The Online Photographer: What is Your Photographic Legacy?
But that’s exactly where most of my photos sit. Paper carton or hard drive, a box is a box. I’m only too willing to concede that only a few hundred of them would be of interest to anyone other than me. Perhaps only a few dozen would qualify as award-winners—but again, what’s the difference, if they’re all just sitting in a box? And what interest or value would they be to my wife and kids once I’m dead and buried? Is the whole point of this my own personal amusement, or am I serving some greater purpose?
I used to wonder about the purpose of art, my art in particular, until I heard a seminar given by an investigator who was studying speech and language using functional MRI. By looking at what parts of the brain are active during tasks, one hopes to understand more about the processing pathways. One of the intriguing findings was that when listening to speech, one’s own speech production area lights up in addition to the areas that process language. It’s as if the words being heard are being run through your brain as if you yourself were saying them. Of course, it’s an important task to separate the words in your own head from those you hear from outside, a distinction that breaks down in psychotic states.
Fundamentally, talking to some one is an attempt to change the brains of other. Putting your thoughts inside the brains as others. It’s an attempt to change their way of thinking. Some art is verbal or language based like radio or the novel. Others either include a visual component or are exclusively visual. Or aural. All are invitations to see what I see, hear what I hear. And be changed in some way by the experience. Profound art produces profound changes in it’s audience. When viewed as a simple act of communication, art becomes much less mysterious.
But just as we talk to ourselves, either out loud or non-verbally, we can also produce art for ourselves. I get to look at many more images and many more image states than does my web audience. It’s a single person feed back loop of the activity of seeing the world, taking images and viewing/manipulating the result. For me, the art is an activity of learning to see and sharing what I learn with others who are interested. These banal images of the suburban landscape appeal to me because they are for me more simply about the act of seeing and less about what is seen. I tell myself “Open your eyes and look around. You’re here.”