I am looking at the light move across the water, how many photons are here? Scattered like pins from the smallest stack. The empty heart of something as a beautiful wave that is the essence of lives.
Scattered back, flowing through and around us all as milk.
This project is an inquiry into the visual using photographs of people who are unknown to me from online auctions, objects and written works - this is part of my ongoing PhD research practice.
Using the term 'capture' when describing a process of continuous consumption is interesting because any photons involved in the processes of photography are destroyed during the making of a photograph. For instance, the photons that enter the retina are converted into electrochemical reactions and processes whilst the photons that enter the camera are absorbed into various light-sensitive mediums. The darkroom process similarly uses photons available to create prints. These processes have three different 'batches' of electromagnetic energy that need to be consumed to create just one photograph, not taking into account any non-recorded processes that goes into the making of any photograph - selection, reconnaissance, looking around a subject, deciding on lighting options etc. As such photographs are not the light from one moment in time captured but a series of photonic consumptions, compounded together by tools and physical actions created for mark making. Breaking down this process by altering found images exposes this series of events.
Piercing the eyes of the subjects exposes the image as a material object, applying a prism to each one allows an abstract view from each side of the photograph. This questions possible assumptions about what we see, what we think we see and what realities we can experience via the visual. Add this to the conditions of the cameras invention, its colonial and positivist history, as well as ideas of objectivity and 'truth' which together challenge this system of ubiquitous 'objective record'. Language around seeing and belief is unstable, while truth and evidence is at best subjective guesswork. Statements that reinforce truth such as 'seeing is believing' reveal firm links between language concerning vision, the visual and the apparatus we use to also reveal the truth of things.
Nothing is how we see it and we see almost nothing.
Does the camera help to provide/reinforce a human deceit of truth? Does sight provides evidential concreteness of human experience and existence that denies our vulnerability on the universal scale. Does it convince us to be our own universal centre? To place importance on our own incorrect experiences of the temporal as true and help us to ignore certain truths that could be transformative? Truth, surveillance and the self ... this needs a re-evaluation if we are to begin the journey of planetary care and transformation that is required to change our current trajectory toward destruction.
Stop looking at yourself.
