#30 - Fog of the Present

I read recently how photography tries to see through the fog of the present. It’s an act of sense-making that can either make us feel like our experiences are shared, or that we have less of a grasp on what’s happening than we thought. I think this feeling has influenced my photos quite a bit lately. I grew up a little too confident that how I see the world is how the world is.

For a lot of the photography I’ve done, I’ve tried to recognize a clear, understandable scene, and make an image of it. The images I made were easy to read, with scenes familiar to most people. I guess what I was doing, was telling anyone who looked that ‘Here, this is how the world is.’ But as life does, it’s showed me that clinging too tightly to the idea that my perspective is total, is just a little silly. Since then, I suppose photographing became my first pass at figuring out what I see, instead.

I make photographs for myself, but it’s on my mind how people might see them. A successful photograph, I think, serves me as well as the viewer with whom it might connect. That connection felt easier to impress on someone when the content of the image was less ambiguous. At the moment I’m making work I can’t be sure will connect with anyone, but stepping into imagery of uncertain meaning has felt, I guess, honest. Honest, because what I’m showing no longer declares my perspective as perfect, it simply declares.

Trying to see through ‘the fog of the present’ sounds like trying to understand Now and the place it will have in history. But I think it doesn’t have to be so complicated as that. The ‘fog’ isn’t a characteristic of the present, it’s everything that keeps the present from sight. Our history, our insecurity, our worry about the future; it all thickens the air between us and what’s there to be seen. But by degrees, with practice, the simple act of looking can make the present clear, and clear again, and again.