On vision

I.

If photography is used as a tool to make real a subconscious world, both materially and experientially, then the actors chosen are also living characters within one’s personal netherworld. And in the psychology of dreams where every such actor is a manifest of one’s secret self, so are the actors chosen for the lens.

We speak of the real search of the mind’s eye, where vision begins to be crystallized. Where one’s vision leads the way and the camera and the self have no choice but to follow and serve.

And then, when found, the image is formed, materialized into it’s true incarnation, replete with frame, composition, length, breadth, depth, metaphor, code, symbols and significance.

II.

From the beginning, the true discovery of photography was the revelation that lay hidden within a scene that is not revealed by the eye’s gaze. Historically in the most minute details of great structures and the steps of a horse at a full gallop.

III.

Obsession. An event that becomes a pivotal point in one’s nature. So pivotal in fact, that the rest of one’s life is spent in recreation of some form of that very same event. The worrying of a wound yet unhealed.

Photography is to be obsessed. It is to continually prod, stroke, puncture, cajole the same sensitive spot to the point of ultimate culmination or dissatisfaction.

It is the working of the subconscious, the realm beneath the rationale that precedes deconstruction and understanding. It is through following this impulse that we find our answers and the quest comes to an end.

IV.

I feel frozen in grief. Like time has stopped still and my heart remains in the same state of juvenile mourning that it entered when I was 12. I am that child. I nurse and try to run away from the same blistering sadness. I am the same as I ever was.

“My whole nature was so penetrated by the grief and humiliation, that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I… wander desolate back to that time in my life.” ~ Charles Dickens

V.

Muse. I write words and hurl them into the public maw, hoping you will find them. You, with your own life, with your own friends, your own lovers. And I am left free to my own devices, my giant imagination. So I write, so I photograph, transcendent fire arrows in the dark.

You know this would never work if you were actually with me. I wouldn’t have to make these messages, wrapped in metaphorical code, cased in glass and flung to the waves. I’d just whisper to you and perhaps even then, you’d never truly know the continent of my heart. We would be held apart by the same insurmountable alps that other intimate couples discover in the journey towards each other.

It is within those messages that is written as plain as such humanity can be plain. What I fear. What I love. What obsessive winds buffet me from shore to seemingly random shore.

Muse. All this for you.