I can’t even…

I can’t even…

Sometimes the world that unfolds in front of my eyes is so mysterious, the notion that I can capture it and have the ability to share it with others feels like a futile pursuit. There is a little pain, also, because that moment will pass and will be lost forever. Where does it go? Come to think of it, I think that’s actually the thing I want to convey.

I’ve been doing panoramic photography for years and I’ve always experienced a feeling of disappointment and some frustration that the result fell short of conveying what I was after. I’m comfortable with my craft and my ability to execute rules of visual grammar so that’s not the issue. When I was younger, I would say that I want to take photos “of nothing”. I think it meant that I was interested in favoring the unexplained being-ness of the phenomenon that manifested into the image artifact, something beyond any story telling. With that in mind, capturing a scene at super high resolution would hopefully cause the texture of the details to overwhelm the overall photo’s surface and transcend into a deeper abstraction conveying the awe of witnessing the scene’s mystery. Ultimately, though, this abstraction was continually thwarted by the fact that the extra resolution offered by the increasing accuracy of the cameras implied the meaning was IN the details rather than beyond them. Also, the technique itself often requires a fair amount of cleanup and tweaking to create a finished product, with the intent of hiding the technical steps that led to its own completion. It purports to present a singular totality of a scene when it is in fact the result of multiple disparate elements stitched together and manipulated to create the impression of continuity.

Rather than adding more detail with the hope that it will create more depth, I want to loosen the semantic mesh and open the way to something beyond the surface of the image, an energy field that is at once elusive and vivid. You don’t know exactly what it is but you know exactly how it feels. The panorama tries to capture a scene but usually ends up conveying its own failure at transmitting the experience of witnessing the real thing. Slow exposures on the other hand, freed from the burden of having to “show the thing”, end up hinting at something deeper: a visual representation of the distinct taste of a feeling imprinted into a memory by the clear signal our stimulated senses received from the scene by our simple presence. I’m not sure how long ago or what day of the week it was, or who was there. In fact, I’m not even sure it wasn’t a dream. But I remember it so clearly!