limit

I am always thankful when asked if I can photograph a family event or a wedding. There is a look of disbelief when I say that I am not that kind of photographer and when I respectfully decline. Recently, someone asked why I would not photograph events and limit myself to film. A limit describes a value as a function as it approaches a maximum amount of something. When art has a limit it is close to reaching its specified point, it has been restrained. I have yet to reach a limit of expression or application of my creative, emotional, or imaginative boundary.

The philosopher John Searle proposed a thought experiment that challenges the notion of consciousness. A person is in a room filled with boxes Chinese symbols with a rulebook in English. The person does not know or understand Chinese. A message is passed under the door. The person forms a new message using the rulebook and corresponding Chinese characters, and passes the message back under the door. The person outside the room understands the message and forms an opinion that the person inside the room is intelligent and understands Chinese. The posits of Searle’s argument is that the person inside the room is performing symbol recognition (syntax), like a computer or artificial intelligence, without the deeper understanding or meaning (semantics). The core finding of the Chinese Room experiment is; patterns in, and within symbols, is not the same as consciousness. The duality of the experiment is the same thing in art, wether I am a film photographer or an event photographer, art, and its notion and implications, just as consciousness, is subjective.

Love Only is a street photograph where the sign is in syntax and a person has applied the word “love,” making the photograph an urgent missive. The photograph was taken on film and printed in the darkroom on silver gelatin resin coated paper. We are taught controls of left turns and right turns through symbols. The same controls can be applied to constraints…authority, power, privilege, and rights, prescribed in religious, political, & societal bounds…restrictions and limits on the size, amount, or even direction of some things that are permissible or possible. In this time of uncertainty, some people are not treating people kind or decent. People are applying their constraints, and understandings of their boundaries, to others. Kindness and decency shows a deeper understanding and meaning of this shared notion of life. Art, living, and love, are consciousness and are limitless.

all my friends got broken wings
think they will never fly again

i aint no king of crows
i just know

the sky is always falling
love is always calling

love only 

blue

it is not that I can explain it

it is that I cannot explain why

in the back of my mind

music to be murdered by

ordained crows

slow and regal

take flight

midnight

moonlight

collecting visual narrative

 serving platter, overhead projector, and placed on silver gelatin photo paper during enlargement

"Character is like a tree, and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing." - Abraham Lincoln, as quoted by Noah Brooks, in Scribner's Monthly, August 1879 

collaborative images

 "We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master" - Ernest Hemingway

in love, in war

a magic lantern slide poem, presenting the follow spots used in conjunction with slide poems

 

chapter 2. in war

Royal Aerial Steam Carriage Regiment (Mechanized)

 

 

 

 

 

 

follow spot

In trying to find a handheld lightweight projector, the use of a flashlight Pordell seemed like the way to go, the hard part was to consider the size of the slide to convey the meaning of the visual image to correlate to the poem. The light source is a LED shop light from Wallymart and takes 3 AA batteries. The condenser is from the Simmons Omega B22 negative enlarger with the two lenses convexity facing each other and the separator is a cut down corrugated aluminum piece from a Simmons Omega D2 enlarger. Added some chaffing rubber material that I generally use for the rim of my stereopticons.    

 

 

Then cut down some threaded rods to get the right size for coupling/ sandwiching the condenser lens housings between the workshop lights to the wooden framed magic lantern slides.

PVC piping coupler was used for the lens mount and PVC pipe for the lens barrel. The lens object from the Simmons Omega B22 is the supplemental condenser lens. The magic lantern wooded frame was removed from the condenser and a aluminum metal duct-work tape was used to adhere the PVC lens mount and then placed back and tightened. The PVC lens barrel used the same aluminum tape to adhere the objective lens.

pyromaniacs

 

 

the valley, a canopy of clouds. we continue to destroy our destiny by using the inferences that my personal destination is my obligation and anyone else’s is my destruction. protect my queen at all costs, my god will save you, a candle in my window to guide you. everything is not everything, nothing in this world belongs to me. fear and warfare are based in the deception and the imagination of some, and the silence of others, fighting fools and fighting monsters are both battles fought at sea.

the clouds are broken, the night sky becoming clear. the roaming lamps of fisherman blend with fireflies and the reflections of the night stars. what if this is impossible, if it is nothing, if not nothing, from nothing, a place where we once shared voices, singing, dancing, what if it is all for not, dancing to imaginary music with imaginary people, for those who watch? I hope my cause of death, is not the cause of me, nor the cause of you…just before midnight, donning masks…we burn the fleets of ships in port, and by morning, we will be silhouettes in the rising sun, dancing and singing, the smoke, a canopy of clouds.