hungry eyes

"The Eyes of Laura Mars" is on upstairs--ironic, because today I've been pricked by a strange, contemplative reverie about photography and second sight...

My sweetie got me a nice digital camera for my birthday/our anniversary/christmas/easter/labor day, etc. ad infinitum...

I find photography to be a compelling and seductive medium.

As someone who paints and draws, I understand the intimacy between artist and subject. However with a camera, there is something mechanical, something blind yet seeing, something fetishistic and totemic, which simultaneously denies and forces a hyper-intense intimacy between artist and subject.

From behind the camera, my experience is seductively voyeuristic and at the same time clinically predatorial. In front of the camera, I have the sensation of a medical exam by a doctor with cold hands...

The product, though, the work created, the image made, is always something more (and less) than the photographer and the photographed.

There is a strange alchemy that occurs in the shutter and click between occulus and lens. That is why I'm amazed by great photographers and by those who are truly photogenic.

Great photographers use cameras to lie, to sculpt, to steal light, and seduce shadows. There are entire universes contained in a single image, and as "real" as that image is, it is somehow not accurate... There is a superstitious exchange of light and soul. Not the Crazy Horse fear of the soul being sucked into the camera and oiled out flat in negatives, but the subtle difference that comes from looking at a person or thing through the eyes of a machine...

A great photographer teaches the camera to see in a way that is somewhat, but never entirely human... As for the great photogenics of the world (Marilyn their patron saint), I wonder if there is something mechanical and inhuman flickering in their synapses that somehow recognizes and projects--machine to machine--a calculated doppleganger of the sweaty meat that exists in time and air?

Richard Avedon is famous for drawing subjects in, for teasing souls out of organic cavities to flutter and play over the features of flesh...

avedon

The photograph below by Giuseppe Pocetti is one of my favorites. Here it's all about visual sex. The camera becomes an extended eye-phallus of the photographer, creating a short circuit between vision and crotch. There's something occulted, something linguistic about the composition, a tease that is not playful but seriously sexual...tiny bubbles, pink nipples-- but this is no burlesque...it's soapy and dirty...

pocetti

The next photo is by Dylan Ricci, who is technically an excellent photographer, although I think his work is sort of hit-and-miss. He does have a remarkable ability, nevertheless, to transubstantiate flesh into mineral... The bodies of his men are slick metallic, sculpted of glistening mud, twisted and licked by oily, barbed-wire hair... Nipples like the somber eyes of african gods... Lust is conjured through the sheer object-ness of this man. There isn't room to negotiate an encounter, there's no guarantee of more...just an open stance with a trail of promise...

ricci

As I walk around my world each day, I am aware of myself as voyeur. I watch people, stare at bodies shifting under clothing, imagine what shapes suggest...

Security cameras in parking lots, convenient stores, elevators, obviously have no such self awareness...their vision is sentinel, unsentimental, black-and-white, shifting static punctuated by over-exposed faces and t-shirts.

I wonder if technology will ever let us download the images captured by our eyes, sans camera? A USB cord for the brain... How would those images look? Would we startle ourselves with the calculated objectiveness of our world views? Would we be astonished by beauty that we miss when just glancing around? Would we see in print, the hunger that lies behind our eyes, the covetousness (as Hannibal would say) we feel towards that which we see every day?

All I can say is keep your eyes open...

Passion, beauty, and love, folks...life is short...