lines and planes is all

This photo, or really this sequence of three photos, prompted some of the tried and true questions and thoughts that play like a broken record in my mind and here on the blog.

1. How do we make sense of the world? How do we get from point A to point B in an intentional way? How do we make sense of the overwhelming amount of sensory data that hit us?

We filter it out; we ignore virtually all of it.

A wheat field. We don't see the the wheat. We hardly see the wheat field.

2. That's basically what I try to do with my photography: To notice what I normally filter out. To actually look. (Photography has dramatically altered my reality in ways far larger than what I'll write here; perhaps I'll return to this theme in a later post. My orientation of all of life shifted in some ways when I started taking photos, and not all for the better. Arguably a lot of it for the worse.)

Since I've started taking photos, I'm far far better at resisting the cruel tyranny of functionality to notice a thing for what it is visually--shape, color, contrast. I adore shapes, and as I've said a thousand times before I swoon in yearning and pleasure and sorrow from chiarscruo. Colors are not my strong suit.


3. Then I tyrannize over you by forcing you to look at what I see. Which is sorely disappointing to both of us. You're disappointed because as often as not there's nothing there in my photos apart from shapes and colors and contrast of light and dark. No functionality at all. And what's the point of THAT?!

No point. No point at all. Not really.

No message apart from what is evoked by the image itself--mostly mood.

And of course I'm disappointed because you resist the tyranny, as you must.


4. All the clean surfaces and sharp angles and perfect lines of these past few photos just make me so sad. They are so depressing. How do you hook or attach your soul to these planes? You can't. The soul just slips off of them and slides into space, and there you are looking in from the outside in a weird inverted version of Dante's Inferno.

Not good.

5. I wasn't made for photography; I was made for painting. Were I to paint my tyranny would be far greater than it presently is. And yet I can't paint at all.

You're welcome.