Translating the world

ld 35, originally uploaded by crumplestiltskin.

When I’m sitting photoshopping away, as I seldom seem to do any more, I realise that what I’m seeing on the screen is not a horizon, bricks, eyes or fingers. It’s bits and pixels, spots of cyan and magenta, 1s and 0s spewing out in a matrix, a language of colour and light that my eyes have grown to understand. But when I look out of my window and see a real horizon, how is that any different from a jpeg? Dimensions aside, all I’m seeing is particles and matter, reflecting light in different ways, arranged into shapes I’ve learnt to call a horizon. One thing I can never know is if you translate those shapes and colours into the same language as me.

Is my blue your pink?

Life and things

br 15, originally uploaded by crumplestiltskin.

Sometimes I just feel like part of the scenery. How can you engage with the world when you are the world? How can something physical capture anything more than the physical?

In the world, life and objects meet, interact, happen. In a picture, life can never exist. Everything is an object, for everything is colours and lines on a 5×7′ piece of glossy paper.

I touch my desk, a book, a mug of tea. I’m alive, moving, choosing. I am me, rippling and humming with facets. But in a photograph I’m just as static and inhuman as any object. All flat in lines and a present past. All dead but seeming real. And there’s half a heartbeat of me, with that thought in my head, words frozen mid-flow in the space of my mind like juggling balls. Feeling angry, disappointed, satisfied, deceptive, victorious? You’d never know if I was one or none or all of them at once; I’m not just alive, I’m beyond alive, unreachable, unseeable, unthingable.

Capturing experience

j 20, originally uploaded by crumplestiltskin.

So often a camera falls short of capturing beauty, because beauty isn’t just something you can see with your eyes. Beauty is an experience, a feeling, a state of mind, an everything. Photos can only represent a fraction of all that; a single dimension.

When I took photos of a sunrise in Jersey, I was surprised the visual beauty came through as well as it did. Yet however it may seem from the pictures, a viewer still can’t grasp exactly what it was like to be there.

The bitingly cold air, the sand muddy and dense like half-set concrete, dipping and bumping, wet feet, seagulls screaming, the smell of seaweed waking up, but most of all, the neverending panorama that even a fisheye lens can’t take in. 360 degrees of stones and sea and sand. Eyefuls of sky stretching out to everywhere. Two hours of chameleon clouds, rising from navy to blue, purple, pink, orange, gold, lemon, streaked with steely grey, blinding white sun breaking through. Not just the sky; the sand itself, wet and receptive, took on every colour like a folded inkblot, punctuated by rocks and lumps.

That 120-minute-long movement, where every colour changes imperceptibly every second, is impossible to record in a single shot. The smells, the feelings, the sounds; they’re complements to that image that now exist only in my mind and in my memory and that no amount of words can equal.

What I mean is, if these pictures look like 100% beauty, the reality was more like ten times that. These images may look beautiful, but nothing compares with actually being there and experiencing it. But equally, experiencing it is nothing unless you see the beauty in it.

Black and White

nhc 131, originally uploaded by crumplestiltskin.

“Ladies and gentlemen, observe the contrast between age and youth, black and white, light and shadow. Admire too the subtle contrast of shadows – the tones on the white woman’s face are almost an inversion of those on the black woman. How clever that these women appear to be so different yet are drawn together in a celebration of diversity.

Equality manifests itself in the image’s composition. The tops of the women’s heads are in line, the curved shapes of their headdresses echo each other elegantly and the diagonal sweep of brocade shows a harmonious dynamism. At right angles to this, two more diagonal planes are established by the eyeline and their uplifted jawlines, drawing the viewer deep into the image.

Yet despite this structural display of balance, there is a reminder of historical inequalities suggested by the harsh shadow cast onto the black woman’s arm by the white woman’s costume. Perhaps more importantly, the white woman is the dominant subject, being in focus, in front, and taking up most of the frame. Is this really the happy, diverse image it seemed to be at first sight, or is it something more sinister?”

This could be interpreted as a very meaningful image. Symbolic. Metaphorical. A sign of our times.

But it’s just a snap I took at the Notting Hill Carnival. Where did all this deep meaning come from? It wasn’t like I got them to pose with their heads in line and a “diagonal plane drawing the viewer deep into the image”. It was complete chance. And for that reason I don’t think it’s justfied to assign any sort of meaning to it. Yes, it might happen to illustrate a particular political or moral point, but I can assure you that I wasn’t thinking about that when that shutter released. Perhaps I’d be a better photographer if I was.

I’m not going to trick you into thinking I believe all my pictures have some kind of profound, innate meaning, because very few of them do. Maybe it’s best that way – it makes the audience think more rather than giving them messages on a plate.