limits your ability to live not enhance it.

We have finally been assimilated into the economy of the money transaction.  In the past we were outsiders in the deal making.  We had the ability to be objective and through this objectivity we had some power over the advertising agencies and their relentless aggression to make us buy stuff.

Now, with corporate social media, we allow them to collect personal information from us for free.  This information categorizes us into a caste system of potential product sales through targeted ads.

In the social media world the collective spurts out what is right and what is wrong instantaneously.  If it happens to sit well with you in these seconds of comprehension then you can like it and then forget about it and move on to judge something else in the collective spirit of cyberspace an external wizardly of smoke and mirrors.

In reality however nothing has changed nothing is accomplished.  It is a side show to get you involved in the trivial, mindless explosion of controlled entertainment, while the real movers and shakers use their slight of hand to take more from the suckers herded onto devices that are only used for confusing the truth.

A new religion is born.

Our lives are speeding up as we accumulate more and more frivolous snap shots and banal information to sedate us, as our society sinks deeper and deeper into a collective zombie mind without the ability to recognize the manipulation of our animal instincts to herd together for support.

And because of these animal instincts we are herded in to corrals of social hierarchy and ads are sent to you given your station in life.

Still images have a separate authority, a new narrative that living in the moment does not have.  That is the addiction to self awareness.  By constantly taking pictures of your life, you change the narrative of your moment and are actually imitating a screen play, a movie of someone, a character in your own narrow reality. By stopping time, it might appear that you have empowered yourself and your future narrative by projecting through social media and to the world your cubicle of time/space.  And by doing this one is being mislead.

You are actually creating a likeness of yourself and this objective life you are leading becomes a new likeness to what the collective dictates as acceptable behavior and you are literally immersed in a fake life that has no ultimate significance, while the real world politics is being centered under a different reality of collective minds manipulating the masses.  We now listen for shallow words, one word summaries of our lives, maybe a half sentence to describe who we are.

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.

April 10, 2016


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.

March 6, 2016



Emerson, (and for Thoreau as well), "each moment provides an opportunity to learn from nature and to approach an understanding of universal order through it.  The importance of the present moment, of spontaneous and dynamic interactions with the universe, of the possibilities of the here and now, render past observations and schemes irrelevant."

We have more connections, more access to information and personalities now than any time in our history. But what we really have access to is a collective mind, who's main goal is the making of money, shorthand for consumerism.  Capitalism rejects the individual and relies on mass incarceration with the flow of their information ( your gift to them without charge is your personal info but this is secondary) over their corporate owned monopolies in the media circus.

The selfie is a perfect example of the moral climate in this consumer generated society we live in.  We have become commodities to be sold.  We give freely away our private lives and the corporate media uses that information to regurgitate back to us products we don't need.  The means to success for the capitalist mentality is the money transaction, the buying of their products. Our lives are not independent, we have become collective cattle to be prodded for personal information and manipulated to thinking we make the choices when buying products we are somehow attracted to.

Just like in photography we live in a heard mentality.  We follow the ads and internalize them and make choices on what to shoot not based on our true desires and our true calling but a shallow representation of a life not worth living. We accept experience (our interaction with nature) now as an act of reflection through a past image taken not for anything deeper than to be doing something other than experiencing the moment with your full conscious intensity.

The act of reflection is a means of living in the past. Taking pictures is similar. It is a physical representation of a past time.  It becomes an absorbing repetitious necessity to take a picture which allows you the ability to remember not the present moment but a past moment.  This becomes your anchor to living what you believe is a full and meaningful life.  The snap shots are objects that seem to posses occult powers and are carried with you in your cell phone,  your very own talisman.

Lowering expectations makes it easier to achieve goals. But is that doing your best? Is that immersing yourself in your photographic subject.  Are your choices of what to make images of dictated by ease of shallow trifles of thoughts moving you away from concentrating on anything.  Are your thoughts and feeling continually moving past the now and making you fill your consciousness with anxiety and the inability to stop and really see your life.

Digging deeper into the scene and beginning to feel the empathy toward the world we live in, is the true purpose of image creation.

Is shooting what you are about to eat a real experience worth sharing? Common sense would tell you to "forget about it!"  Enjoy the food in the moment and then move outward through self awareness to find subjects with meaning for you and others.

The snapshot puts the present moment behind me.  I am separated from the event, my experience is the image taken.  We have transitioned from our own time line and made it possible to live our lives  ow through a mechanical device.  This device is tethered to social media and we gladly expose ourselves to the world, to the collective, to feel we are alive and part of something.   But all this time we are moving further and further away from our lives and the control we once had over it.  We now are obsessed with the game of likes and dislikes as if that will validate our inner mental states, as if that will be a true experience and interaction with anonymous people we have never met.  It is a false god we have become oppressed by it and if we want to get back to a true life, a meaningful life, we must reject this current monster, this leviathan of the look at me mentality.  Don't be an object to be exploited but develop your inner vision become your perspective and keep true to your beliefs and your moral compass.

March 5, 2016


Emerson wrote, "that men should break away from reliance on secondhand information, upon the wisdom of the past, upon inherited and institutionalized knowledge."

When making imagery one must let go of preconceived memories of what makes a good subject.  We are trained at an early age to fit our perceptions into neat little boxes and let go of the wide infinite universe that is waiting to be discovered.  We must open those little boxes and let them free.  Let them go and move into the experience of the now.  Take chances on your subject choices.  Experiment with different lighting and most of all make mistakes.  Mistakes lead to knowledge of yourself and your deep purpose.  Don't be afraid of failure when creating image.  In the film days we were happy to get three or four good images out of a roll of film.

I feel we take images to understand our limited ability to see.  By stopping a moment of time we have an opportunity to return to the image and study it.  This allows us to learn our technical skills but also gives us an insight into our life story.  Family photo albums were that connection to the past through the present image being seen.  But we can't get caught up in our life moments by continually snapping pictures and not living those moments full out.  First hand experience is the necessity for living a truthful life.  Without being present in this world we miss our connections that make us whole, who we are.

Put down the cell phones and move away from the commercial life and begin living your life.  When you are aware of your experiences you will be able to translate those emotions and thoughts into imagery with intent and honesty.

January 30, 2016


We are displayed now as objects, exterior to our internal needs.  To have a cohesive self image we can not live outside ourselves through snap shots, we need to embrace our own inner time line that give us our unique perspectives. Center ourselves through our own views and break the illusion of outer exposure through social media as real.  

Fight to live your own perspective, through your own eyes and not through what others see you as.  Corporate media is a means of commerce, entertainment and violence.  This keeps us in constant stress and anxiety.  We don't look through our own eyes and see the world but we see the the world now through billions of eyes, exterior eyes that keep our lives fragmented with unnecessary images of desire, violence, opulence, hate and a constant police blotter.

We live in a constant badgering of images that make us want to pacify our anxiety with material needs, a buy, buy, buy mentality.

It also makes us susceptible to thinking that once we post our private thoughts or a snap shot of ourselves we must get a like,  an acceptance from the masses and if we don't we begin to feel bad.

This is not living in the world but living through a collective mind that entertains us and makes us feel we are contributing to society. But what are we contributing?

But in reality we are just playing at living through cyber space and this space becomes an extension of our thoughts and cages us in a unbearable necessity to view our lives through a physical exposure.

This has nothing to do with self image because once your image is sent into the collective it is seen as a small minute fragment of the whole and as such is only present for a split second and then reduced into the murky cosmos of information gathering that is mined for trends to sell more products to the masses.

The need to grasp at fame is an illusion perpetuated by the cult of the media adman.

When you focus all your energy to snap shots of your life then you have torn the linear fabric of your life into pieces with no cohesive bond between your moments.

Your focus should be on the relationship you build with the outer world.  Asking questions as to why I react the way I do in this situation and not others.

Why do I think first that a snap shot of an experience is better than to sit still and enjoy this moment.

The answer is Pavlov's dog.  You are being conditioned to use a mechanical device first and experience the moment in a future time by the past image.  Why do we do this?

Capitalism is the pure and simple answer.  You are being trained to think in a collective ad, your moments matter to everybody and should be shown continually.

You are also being dumbed down to think in terms of seconds instead of hours or even days.  This shorten time line speeds up your anxiety and you have to work and do more to keep up with the latest and greatest products that can enhance your status on these corporate media sites.  Information to the masses is nothing more now than trivial, banal sex and violence.  Our knowledge base is being eroded by distraction purposely manipulated to get us thinking in the wrong direction.

This connects all the Media Corporations together, shoot, post and buy.  A never ending circular loop of material that hits us in our desirous brain.  A hyper visual mind does not think but accepts images as a means of communication.  This is fine if you are creating an image with purpose to enhance and reveal your inner design so others can have their own experience through your photograph.

A relationship with an image is significant in that you as the observer have bonded with something in that photograph that means something to you that the creator of the image might not of intended.

But now social media is using this facade of authenticity to undermine the nature of image creation.  Images are personal and are meant to show others in the family, in society, in our culture how we lived, how we live, and we we want to live.

But perception itself is being transformed through manipulation in social media that makes us feel we are part of the show, an integral part of the media experience and therefore we are being acknowledged and accepted as loyal button clickers.

Our lives have been stolen from us and now we experience reality through a mechanical device that never says, enough! Never says wait, think before you post.  Always available 24/7,  always ready with a reply, an ad to soothe the savage beasts.

We are participants in a bigger whole in which we are being primed for buying into the madness of materialism.

What we have now is an all out assault on our human species.  We are being conditioned to think in isolated pockets without a true connection to others with a different perspective.  In my book this is called Fascism.

The future is only endings of moments in the now. We are constantly reacting to stimulus from nature.  This creates our life as we age.  This interaction with the outside world is vital in living a full life as a human being.  It is necessary for us to live in the now and experience this reality through our unique voice.  Make are own imprint on this world and not allow our true lives to be stolen from us by a hand held device.

We are in a regression to a more caveman like experience of reality.  We are being trained to fear the world as a bad place therefore it must be destroyed, not protected.  We are being forced to live our lives through machines that dictate to us who we should be and should want to be.  All glitz with no substance.

Stop, look around, slow down.  Create an image in the slow recognition of your internal landscape that can be perceived with focus on the beautiful world that surrounds us.

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.

December 20, 2015

What is your attitude toward image making?

What are you demanding from the scene that doesn't allow you to get close to the subject?

What is inhibiting your connection to your subject?

These questions need to be answered given the proliferation of images that overwhelm the senses and look and feel like so many others.  Originality is lost through the marketing of corporate media the billions of images now rushing into cyber space to catch a few eyes.

Our lives now seem to go up or down with likes and dislikes.  We are becoming Bi-Polar in our acceptance of outside forces messing with our confidence and purpose in manifesting our inner vision.

Praise easily given.  Not the purpose of the image.  How the photographer made a conscious choice to examine the scene and look for a composition and light that would express his feeling toward the subject and give the viewer a look at another perspective they didn't see.

We must tame the beast, this nature that surrounds us, making us fearful to live our lives independent of the recognition game.  This obsession with celebrity and the quick viral image of likes. We are caught up in the media spin of celebrity and flesh.

Now it seems, we must document every moment taking place within our own ego.  As if our disconnect from the outer world is confining us into an internal drama.  And we feel compelled to expose ourselves to the world of greedy eyes.

We are at a transformative stage in human evolution.  We see the coming annihilation of the earth and this makes us more intense to document our lives for others to witness.  It makes us feel like we are somebody in this human train wreck and thus we feel acknowledged by others.

We exploit the external for a visible extension of our presence in this ever exploding world of eye candy.  All of it distractions, slight of hands, cliches to suppress the masses,
drawing our attention away from experiencing the world as an I and not an object in time and space to be viewed by someone on a social media page.

We substitute images now for the loss of community, of eroding cultural values, of human decency gone awry.

A picture now stands for an active and involved life.

The new mantra is, at least I have been noticed, looked out and perceived for good or bad by a simple click of a mouse.  Not by my own standards of behavior.  But instead, relying on the judgement from an anonymous other.

Our images are like any product made that can be exploited.  In nature, redundancy, doing the same thing over and over again,  leads to an end of that species.  You must adapt in order to survive.

As photographers we must bring to the internet table a feast of personal work that stands out from the proliferation of image fatigue.  That weariness we get when we see the same repetitive images over and over again.  This has to effect the psyche of photographers to join the masses but resist this impulsive behavior, stand your ground and create images worthy of your effort.

November 15, 2015


Susan Sontag, "Photography is a mass art form.  Photography is not practiced by most people as an art.  It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, a tool of power."

We take an image not to relate to nature or other human beings but to capture them in moments in our time line.  We bring into our space and time images from another's moments and this increases our sense of domination.  We attack nature in order to capture for ourselves this feeling of superiority.

We have gone through many manifestations of what photography is and should be.  An art form always.  A means of documenting the ever changing lifestyle of of society, yes.  A way to express the inner landscape of the individual in this ever changing world we live in, of course.  Photography has exposed the horrors of ego, power and greed through out our history and those continuing forces are being photographed as I write this today.

The history of photography is laced with ideas and subjects that have lead us to this point in our photographic story.  We have seen photographers that tried to express their vision through creating the perfect image through visual and technical perfection.

This perfection was seen as a  mental construct of how they wished to impose their will on the external subject. It didn't always lead to a good photograph.

We are now in a more organic form of image making.  Where we approach the subject in a more awkward, self protective mood.  Where we are hesitant and naive in our ability to capture the subject present before us. These images have a more natural feel to them and because of that they appear more authentic.

This informal photography is exploited on social media.  It is the same concept of authenticity that is never authentic.  When your subjects are wearing apparel that is paying the bills on the photo shoot then we have a big problem with real lives, living a life without consumerism as a back drop.

The new editors (beholden to the homogenized outlook of corporate media) that give out assignments are not always looking for original imagery with power and purpose but images from photographers who have a following on social media.  These photographers have an already built in audience to be exploited by advertisers looking to sell products that have that  so called natural, earthy appearance.

This new age of photography is exposing the inherent dilemma of picture taking and picture making.

What is a worthy subject to make images of?

Susan Sontag, "But it is now that there is no inherent conflict between the mechanical or naive use of the camera and the formal beauty of a very high order.  No kind of photograph in which such beauty could not turn out to be present. An unassuming functional snap shot maybe as visually interesting, as eloquent, as beautiful as the most acclaimed fine-art photographs.  This democratizing of the formal standards is the logical counterpart to photography democratizing of the notion of beauty. For photography there is finally no difference, no greater aesthetic advantage between the effort to embellish the world and the counter effort to rip off its mask."

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

When we choose our subjects to make images of are we imitating others or are we seeking our own unique visual voice?

If everything makes a good subject to take pics of then what criteria is used to edit out imagery that doesn't hold meaning or purpose for the viewer?

Do we say if a photo has an audience of one, two, ten or more then it made a connection with someone therefore it is worthy to be called a good photograph?

Thank goodness we are all different.  Even though in today's corporate media it is hard to get individuality in ideas and in imagery reported on.  

But because we are still different from each other and we have different desires, goals, feelings and obsessions, I think we all inherently know what makes a good image and what makes a bad image. 

There cannot be a universal objective standard to judge what constitutes a good image.  We live in a subjective universe and as such, we are in tune to ourselves and our own personal visions and not someone else's.

It is when the mass herd instinct kicks in gear and decides for us what will be acceptable and what isn't,  then we have a collective entity forcing itself upon our uniqueness.

Not every picture snapped can be a worthy image.  There are cultural and societal standards of behavior and expression that is there to protect the innocent from exploitation.

When a photographer has an intense desire to show, through a mechanical device, a unique expression, by building a relationship with the subject and eliminating all the unnecessary details that will detract from their photographic vision, then I feel that is a good start in determining what makes a good image, the photographer's individual purpose.

However, most subjects chosen in todays camera/phone explosion don't meet the standard of a good image. As we move forward in this explosion of snap shots I feel social media is catering to the masses, exploiting their ego's, patting them on the back and reducing the integrity of the photograph as an art form. 

What we see on social media is the collective mind dictating to us what is acceptable and what isn't.

And that is where social media is a detriment to photographic purpose.  Everybody posts everything, creating an effect without purpose and a Pavlov's response to copy and upload to the growing redundancy of life and in so doing creating an atmosphere of human boredom.

Be yourself and explore your own inner landscape to find your path to good photographic expressions.