Consciously Re-Seeing The Photo Before It is Captured: Poetry
Conscious Re-Seeing:
the Poetry of the Image
Artist Statement prepared for Gallery Submission
KJGeisler
Introduction
As a practicing visual artist, "Conscious Re-Seeing" is my personal term for what I do and strive for in my photography. This manifests itself differently from month-to-month, year-over-year and sometimes between "clicks," even edits of the same capture.
The first aspect of re-seeing is simply of properly documenting a moment or thing as it is so that it can be "re-seen" for as long as the work survives. I admit to sometimes having a strange nostalgia for a moment as it is happening, often missing full contemporaneous enjoyment while trying to "think-back" to the present. This springs from a personal self-awareness of how poorly memory can serve as a source of witness. In poetry there is the elegiac, in photography we have golden moments.
In 2017, this manifested in a passion-project.
Thinking back to my own experience with youth sports, I had a lot of great memories, but very few photographic records to help me share and reassert those memories. Of the few photos that exist, very few meet with modern day journalistic standards.
With my son going into his Sophomore season of high school soccer, I made a personal, yet inarticulated, commitment to document these moments for him and, eventually was compelled to increase the scope of the project to the entire high-school soccer program. I started by going to the first pre-season game, continued on moving my schedule around to accommodate shooting and, before I knew it, I had photographed the entire season. (Without ever really planning to.) As the games wore on I began to take and post increasing numbers of pictures of the entire team.
This lead to my being asked to give the slideshow at the season-ending awards banquet - the sort of broad audience that had been furthest from my mind when I set out. I felt great satisfaction knowing that families would be able to relive and remember these moments from what turned out to be the first conference championship since the 1980's. It was a great learning experience for me, putting me out in mostly less-than-ideal conditions with an entry level camera and lenses trying to work the technical aspects of light and motion on the fly. It reminded me how images affect the human soul. And it awakened something within.
Sometimes capturing a moment with no whisper of the artist's self is the proper treatment of the subject:
Re-Seeing, Writ Large
Recently I have had a desire to return to my roots in photography . These go back to film and dark-room and the heavy lifting of shooting, developing and printing one's own work, often back then only finding that my artistic reach had exceeded the grasp of my limited budget.
What could I do now with digital media and the latest editing techniques?
As a photographer, one alternately serves and attempts to control light much like a poet does with the Muse. This has been a main focus: darkness, light, shadows and insinuations of shadows.
This type of re-seeing is rooted not so much in documenting what is visibly there, but in revealing the "is-ness" of what is there, or what might be there. Although at first it felt like cheating compared to the limiting post-production capabilities of film, I now find great pleasure in working a raw image as if it were clay, especially on days when new subjects seem scarce. It feels like - poetic license.
Also: A Strange Fetish for Detail
One of the things that keeps me fascinated with an image is the fine and sometimes esoteric detail that the camera can capture: The strands of feathery substance around a young sparrow's eye, reflections of light billowing over smoothed out waves. The way water turns purple and blue in the minutes around dawn.
In this, the camera outperforms and instructs me. I can only approach my artistic and technical tasks in diligence knowing that, if I do, there will be miracles of minutiae that my aging human eyes cannot themselves perceive. At their best, these details will have me staring at an image in that rare state: revery.
If all the elements come together (The Golden Moment, the Is-ness and the Fine Detail) I feel an inner stillness where my chest meets my stomach and that space begins a slow upward spin and I feel my own consciousness begin to raise, if only for a moment. This is how I felt when I first read the works of William Blake, WB Yeats and Allen Ginsberg: Don DeLillo's sentences. This is how I feel when I stand in the physical presence of a work by Marc Chagall or Vincent Van Gogh. This is the feeling I'm trying to re-create for myself and, especially, for those that look at my work and hopefully are moved in a way difficult to articulate with words.
This, for me, is Conscious Re-Seeing.
