The photographic process, whether digital or analog, fixes light and fixes time. When we photograph, when we are photographed, we solidify and are solidified. We do not photograph things, but light and time. We make physical the ephemeral.
We exist in, through and of significance – the ‘tree’ in my head looks different than the ‘tree’ in yours – and so I see every ‘tree’ somewhat differently than you do. Our realities, therefore, are significant, which is to say, are unique according to our individual significant inputs. But significance ultimately arises from a reality that is outside of, or prior to, our comprehension. Without external input, we are unmoored.
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Harper: I don't understand this. If I didn't ever see you before, and I don't think I did, then I don't think you should be here, in this hallucination, because in my experience the mind, which is where hallucinations come from, shouldn't be able to make anything up that wasn't there to start with, that didn't enter it from experience, from the real world. Imagination can't create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions… Am I making sense right now? … So when we think we've escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives, it’s really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable. Don’t you think it’s depressing?
Prior: The limitations of the imagination?
Harper: Yes.
Prior: It’s something you learn after your second theme party: It’s All Been Done Before.
(from Tony Kushner's „Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes; Millennium Approaches“)
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In this way, the photograph's irreversible materiality, its existence as a thing itself, provides an escape from the limitation of the imagination. It may be, rather, the seeding and the impulse to the imagination.
Aaron Krieger
Chicago, IL
Chicago, IL