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| You don't see the car to my left and the road behind me. |
This is one of the
most important of my discoveries in my way of seeing. How much the
camera doesn't show you. I can take a picture with the entire room in
chaos and as long as what is in the frame is perfect no one will be
the wiser. As I created my own online store, this began to come into
sharper and sharper focus. This is all people will know when they
look at a picture or a film: what some one wanted them to see. It is a
fully editable and unreal experience, even when you are the subject
matter that experience that is revealed is so different from what was
actually there in the live edition.
This a huge part of
what John Berger is trying to relay to us in his Ways of Seeing series (see below for links), how difference the
experience of seeing something live is between seeing it through
print. It is almost the same as living your life in box where you
only see what comes in from of the opening, only that still gives one
a live experience. As Berger pointed out even when looking at the
painting on-screen (even if the entire piece is in the frame) you are
still looking at movement that has nothing to do with the painting.
The virtual reality is a living breathing piece of machinery that is
constantly blocking out the real.
Nothing could be more
evident than the loss of reality we are witnessing on a daily basis.
This colonization (to use Naomi Klein's term from No Logo) is becoming profound as the
hyper-reality seeps into our culture not as a passing fad, but by
becoming the culture itself. Our lives are influenced by the images
we see whether moving or still. When a mother reads a magazine, for
instance, and sees a perfectly clean house and a completely model
perfect mother cooking, it becomes something she may think is
obtainable. What she doesn't see are the hundreds of people who are
involved in that image, including a master graphics artist using
Photoshop --once the almost perfected image has been created it goes
to them to create the perfect, the hyper-reality.
Berger does a great
job in illustrating just how this is done by showing the lights and
the hairdressers, as he panned out from his original shots. He also
is quite right about the stillness in standing in front of a painting
and the effect this has as opposed to seeing it in print and
conceptualized within some framed context or even seeing it on the
screen of either television or the internet. "Art for Art's
sake" is what someone may misconstrue on this topic, however it
is more than that, it is Art for our own sake. Take for instance, the
new studies that say children cannot learn by looking at a screen,
they must experience the language in order to learn a concept. It
must be contextualized concretely in the real world.
The bright side to
this all as the world is awakening to the hyper-reality. Many people
have begun to work against it and really look out into the world around them. The studies proving screens aren't
that helpful are solidifying that view that was once only a wild
theory without actual basis. I don't want to vilify cameras, they are
quite useful as long as the dangers of manipulation are exposed. The
methods revealed so those who are working to create the perfect know
it is a hard-fought battle that is truly unobtainable in this world.
Check out Ways of Seeing when you have the chance:
Video #4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XShzabEv8bM 
