Seeing What's Not There

Photography is a way to look for things that aren't visible--or rather aren't visible in the way we collectively see the world. Cameras are an apparatus or tool, just as musical instruments are tools that make certain music possible. A guitar is more harmonic than a violin, for example, so it can produce music that isn't "visible" for a violin.

When I'm out with an SLR as opposed to just a smartphone, I am more focused on taking photographs, and I am looking for them as if they are invisible. You have made a concerted effort to use the SLR, so you are more on the hunt--as opposed to grazing or sampling with a smartphone.

As I was looking at photographs taken by Robert Adams, particularly the photos taken in 1968 in Eden Colorado, a new exurbia that was emerging, which Adams saw as perhaps Robert Smithson or Michael Heizer would have seen it. They saw it as being entropic. Smithson maintained a deeply pessimistic and dystopian view of modernity, believing that the energy of the present was winding down and that the future would be a post-apocalyptic landscape of decay and collapse. He viewed industrial ruins—such as the "dead zones" of New Jersey—not as failures, but as "new monuments" that symbolized the end of the illusion of progress. Adams saw it the same way. He said, “After people live awhile in a place to which they’ve laid waste, it gets to be easy to hate a great many things. Including themselves. And anything green that tries to rise again.” 

This music is generated with AI from my lyrics derived from a dream, which I think has a "Wichita Lineman" "vibe" to it and nicely contrasts an arid bareness with water imagery.

I was at a shallow pond or the shallow shore on a lake where the water was clear. I waded into the water and had the idea of coming back at night and shining a light on a large stone in the water to take a photograph of it.

 

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Excerpt Library (Art History and Criticism): "Discuss the work of Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, and Walter De Maria"