reality in a glance

photographers are excellent editors : to take a photograph is to interrupt a narrative & draw attention to the moment it imbues

i'm not sure, but i think this has something to do with photography

The Pencil Story 1972 - 1973

I had this old pencil on the dashboard of my car for a long time. Every time I saw it, I felt uncomfortable since its point was dull and dirty. I always intended to sharpen it and finally couldn't bear it any longer and did sharpen it. I'm not sure, but I think that this has something to do with art.

john baldessari

( that which makes us uncomfortable in life [in reality, in truth or in fact(s)] must be mutable for action alleviates our anxiety )

re: digital (photographic) technologies

ours is the ability to (re)move mountains

medi(t)ating

i like how a picture of a camera
is a picture of the eyelid open.

i like how taking a picture is the act of closing one's eyes.

reduce, re(f)use, recycle

It has been said, a thousand times, that a photograph can say a thousand words. What then? So can an angry laundress! It is much better that a photograph should say fewer words plainly, and those the ones intended.

A photograph like that can save a thousand words.

- David Charles, Commercial & Industrial Photography for the student, the laboratory, the commercial studio & for the industrial workshop 1959

ReConstructions (a begining) [written for/after mary mattingly]

( Farway places seem the closest as remote ideas the ones I hold in my heart. I have been left, lost, cheated & lied to but I have never, ever been betrayed by my own fantasies. In fact some of them have even become ardent realities. )

What do memories mean to a nation that has none ? History is constructed with when the bullet’s outside the barrel & shutter is snapped shut. We edit our definitions with every image pasted in the album or placed in textbooks. The real is demonstrated in facts, the lens is a science & the camera a sword.

( The pictures of me on the first day of school lasted a year into the first grade, for father was taken before graduation & mother opted not to draw the camera. Mine is a childhood forgotten & seldom recorded. I remember naught before this moment. )

Our task is not to make you believe what we believe so much as to make you see exactly what we see. We fight for the right to be represented as to be seen & heard is as to breath. Yet the soldier in Capa’s picture, did he actually fall ? Facts have become unstable & all constructions de . . .

( I want to build myself a new life but I’m afraid to find the words their meanings. )

So we shant speak for truth anymore, & we could never speak for you. Ours is a new state of desire & a government of infinite questioning. Our propaganda will not deliver to you the word as our sentences are made up of yrs & yrs & yrs. We had a dream tomorrow night of the great fires of yesterday.

( This vision is the real of imagination, rumination & literature. I speak of when only when told. For then does not exist only this moment in now. )

We want to talk to you. To hear yr words & breath yr thoughts. We are not here to tell you anymore. We seek only to listen & re record the images & bullets yr own eyes have seen. For histories do not repeat themselves so much as undulate & intertwine. A new text is forming from deep within the mines.

( The time is now. The place is here. The I is we. )

something : things to gaze upon

photographs i made a few years ago