It's Not That Bad - Part 1

It's not that bad. We are not victims. 'Victim' would imply that we have been wronged and presuppose a self-awareness sufficient for us to be aware that we have been wronged. We have not been wronged. And most of us are self-centered, but not self-aware.

It comes mostly from our state of being, from the illusions that form the fundamentals of the complex systems we utilize to feed ourselves, to quantify our relationships to the people and things around us, to fall ill, to heal, to age, to breed, to navigate, to reproduce, to ascribe meaning, to fabricate value, and to die.

We use use the systemic momentum to propel us in trajectories of our choosing, and therein lies the root of the illusion of freewill. But we cannot extract ourselves any more than a virus can stop from killing its host. In that respect alea iacta est.

It is neither good nor bad, unsettling nor comforting, restraining nor liberating. It simply is. And like the plastic spoon, it is inevitable and beyond our control.

Diligently remind yourself to forget. Regulate emotion. Finish reinventing your past. Fight the good fight. Never give up the ship. Ignore the psychic noise. Be faithful evermore. It's not that bad.

Eric Dolphy ~ Number Eight

While I have always been drawn to images of signage, urban decay, and what I'll call 'subcultures,' I'm never 100% sure of exactly what it is that I'm seeing when I shoot.

I found this image in Great Barrington, New York. It's hardly a remarkable image. But I'm taken by it and have been working to uncover what's really there.

I always start by adjusting the levels to set proper highlights and shadows. I then remove any color tints in the shadows. Next, I usually work with the hue and saturation to affect the contrast before actually adding a curves adjustment layer and adjusting the contrast directly.

This process yields a 'corrected' image, but in this case still a very boring one.

To make this image more interesting, I used a mask to separate the sign and building from the sky and adjusted each individually. The result was a more dramatic image, but one that is still bland and that says absolutely nothing.

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I'm not sure why I'm so taken by this image. Its Americana overtones hearken back to an America that predated me, of which I have neither memories nor affection. Why then bother to look for meaning in this image at all?

But as I write this I come to realize that I don't care about Americana so much as I care about quintessence.

This image would be meaningless - absurd - if found anywhere other than on the main street of an out-of-the-way American town. In Times Square, this would be the facade of yet another themed chain restaurant. In Europe, this would be Disney World. In both cases, the image would be mere Americana and nothing more.

But in Great Barrington, this found image is more than just a diner, and much, much more than Americana: it's quintessential America.

I don't know if that's what I captured in this latest iteration, or if I captured anything at all for that matter. But at least now I know what I'm looking for.