Big Bend - PhotoTrice

Fresh Frozen Reality

Lately photo web sites are abuzz with indignation over dastardly manipulation of images. Indeed, how could anyone do such a thing as corrupt the truth in a photograph? A better question is how can a photo represent reliable truth? The general notion persists that photographs represent reality. We are so easily deceived into thinking they are true depictions of something. Even if you discount all the decisions and or biases of the photographer you are only left with a fraction of a second of frozen ‘reality’. Anything we know from a photographic image has been interpreted, composed and extracted by the photographer then reinterpreted, recomposed and committed to memory.

I wonder what truth was being represented hundreds of years ago by the maker of the rock shelter petroglyph? That person didn’t have a camera but he did have a world view which framed his interpretation of reality as surely as we frame our own. Native peoples were as intelligent as us and just as capable of depicting the world using the technology available to them. You can easily see that they had cultural bias. Should we think that we are less biased because we have a better way to portray detail in our images?

It is good to remember that 99.99% of all photographs are not made for evidentiary documentary purposes. We are free to select what we see in front of our camera lenses and to interpret the images we capture. The fraction of a percent of images that we deem to be inviolable as historical documents are an edge case when compared to the mountain of images made for other purposes.

The camera is an instrument for capturing light not truth. The finished photo is something interpreted before and after capture. It is important that we set our own limits for what is appropriate when creating finished images. Others should be free to do the same thing.

Dusk

Once a gleaming adobe plastered white with tin roof shining in the desert light. It was visible for miles across the valley. In this place such a home was the unmistakable sign of prosperity. Generations of fortunate families lived within the walls on a foundation of stone. They were owners of things.

Across the valley were jacals of more humble families. People as tough as the world they lived in raising generations on faith and hope for the future. They left a mark on the land as deep and enduring as anyone who lived hard against the Rio Bravo. Perhaps they worked for those living in the white house.

Time marks everything as adobe slowly melts back into earth. But even abandoned and neglected the white house maintains dignity in ruin. A hundred years has not been able to erase this home.

Rough

The patterns of everyday life have changed utterly in the last few years for those of us in the so-called developed world. We are managed now. Inconveniences are removed to smooth out rough dangerous potential in our lives. Our world is a safe clean bright colorful place. Information is available at our whim any time anywhere. Youth knowledge and power are transformed into wonderful technologies. We are so lucky.

A mid twentieth century person will have memories of a different world altogether. A browner place with more textures, filled with rusty tools passed through many hands. Substance and weight measured the worth of a thing then. You could rely on advice of older wiser people to guide your way of living. They passed skills to young hands with a certainty of past generations.

We should appreciate our new world.