“Many people, when writing about photography say that it always shows what we already know—that which is common knowledge. I think this assertion should be corrected to say instead: photography always shows what we think we know.” (Luigi Ghirri)
I woke up today to a message from a Lebanese visual artist that rattled me a little, given that we’d never interacted before, and that I respect their work.
It said, in response to a thing about astrology I’d thrown up in my stories: “The aqua moon explains how I can never grasp your point of view through your photography. Not to say you don’t have one, but detachment is the loudest message being received.”
They’re not wrong, but it did unsettle me a little to have an imperceptible eye peer so deeply inside me without so much as a “marhaba.” So, I did the “aqua moon” thing and launched a mental inquest of the sensations that bubbled up and realized that I stand behind, so to speak, this perceived detachment. It’s what draws me to a thrown-together “look” somewhere along the Wes Anderson/Luigi Ghirri spectrum. But it’s also why I “look” in the first place: there is a spirituality behind these photos, an inner “snap-to-grip” I feel when I stand before a scene and sense some kind of alignment. It’s a feeling of “thereness” – there it is, there can be no other.
It’s what explains how I managed to get the composition of that knocked over traffic cop shelter almost exactly dead-on with two very different cameras on two consecutive days, without really meaning to; it was there when I was there, and that’s all there is to it.
“The ultimate role of photography as a contemporary language of visual communication consists of its capacity to slow down our fast and chaotic way of reading images.” (Luigi Ghirri)