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Windows ~ Merry Christmas A photograph is neither taken nor seized by force. It offers itself up. It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos. Henri Cartier-Bresson I was in Rome, looking out of the bathroom window, when I saw this combination of windows staring me in [...] Living in the ordinary world, the stuff of living both in the present and locally. One does not live in the world, one lives in this world, the world that surrounds, envelops, the world of family, of friends, of jobs. One only lives within the limitations of one’s local context. Those of us lucky enough to travel know that visiting another place, be that place a few miles from one’s home or another country learn soon enough that one is merely visiting. It is impossible to be a native member of a culture into which one was not born. Reality is dependent upon the observer not the observed. Point of view is dependent on one’s proximity to an object being observed as well as the angle of observation of the observer. One way of thinking about this is to imagine one’s self at a baseball game. Let’s say you were sitting directly behind home plate about ten rows up in a box seat. Now suppose your best friend is sitting directly opposite you in center field. While each is watching the same game (the object remains the same with or without an observer) you both see a very different game unfold before your eyes. Even the persons sitting directly in front, directly behind and to each side of you will see a slightly different game played out, though not as dramatically as the game your friend observes from center field. How much does a camera have to do with the photograph. At once, everything and nothing. The camera is the instrument that captures the image either on film or, more recently, on a digital sensor. Beyond that capture does the camera contribute to the success of a photograph or is the success of the image contingent on the vision of the photographer? 251 km North of Adelaide, South Australia, outside of Port Germain, SA, a wooden jetty, booked as the longest pier in South Australia is now an attraction for tourists. Near the end of a motor tour of the Flinders Ranges, returning to Adelaide, we stopped to look at this jetty extending as far as the eye can see into the ocean. The stopover was designed to be a few minutes but, to the exasperation of our driver, I spent nearly an hour photographing in the area. We arrived at low tide causing the jetty to look even longer than it is. Some 1700 meters in length, the pier was used to load wheat harvests on ships until the 1940’s but now draws tourists to South Australia. When Frampton says that the photograph is taken out of the infinite cinema, is he suggesting that the photographer, through some secret of alchemy, somehow removes reality from the scene being photographed and reduces that four dimensional universe into two? Does he mean that the photographic image somehow captures and retains the essence of a place, a thing, an object of the photograph, that the act of reducing the image to the flat plane somehow is like putting the Jin in the bottle? The claim voiced by Frampton is, hard to swallow on a number of counts, yet, it is a claim made quite often. Because the camera as tool allows one to capture clarity, a sharpness of focus of the object being photographed, does not translate into a clarity of subject matter contained within the four corners of the image. What makes a photograph so intriguing is the very interpretative nature of the image itself. What appears clear on the surface becomes fuzzy as the layers of meaning and intent are pealed away leaving one with the bare image, the image subject to interpretation that makes it interesting from the beginning. I invite you unconditionally to look at my photographs, at the images I create because I am absolutely passionate about what I choose to photograph and wish to share my vision with you. I call for you to look at my images, explore with me these things that matter most to me. I encourage you to see the world through my eyes, through the trace that re-presents the world as I, and only I, experience it; in doing so to add your own experience to mine. I summon you to spend time with my images, to explore the nuances of color, of light and of shadow, to deconstruct the image by interrogating that which I re-present to you as an image. In short, I challenge you to think about the images I post and, in so doing, make them a part of your own lived experience. |
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