diptych # 76 ~ appearances

sink / kitchen counter ~ Au Sable Forks, NY - in the Adirondack PARK / Phonecia, NY - in the Catskill PARK • click to embiggen

Freed from the necessity of having to make narrow choices (as painters did) about what images were worth contemplating, because of the rapidity with which cameras recorded anything, photographers made seeing into a new kind of project: as if seeing itself, pursued with sufficient avidity and single-mindedness, could indeed reconcile the claims of truth and the need to find the world beautiful. Once an object of wonder because of its capacity to render faithfully as well as despised at first for its base accuracy, the camera has ended by effecting a tremendous promotion of the value of appearances. Appearances as the camera records them. ~ Susan Sontag - The Heroism of Vision

It would seem, to my mind and sensibilities, that Sontag's consecutive use of the word "appearances" is meant to imply both meanings of that word:

1. the way that someone or something looks.
2. an impression given by someone or something, although this may be misleading.

In essence, that dual-meaning usage succinctly and word-frugally entraps the modernist era debate (and beyond), re: the medium's claim to truth - does/can the medium's capability of rendering reality* realistically also convey truth (or, at the very least, a truth)?

I come at that debate from the school of thought that the medium's inherent / intrinsic characteristic as a cohort of/with the real is; a. what distinguishes it from other visual arts, and, b. what enables a practitioner thereof to make images which represent the appearance of the real which are quite true to that reality. And, in addition to a picture's visual true-ness to that which is illustrated (the referent), that same picture can also convey / illuminate (the implied) a truth (meaning) which transcends the pictures visual truth.

The fact that a picture can also lie / be untruthful / misleading through deceptive - sometimes called "creative" - visual techniques and tricks is somewhat beside the point. Spoken/written words can be truthful, spoken/written words can be untruthful. The existence of neither word-state negates the existence of the other.

In any event, in my picture making endeavors I am drawn to the appearance of things as they are and, in the making of my pictures, I attempt to create visual representations which speak to the truth of what is.

* please park your dance-on-the-head-of-pin notions of reality where the sun don't shine.