“The summer issue of Foam Magazine reflects deeply on relationships between photography and reference. Ref. presents eight portfolios which [sic] refer each in their own way to other photos, a specific visual style or language, or to stereotypical visual elements that we recognize from other photographic genres. They are all portfolios that recognize that nothing exists in splendid isolation,” says the introduction.

Consciousness forms within a dynamic social order. Read more…

I had the opportunity to sit down with photographer Ken Schles a few weeks ago to discuss some ideas that had recently been bouncing round my head and how they related to some of the ideas discussed in his books.  We started talking as soon as I arrived at his home, but I wasn’t able to get my recorder out quick enough to catch everything.  Nonetheless, as you’ll see below, we had a long, engaging discussion touching on a whole variety of themes… [I should note that all hyperlinking has been added by me to further some of the points we discussed]

Ken Schles: The evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel’s piece on Edge.org talks about the Internet collapsing different kinds of space. Obviously we know how the Internet collapses physical and economic spaces(brick and mortar commerce vs. e-commerce; the ability to contact people or do work remotely), but Pagel talks at length about how the Internet collapses intellectual space as well. This reinforces what he calls, our “infinite stupidity.” The Internet encourages social tendencies that reinforce infinite stupidities…

But he also notes evolution works intrinsically because of its stupid nature. That evolution creates stupid variations that work or fail in the most unpredictable of ways. And sometimes those stupid “failures” turn out to work so beautifully well in the most unimaginable ways.

Read more…

Both A.D. Coleman and I think the marginalizing of critical writing on photography in the popular press has certain implications and will have effects on a particular kind of photographic practice.

The larger discussion raised here are the effects of an increasingly fragmented discussion in a media environment that operates more on a networked basis rather than a top-down approach that traditional media once provided. With the loss of the authority of the popular critical voice, whither lay context for an uniformed populace? What happens to history (and knowledge thereof) and what exactly constitutes the context that a body of artwork now appears in? Histories seem to be implied or lost altogether in our clipped forum and blog entries—and contexts for discussions become increasingly relational and contextual in a place (the Internet) that has no implicit context. Perhaps our discussions have always appeared in relational contexts, but now the context of our Internet digressions are evermore so slippery with the destruction of any physical context in our atomized communities. Our discussions now seem to exist solely in a relational cloud or fog. History no longer is so linear or didactic (but should it ever have been? Were not its didactic qualities the root source of conflict among so many disagreeing parties?). And to fall into the reverie of metaphor: histories and the contexts for any understanding seem to act more like clouds that move like storms over the landscape of time. They blow this way and that depending on where one stands only to eventually blow over. Some of us are affected by the squalls, and for others it has no effect depending on where one happens to be and the source (or lack of) one’s perspective. Histories and context and the meaning they once provided—easily lost and fleeting as they always have been—seem more easily lost (or fleetingly retrieved) in our networked environment.

Infinite Stupidities:
pt 1: http://nearbycafe.com/artandphoto/photocritic/?p=10954
pt 2: http://nearbycafe.com/artandphoto/photocritic/?p=11107

p.9: The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

There is alway a question about the genesis of a project. Where did the idea come from/what were the underlying circumstances that led to the creation? …I’m going to answer that one first, yes, to get it out of the way, but more importantly, to establish a baseline—for an actor it might be akin to the question: “What’s my motivation?” Well, for Oculus I was motivated. When the world is slipping out from under your feet all kinds of motivations arise. I wasn’t suspecting to be making this book at this time, but it took hold and suddenly gained a momentum of its own until it obliterated all else. As creators we work under less than ideal conditions and situations… But we work and our work inevitably reflects the conditions and situations we find ourselves in. Sometimes we make the work simply because its all we can do in the face of things.

Thinking about the Nabokov quote was the start of a journey that lead to Oculus. There it is in black and white: A sentence that aptly describes existence. A metaphor of light staring straight back at me.

The real start of Oculus was neither inspiring nor auspicious. Difficult really. But who hasn’t been having a difficult time of it these last few years? And I can’t see that the world will getting more hospitable moving forward. The evidence counter indicates that things will be getting easier. But its also a matter of being up to the challenge, no? Let’s not go quietly into that night.

In true photography book perusal fashion let’s start with an except from the back of the book: some text from A Personal Note that is somewhat hidden in a fold-out tucked into an end page of Oculus”

“Oculus started with a question—a question about images and the way they function. It started with finding myself in a particular circumstance and confronting, what was for me, a particularly difficult time. Oculus is also a direct outgrowth of ideas I explored in my last book, A New History of Photography. In that book I discussed at length an observation that my pictures, usually made in a ‘documentary style,’ often reflected images I already had in memory. Oculus investigates the phenomena of images in memory as well, but looks at the subject from a very different perspective.

For me, this project started in March of 2009, while researching a talk for ICP in New York City. (See it in its entirety.) In that talk I quote an article that started with the opening lines of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. The author connected the metaphor of light to consciousness and memory (New York Review of Books, Michael Greenberg, Just Remember This, December 4, 2008). I had been thinking about memory (and forgetting) more concretely around this time, as I was in the throes of confronting a troubling situation involving my two elderly parents. They had both been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and were insisting on taking care of themselves in their own home, with as little help or outside intervention as possible. At first this seemed empowering: a bid for continued self-sufficiency. But they were isolated and argumentative. Still refusing most intervention as an attack on his autonomy, my father became increasingly dangerous to himself and to those around him (driving while functionally blind, for instance), as well as violent and abusive—never mind the house falling into disrepair and my mother’s diabetes, stroke and broken nose. Around this time, my wife was diagnosed with a serious viral infection, which she had been carrying from before we met, over 25 years ago. She began a debilitating course of treatment that would last nearly a year, with a forty percent chance for a positive outcome. The children and I were tested. Luckily, these tests proved negative. By this time, the photographic industry was fully into its wrenching, economically disruptive shift towards digital media. When the economy fell in the wake of the worldwide financial crises, business relationships I had cultivated (some for nearly 20 years) disappeared. Industries vanished. I hunkered down and moved my workspace to my home. Friends were having their troubles too. In that we were not alone. It felt like the solidity behind the structure was vanishing, but on the surface, much appeared the same. We took the kids to school, sent them on play-dates, and did the grocery shopping and the household chores. But there was a hollowing out. My wife’s hair filled the drain when she showered and she struggled greatly not to sleep through most the weekends, although we both still took great joy in our children and delighted in their energy and interests. We soldiered on. Let it be said that throughout, my wife missed not a day of work. It wasn’t all gloom and doom: We cooked elaborate meals for ourselves, and when my wife was up to it, we invited friends. But when our car was hit and destroyed while parked near our house, we didn’t bother to replace it. In retrospect it is of little wonder that I should have been so moved by the Nabokov quote. I saw an abyss opening up. I thought about the images I held centering on my peers, my family, my work and myself. I was struck with the realization that the images I held, the images in my head, had become separated from the reality they once portrayed. I was taken off guard that my images could be so defining—not only in relation to who I was and how I saw the people that I loved, but also how those images colored my perceptions, swayed my judgments and influenced my actions. I had to take stock; my images no longer held up.

The first Image in Oculus.

Somnambulism: I started to make the photographs of sleeping children with the help of their parents while the Nabokov quote was firmly planted in the back of my mind. Meanwhile, the world, as I once knew it, had unraveled. I still acted as if things were as they had been. I was the sleepwalker moving through the bedrooms of these still and silent children, all tucked in their beds. Eventually, I came to realize that seeing was, in many ways, only ‘believing.’

To look at my wife and me, few would have guessed our difficulties. We kept quiet about what was going on, and it was easy to believe our world was on course. ‘Things’ looked pretty much as they—I was going to say ‘always had’—but that simply isn’t true—there was never an ‘always had.’  And as I write this I think: The images we use to describe our lives are legion; they are nuanced and layered as they mimic and mock life itself.

It is my hope that Oculus gives pause and becomes a vehicle to think upon the rôle that memory and metaphor play in constructing images we use to describe the fleeting nature of experience—and life itself. Attempts to unravel these essential mysteries illuminate what makes us most human.

My journey started when I compared my experience to a range of concepts both philosophical and anthropological, some current and some whose origins date to the earliest of antiquity. They all represent links in a chain of causality, of questions, of thoughts and ideas as old as civilization itself. And yet these voices were as illuminating and eloquent as any I had heard.

I didn’t come to this project lightly. I came to Oculus while thinking through difficulties I faced in my personal life.

…”

About Oculus

We infuse the world we encounter with meaning, with social and symbolic significance based on the value we place upon representations we share. This, perhaps, is the irony of our conceptualizations: We make and share images so that we may know the world.

Oculus takes you on a personal philosophic journey that points beyond the shadow-play of images. It is a meditation on the nature of perception and existence in the gray light of this world.

Oculus, a photographic book about images, memory, and the metaphor of light.