Point - Object

My point has been that photography is a way of pointing.

The language around photography and making photographs is varied and has multiple, folded, agendas. Compare, for example, the New York Times with BP press releases about the oil spill, or with any annual report from your favorite tech company. Who points at what? What is their goal? Who do they think is looking at what they're pointing at?

The use of a lens system to make pictures means pointing at objects, one way or another. The choice of which objects to point at is determined by context, by what you care about, by what you want me to care about. Sontag says that photographing is a way of collecting the world. Wrong, nearly. Photography (in so far as we think of photography as making pictures with lens-based technology) is a way of pointing to what you've collected of the world.

Your collection is different from mine, but I'm confident that you have a collection.

Let's think about how a lens coaxes us to think about a world of objects that can be collected. This is perhaps an emergent property of the object system itself, rather than of the world, though we often get the two mixed up.

That is, just as focus is an emergent property of the lens (i.e., the lens-less camera obscurra has no in- or out- of focus since refracted light throws a uniformly 'sharp' image against the wall of the shadow chamber), though we often think of it as a property of photography, or of cameras — the same might be true of how we behave in the world we share. I mean, we're obsessed with stuff, the stuff-ness, of our lives. We devote ourselves and our energies to collecting and hoarding shiny hard objects, or soft cuddly ones. Hardly anything else needs be said about it, I'm sure, because there's an excellent chance you're reading this on a fancy object you treasure more than the food you ate last night or will eat today.

What do you think — can we imagine a world outside of object obsession? Would we want to? These are inflammatory questions, at root.

On the surface, and the point of what I think I'm doing in the classroom, is this: can we use photography to picture the space between us and our objects, and between ourselves?

Can we point our lens at a relationship?

This is the challenge I put to you during class, though in different words — can you point your camera at the world in such a way that you tease me to see beyond the individual objects of the world, their ghostly traces, our mutual obsession, which I already know too well since I am, after all, embedded in the world with you? Rather, can you unfold for me what it's like to see? to feel? to know something that can't be known?

This is the goal I set myself, as well. I don't know how to do it. I do know, however, that I want something more from pictures, and from my life, than simply a collection of objects.