Documenting our Landscape

An illusion of reality? Arnold Newman is on the right track. Another way to look at this idea is that the photograph is a supplement for the origins it is attempting to capture. If the natural world exists, an ontic question bordering on the metaphysical, it is always already not present. When witnessed by a human being what remains is a trace, neither the world itself nor the complete remembrance of that world. When a photograph is made a brief flash of time is captured, freezing an instant, 1/500th of a second for example, thereby creating an artifact of that encounter with the existential moment. The photographic image acts as a supplement for the trace being neither the moment itself nor the trace but acting to link the two in a tangible and interpretative manner.