Photography is a brutal act. The vocabulary surrounding a photograph is violent. There are shutters & filters & bellows; aberrations & distortions; solarizers, polarizers, sensitizers; developers, fixers, stoppers; these, in conjunction with those other progeny of the industrial revolution, are used to shoot subjects, to capture them.

A dark-room is simply that: a camera oscura. It is at once terrifying & purposeful in its intent. Film & paper, once exposed to the tyranny of that lies without, may not lie naked again until they have been rehabilitated, until they have recovered to a state where they are deemed meaningful. This process of selection is exquisite in its sadism; we now have machines that make light of these macabre methods.

The earliest kind of photograph is the blink. A blink is a preventative mechanism. One blinks to see better. One blinks to lubricate. A blink is also a pause. It is when Man first noticed the images formed on the inside of his eyelids, at once black & orange, shape-shifting & electric, that the seeds of photography were sown.

The sneeze came next. Now we had a sound to emulate: the shutter.

The Eye is King. The Mind is his Queen.

We now live within that panoply of apparati the mechanical Eye has birthed: chortles, sniffles, chuckles, giggles; cracks, queefs, farts, wheezes; yawns, moans, grimaces, frissons; burps & belches, whispers & snores.

Venice, 2010