The Nature of Your Own Lens

The Lens  [pinhole photograph]
January, 2011 
(click in the image to see a larger version)

This is one of the new images I have been working on for my Artifacts of an Uncertain Origin series. I photographed it last January in the Florida Keys, but only began to work with the negative a few days ago. It will be included in the Artifacts of an Uncertain Origin 2012 calendar, which should be ready to order in a couple of days. This and one other one from the Florida Keys, are the most recent images I have photographed for this long running series. After an 11-month hiatus, it feels really good to be working with it again. I have several ideas for new images and am eager to follow those paths to see where they lead.

I am often asked what this series is about, which is not an easy question to answer, since there is more than one answer. Each image is different and can lead in a a variety of directions, just as different doors will open into different rooms and passages. These photographs are a bit like doorways. What you find once you enter them depends on who you are and what you see. Apropos that thought, and the concept of seeing, here are some musings on The Lens...

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As photographers, lenses are important to us. We see the world through the lenses of our eyes and we create our images with the lens on our camera (the irony in this photograph is that it was made with a wooden pinhole camera that does not have a lens!).

But the idea of a lens is significant beyond the purely photographic associations. A lens focuses light, bringing our attention to specific areas, magnifying some parts while blurring others. Lenses help us see better, farther, and more clearly. A lens can reveal to us that which is hidden beyond the horizon of natural vision, showing us things we cannot see with our own eyes. Our perception of the world and our journey through it is shaped by the lens of our past experiences, deeply held beliefs, future hopes, dreams, and the river of emotions that courses through us.

One of the most significant concepts that influences my experience with photography, both in creating and viewing images, was expressed perfectly by the photographer and philosopher MInor White when he wrote that "One should not only photograph things for what they are, but for what else they are".

At the most basic level, this image is both a still life and a landscape, a photograph of a lens at the edge of the sea. But beyond that there are other levels. What you see, in this photograph or in any photograph, will depend upon who you are and the nature of your own lens.

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See more of the Artifacts of an Uncertain Origin

 

Comments

[Therese]

Wonderful and inspiring!

[Sean Duggan]

Thanks very much, Therese!