Lords of our Tiny Skull-Sized Kingdoms
Photography and Choosing How to See Life
The other day I was chatting with a friend and I used the reference “what the hell is water?”
My friend wasn’t familiar with that reference, so I explained that it was a parable about young fish not knowing what water is, because being submerged in it is their default setting and they haven’t yet considered anything else.
When I got home I looked up the famous David Foster Wallace 2005 Kenyon College commencement speech that begins with this parable, and I gave it another listen. It’s something I have listened to from time to time over the years, but this time something new hit me: this guy’s talking about photography!
As Wallace explicitly stated in his speech, his intent was to describe what he called “the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education,” but make no mistake, he was talking about photography whether he meant to or not.
The vast majority of people believe that photography is a tool used only for documenting the ostentatiously beautiful things in life. There is also a minority of people who believe that photography is a tool used for exposing the overlooked beauty in banal everyday life. And then there are a few of us who believe that photography can generally be agnostic about beauty.
Yes, beautiful pictures are nice to look at — the first time. The truth is, most pretty pictures suffer a tremendous loss of intrigue upon second viewing (when there is no other personal connection between the viewer and the picture’s content). The initial awe of a beautiful scene or a beautifully captured thing connects with the bottom of our brain stem and triggers an autonomous pleasure response. However, we immediately become desensitized to that specific visual stimulus if it doesn’t provoke a reaction that causes it to travel upward in our nervous system and connect with our consciousness.
In fact, we often shoot photos of beautiful sights with our phones, and are so satisfied with that act itself that we never even spend any time looking at the photo after initial verification that we got the shot. We stumble across these pictures in our camera roll, but only when we’re trying to pull up something of real interest to send someone. Otherwise we may drop one here and there in an Instagram story where it will appropriately disappear in twenty-four hours.
The notion that the views that provide instant pleasure are the only ones worthy of capture and contemplation is, I believe, the water that most young fish swim in.
To engage in photography should be an opportunity to reconsider what has value, by offering us a practice of expanding our attention to our non-aesthetic human experiences.
As Wallace states, education “isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I’d ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious.”
After all, he explains, what is “obvious” to someone is the result of a framework of values and the resulting interface to the world that is built upon it, either passively or intentionally. Therefore, “the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people’s two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience.”
To go through life believing that our default settings are somehow natural, unbiased, universal even, is to miss out on everything proffered by an interrogation of our assumptions. These assumptions are at their root arrogant, and a manifestation of a “blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.”
However, understanding that photography is not constrained to simply advocating beauty, and that it is actually better utilized as a medium for transmitting ideas is still, perhaps, water; even if it’s the water that semi-aware, adolescent fish swim in. It is a default setting that assumes that there must first be some great idea worth sharing.
Writer’s block is a bitch. Sometimes, the more that you develop your understanding of the concept that you are wanting to express, the more prolific you become in uncovering the limitless, insufficient ways of conveying it. Your mind’s processing unit goes into overdrive trying to discover the linguistic solution until your mind’s chief executive finally loses its will to further pursue the mission, and the whole creative ambition drowns in drained defeat like Artax in The NeverEnding Story.
The same phenomenon can happen with picture-making.
“Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education — least in my own case,” Wallace warns, “— is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.”
In photography, you can encounter this same danger as you head in either of the two aforementioned, ostensibly opposite directions. You may go long periods with neither the chance to experience a sight beautiful enough to photograph nor the clarity to discover beautiful ways to transform the unremarkable; and you may go long periods with photographer’s block, unable to create pictures that adequately broadcast an intellectual thesis.
So with what spoon does one tunnel out of this imprisonment?
Wallace claims that “learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience,” because, he explains, the mind is “an excellent servant but a terrible master.”
And this is where the commencement speech really synthesizes the potential role of photography in our lives. While talking about a liberal arts education and unintentionally talking about photography, Wallace declares that the real value is in learning “how to keep from going through your [...] adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.”
“If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down. Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.”
Wallace posits that this deliverance from the imprisonment of our default state is what an education truly provides. I suggest that such an education can be administered through photography, which gives us the chance to deliberately choose how to see life.
“You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship,” Wallace says. “Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”
“Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.”
When it comes to photography, I fear that too many of us succumb to worshiping at the altar of approbation. In the nonprofit sector, there is a pernicious effect caused by the schema of the larger for-profit economy that the nonprofit sector is a part of. Generally, an organization sets out to achieve some noble set of social and/or environmental goals. However, it soon becomes clear that it is easier to get funding for less ambitious projects that no longer target the nonprofit’s original goals, and instead serve the interests of their benefactors. And thus the organization drifts toward becoming a useful tool for extrinsic actors, and away from pursuing its innate charter. This is called mission creep.
The mission creep that arises in photography can also come from funding, as well as from peer or mentor attention, from social media engagement, and especially from the lack of any of those feedback signals. This confounding factor, in addition to wanting to make pictures that are nice to look at and that have intellectual connotations, makes it even more difficult for us to ever remember to try to become aware of, photograph, and make meaning out of the water that fills our individual aquariums.
“And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings,” Wallace continues, “because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom of all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear talked about much in the great outside world of wanting, and achieving, and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty little unsexy ways every day.”
“That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”
It is my closing argument that the most sacramental role of photography in our lives is the one in which it serves as exercise equipment for strengthening our consciousness — the apparatus we use for choosing to observe the unexceptional, nearly invisible water in which we swim, and for discovering otherwise hard to notice reminders that each drop is not merely life-affirming, it is life itself.
As Wallace articulates it in the closing of his speech, “none of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.
The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.
It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
This is water.
This is water.”
While earning my degree in photography I studied under renowned photographer, Mark Klett. One of his courses that I enrolled in focused on everyday digital photography. For this class, we carried a small digital camera each day in order to shoot photographs daily. This practice helped us to constantly view the world photographically, and for me, helped to expand my awareness of how my visual response to the world can help to make meaning from it.
Below is my final project from this course, following my artist statement.
Artist Statement
Miller: A lot of people don't realize what's really going on. They view life as a bunch of unconnected incidents 'n things. They don't realize that there's this, like, lattice of coincidence that lays on top of everything. Give you an example; show you what I mean: suppose you're thinkin' about a plate of shrimp. Suddenly somebody'll say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate of shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconsciousness.
Otto: You eat a lot of acid, Miller, back in the hippie days?
Miller: I'll give you another instance, you know how everybody's into weirdness right now?
I find this rather simple dialogue from the 1984 movie, Repo Man, appealing as an understated discussion about a personal fascination of mine regarding the notion of fractal time. The idea of fractal time is that variables constituting different circumstances in life may repeat themselves throughout time in a modular fashion, similar to observations of the Fibonacci series in organic manifestations, such as the patterning of meristems on a Romanesco cauliflower, or the scales spiraling around a pinecone.
As a child, I began to notice a cyclic repetition of occurrences. I grew to learn that some of these phenomena are understood through scientific study, such as the phases of the moon or the changing of seasons. As I approach my third decade of experiencing life, I find myself still pondering the inexplicable coincidences that science cannot address. I have developed an obsession with the seemingly scripted reoccurring events that I am unable to understand — or ignore; the unplanned and unlikely reunion of long lost friends at key points in life, thinking of a song before turning on a radio to discover that song in sync with my imagination, or noticing a train car as it passes by with graffiti on it that reads "FOES" the day after photographing graffiti on a window that reads "HI FRIEND".
For the work embodied by Matter of Time, I relied on an intuitive method of photography, utilizing a pocket sized digital point and shoot camera that I carried with me at all times. Armed with ever-present photographic capabilities, I discovered the opportunity to trace my curiosity's muse by recording a chronology of, and thus signifying, evidence that seems to support my growing suspicion that, even in its most mundane coincidences, life is more complex than I will ever hope to understand.
And for anyone who wishes to listen to the full David Foster Wallace commencement speech, you can play it by clicking or tapping here: