blog.artwells.com

I’ve annoyed people by repeating the statement ‘You’ve got to destroy in order to create.’ The number is probably higher than the number who have annoyed me with it. It’s not just that it’s a platitude, but one that seems to excuse way too much. Probably most importantly, in most cases of creation those things that are left behind after destruction, and left behind by the grand, justifying creation, carry with them the greatest invitation.

A bridge is destroyed in being replaced. The tangle of remaining rebar waits to be shipped off to be further destroyed, reshaped and reused for other productions utterly unintended and possibly yet unimagined.

I remember doing an experiment in college that demonstrated that light behaved as if it were composed of particles. Then we demonstrated that, no, it’s actually composed of waves without a medium. Of course, it’s not that simply confusing. Nonetheless, it was a great provocative experience.

When I see something that appears as a symbol of something, a face in the pattern on the ceiling, a cloud shaped like a ship, a glove waving hello from the gutter, I consider it to be what it symbolizes and that completely, at least for a moment. As far as I can tell, I find what I am looking for by imagining what I am looking at.

When letters are arranged in words, I read them. When I can’t find words, I’m invited to assemble my own.

All of photography is a flattening, and that’s probably true of all memory, perception and expression. I lack a lot of skill in photography — I keep my camera on its auto settings. Though I have professional-grade photo manipulation skills and software, I don’t even crop my snapshots, adjust levels, or even brighten/darken, even in the worst cases. They are what I saw or they are deleted.

I wish I could say that I do this as a way of artistically confining my expression, like a poet choosing meter or a musician using only a single octave and key. I just haven’t learned to see yet. At least, I haven’t learned to see well enough to move on to some other level of expression or moment.

I usually photograph flat surfaces, stuff that is already so close to 2D that I needn’t worry at all about how its light will collapse onto the sensor. I see it, I point the camera at it, and I push a button knowing now that about half the time I get what I see on a tidy SD card. When I started that was less than once in a hundred photo. Yay me!

I’m moving on a bit, but I don’t like it. I love this photo, though. It’s a wall, freshly-painted blue, meeting a sidewalk that was poorly masked. It flattened perfectly, deceptively simply. Only by looking closer is the other dimension apparent. On that unseasonably cold morning, with a head full of hate and a yawning spirit, that is what this wall gave me. A fantastic unfolding world, comforting in its smooth complexity.

Environmentalism is popular. Regardless of this popularity’s value as an approach to the problems of pollution and energy conservation, it creates a cultural space for valuing what we leave behind.

We don’t throw things away. We hand them off.

I actually spend relatively little time looking down when I walk, even though most of my photographs are taken of low things. Those things on the ground experience a filtering process. They are dropped or discarded. They get broken and crushed. If they are valuable, they get picked up. What remains is free of purpose and meaning. I can give to each thing a meaning free from personal utility or value.

I need to spend more time looking down into myself.

During a particularly grim commute, I looked up in the rain and saw cardboard hearts dangling from a telephone pole. I counted four.

This morning I walked by and counted six. Looking at the first photo, I can see now that there were more than four. The others were just hidden. Looking at this later photo, I can see that there are probably more. I’ve been needing to remind myself that there are these hidden heart hanging up there.

I know that what I see is real, or rather that I really see. What I determine, assume, or conclude about what I see–that’s where I start to loose confident. When I start making statements about what things mean, I get genuinely lost. My ideas get confounded with prejudices and desires.

When it doesn’t matter much, being lost can be fun.

When I see a spoon, I feel safe in knowing it’s a spoon. When I see me reflection stretched on it, I feel at ease knowing that it is a reflection of me. When I imagine that because I am seeing myself stretched in a spoon I should try to see myself reach beyond my usual boundaries, it is just a fun mess.

Most of the inspiration I get from streetfinds can attributed to distraction. I’m thinking about a puzzle or a problem, and am trapping my mind in thinking the same way over and over. Then I start looking around.

Seeing this shoe mark a step on a path in transition helped me realize that what I was thinking about was on a level that would soon end and that I could to step up once and continue, or stand still. The steady climbing I was doing wasn’t going to work.