Wednesday, February 15, 2006
The Photograph
A photograph, is a photograph, is a photograph without words.
A photograph is like a journey into the human past without so much as a sentence written anywhere, a journey into the unique fascination that humans have for the eternal strife of a world most polluted by it, or for that matter, the eternal struggle. We wonder as we stare at the young boy hanging at the gallows, we wonder how long we can stare at it, our eyes fixated at the point of points where all the angles seem to point; his lifeless body. Is it really me looking, or is it someone else fixated by the power that death brings to our existence?
There are times, when we may think of the photograph as the simple venture into the universality of human reaction; a goofy smile on a child's face in Iran, holding a crayon and drawing pictures; here, the pictures are of God, and unisex buses, together again. There, you will see the gleaming skin of the model in the shopping center at Kish, her shining white teeth flashing at the camera's lens while a young, darly dressed Chador floats by, a ghost, and we wonder what these ghosts are made of.
It could be that in the photograph, we see parts of ourselves that we could never imagine being seen, a voyeuristic delving into the mind's constant need for attention. How much of our skin would we show to the world, and would we show it when we are dying? A slow, destructive death and then the skin that harbors it?
Fascination with the grotesque, the seemingly undivided worlds of 'normal' and the Spectrum of Normalcy; "the weird", like the fascinating coverage of the Elections nearly a year ago, would be on the very extreme ends of that spectrum. But, we will grade these 'weirds' giving them an approval rating of Five Stars or less. And it's well. It's distinctively a domination by the camera, where the sense of words are lost, but the translations are endless.
