Sunrise Near McHenry Dam ~ Fall 2009
A photograph is what it appears to be. Already far from reality because of its silence, lack of movement, two-dimensionality and isolation from everything outside the rectangle, it can create another reality, an emotion that did not exist in the true situation. It’s the tension between these two realities that lends it strength.
Richard Kalvar
Photographs capture that which the photographer attempts to capture. The creative experience is one in which one attempts to re-present a spontaneous or original image in such a way as to evoke a response, either positive or negative but never neutral, in a potential viewer. Yet it is not difficult to lose confidence in one’s spontaneity of our own thoughts or actions. How can I be sure I am not re-producing something I have done before or have acquired without embedding that approach as my own vision? How can I be assured that the motivation that inspired the shot in the first instance did not disappear moments before I snapped the shutter, having lapsed into something like memory? How can I be assured that the trace I capture is a kind of mental record or even a re-production of my vision. It seems that the apparent instanteneity of the photograph is a most elusive phenomenon.
Creating the photographic image is an exercise in the deconstruction of the space around us. The photographer must examine his or her taken-for-granteds as one visually explores an object to be photographed. Hundreds of decisions must be made, some technical while others are aesthetic. Each decision one makes changes forever the vision one sees in the real world of the lived experience and transfers to the digital receptor something other than the exteriority of the other being photographed.
One is entitled, rather, obligated, to inquire about what is left outside the frame of the image being re-presented as a visual endgame. One is obligated to ask about what is said and left unsaid in the visual object that we call a photograph. One must wonder about how the image reflects cultural values or rejects those values, encompasses or repudiates the idea of the ideal. Additionally, one must embrace the discomfort, deferral of meaning, ambiguity, and the possibility of confusion created by the questions, by the interrogation of the image because without those contra-feelings there would be no image of any value.
Looking at the image in this post one is, I hope, put to the test of interrogation. The image, while having an origin in the natural world, is, in fact, what used to be called a double-exposure in the not so distant past when film prevailed. The image combines to proximate views of the same place thereby creating an almost surreal view of the early morning sunrise on this small creek feeding the Fox River around a half mile to the West. The image provokes a series of questions about the nature of the real and the ideal so as to place an observer in a circumstance of ambiguity and, perhaps, discomfort. The answers to the questions raised, it seems to me, elude quick or easy responses. One must hold on to the confusion for some time before one may draw tentative albeit fluid conclusions about how one thinks about the image.
Rather than think about the tensions created by a photograph as negative conditions for construction of meaning from the photograph, I want to suggest that it is precisely these tensions that help destroy the binary oppositions of good and bad, ideal or not, embracing or rejecting in such a way as to be more inviting and tolerant of one’s own relationship to the place of imagery in one’s own thought process.
The Sunrise Near McHenry Dam ~ Fall 2009 by Roger Passman, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
