Many oriental cultures make a distinction between two ways of looking - 'hard eyes' and 'soft eyes'. When we look with hard eyes, we see specific details with sharp focus, but we don't see the relationships between different details as well. When we look with soft eyes we see the relationships between everything in our field of vision, but with this softer focus, we don't see all the details as clearly. It's possible to look in two ways at once.
Photography extends our perception allowing us to see and experience more - second hand.
The primary mode of experiencing images is non-verbal... but once it's brought out into the light of the day, what's understood by the subconscious intuitive mind can be better grasped by the conscious rational mind. Aligning the two produces powerful results.
I'd say seeking is one of the fundamental artistic impulses. Art is about discovery. The medium is not the message.
Through the experience of art, the powers of perception and transformation can be awakened, in both those who create it and those who re-perceive it.
We talk about the vulnerability involved in sharing our work publicly. I don't think we talk enough about the real vulnerability involved in making art; if we truly engage the process we are changed by it.
While many conclusions are drawn... the process of asking questions is more important than the answers... an ongoing process of discovery.
It takes asking many questions from many perspectives to truly understand something.
Color is a powerful physical, biological, and psychological force. When less color and less intense color is present, trace amounts and subtle differences become highly significant and are strongly felt.
The act of creation, making anything, is an alteration. We cannot eliminate the medium or ourselves from the process, and both are limited. We create decisive moments by devoting our time and attention to specific things. This is the greatest gift we can give anyone or anything - pieces of our life.
The best plans evolve.
A good question has many answers.
Education, or enrichment, is a dynamic, evolving, lifelong process. Every time you look, sensitively with awareness, your vision grows.
My mantra is, 'This or something better.'
Seeing creates growth.
Different people can photograph the same things with the same tools and create such different images.
Photography is much more about elimination than inclusion. The images we make with a lens typically eliminate ninety percent of our field of view and everything that is out of our field of view. The shutter slices time, eliminating all moments before and after it opens and closes. Three dimensions are reduced to two. And in some cases color is removed. How can we call these kinds of artifacts unaltered?
The computer is a tool akin to a telescope or a microscope; a tool that opens vast frontiers of possibilities and brings them to light; a tool that captures the elemental and animates or holds it still at will; a tool that captures the organic flow of the earth's crust or the wash of a wave, and creates an impossible symmetry, an elemental Rorshach pattern ripe for continued exploration, divulging a thousand revelations.
How do we know what we know? Is seeing believing? Is believing seeing?
The most important question is, 'Am I asking the most important question?' The second most important question is, 'Am I asking the most important question in the most important way?'
With the arrival of the new comes the need to overcome fascination with novelty in order to approach substance and sophistication - a sophistication born of subtlety and depth of perception, not complexity and perceived virtuosity.
Images are altered in many ways, to many degrees, and for many reasons, so it's important for viewers to be informed of both.
Listen carefully. The way(s) we speak about things is revealing.
Many times we are tempted to defer to the documents we create, rather than the direct experiences we have.
Very often there is too little information in photographs to deduce how they were made and even what they represent. We rely on context and supplemental information to confirm our observations, not simply the documents themselves.
