Footprints on the Path of Life: Photography

...for art may err but nature cannot miss...

Photography is that unique medium that lends veracity to the unbelievable while isolating the indefinable.

Decimating the sands of time, the camera does not discriminate:

• Anyone can take a picture. 
• A picture can depict anything.
• The very ability to capture a moment -- any moment, anywhere, anytime -- puts power in the hands of many while demoting the artistry of the few.

Photography is swift and merciless.

It teaches by showing us that which passes so quickly that we'd avow we did not see it. It teaches us about what we see by showing us the split second we did not catch.

Photography teaches us about what we see. It's a technology, ergo a tool, a means. It's an industry that is perforce grouped with the artistic, as the world itself is an artist of incomparable inventiveness... in a world of art it'd be impossible to isolate it's journalist.

Every photo is a story that relays to us the real-life fantasies of the world we live in.

Every photo is a fictitious rendition of a non-fictional account. Fictitious because no moment is meant to be isolated. Forced to stand alone, each photo-moment demands its viewer to recreate the story of the moments leading up to it, then abruptly leaving its viewer suspended in the mystery, isolated in the conundrum of frozen time.

Lost — Yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered, for they are gone forever. -Horace Mann

As the media of the universal WHY, Photography challenges preconceived notions. Time is not lost; the experience may be a part of the past, but the photo remains in the present, enabling us to look more deeply into our lives and the lives of others, applying the imagination, ever-capable of strengthening the human desire for better.

Thinking of photography in this light (and perhaps that pun was intended...) -- as the wordless philosophy, the philosophical technology of the evolving creatures of this earth -- reminds me of Longfellow's poem, A Psalm of Life:

Tell me not in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are seldom what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou are, to dust thou returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each tomorrow
Find us farther than today.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

[...]

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sand of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us then be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

Objective: 3-D word installation. Word: DRIBBLE.

Time waits for no one...

... and migrate keeps on migrating, taking me and my Xacto knife along for the ride. Here are a few of the first renderings I did last week. Twenty of them are due tomorrow.

Migrating toward migrate? ... unsure

So one of our instructors noticed the nouns in the list. She has given me the option to continue to work on migration, or change my choice to migrate.

Since the end of the project will involve constructing 3' letters out of miscellaneous materials, I'm leaning towards migrate. You know, 'cuz it's 2 letters less. Ha.

MI.GR.ATE

Today we presented our can opener redesign, but not before I had a major meltdown, bawling my eyes out and spilling my grievances to one of the instructors.

Sigh.

That being said, I have since composed myself and am very excited about the next process on visual communication and words!

We have been given a list of words from which we can select one. There's an air of mystery about it; we have a document we're supposed to be printing out, commencing with 2 (3?) pages of the same word repetitively written in black font on white background. Then there are 10 or so pages that are blank, minus a simple square outline in which one can imagine all kinds of letters (it's BLANK SPACE, expensive real estate!), followed by 2-3 pages of the same word again, only this time in white font on a black background.

The first step is to pick our word, look up its definition, and blog about it.

The list of words was, in its majority, very "letter-oriented"; they all could easily stand as adjectives to describe how a font appears. For example, some of the options were compress; condense; constrict; contrast; expand; subtract; etc. Some weren't so clearly "typographic" but could still be seen as expressions of a typeface. I.e. dribble, propel, capture, connect. 

The ones I migrated towards (ahem) were those that seem to have precious little to do with letters and the description of their appearance. To wit, conduct, obtain, transfer, conquer, migration, withdraw.  

Perhaps I was especially attracted to migration and addition since they were the only two words in the entire list that were not verbs or adjectives. Perhaps someone meant to type migrate? Wouldn't that be humorous... a typo in the word around which the project revolves!

mi·gra·tion

1. the process or act of migrating.

2. a migratory movement: preparations for the migration.

3. a number or body of persons or animals migrating  together.

4. Chemistry . a movement or change of position of atoms within a molecule.

5. Physics . diffusion ( def. 3a ) .

To me, that's no true definition, as one cannot honestly define a word with it's root word, without defining that root word. So let me migrate, but before I do, here's a visual for entry #5, diffusion...

alright. Now that we have that straight... 

mi·grate

1. to go from one country, region, or place to another.

2. to pass periodically from one region or climate to another, as certain birds, fishes, and animals: The birds migrate southward in the winter.

3. to shift, as from one system, mode of operation, or enterprise to another.

4. Physiology (of a cell, tissue, etc.) to move from one region of the body to another, as in embryonic development.

5. Chemistry

a. (of ions) to move toward an electrode during electrolysis.

b. (of atoms within a molecule) to change position.

6. (at British universities) to change or transfer from one college to another.

 

 

 

The Online Etymology Dictionary (which is a bookmarked favorite) sites migration as originating from the Latin migratio, from migrare, meaning "to move from one place to another".
It then goes on to say

[migrare] probably originally [came from] *migwros, from PIE *meigw- (cf. Gk. ameibein "to change"), from base *mei- "to change, go, move" (see mutable). That European birds migrate across the seas or to Asia was understood in the Middle Ages, but subsequently forgotten. Dr. Johnson held that swallows slept all winter in the beds of rivers, while the naturalist Morton (1703) stated that they migrated to the moon.

 

A Can of Corny ...

What happens when inspiration comes to an impasse