Not A Mirror, Not A Black Mirror.

The subject/object kerfuffle in European philosophy has kept a very great number of confusing expositors in business for a long time. Whether Hegel or Kant or Freud or Heidegger or Foucault, in the end you get the unmistakeable sense that a mind is a terrible thing to make up.

And so here we are.

After many years making audio recordings of musicians great and not so much, I came to know what kind of recording I like – the well made live performance. But it was not until practicing photography in a non-journalistic way that I realized why. It has to do with the subject/object, mind/matter division that has plagued Whitey since Sophocles. 

When you take a photo, the mind meets the matter – the subject meets the object – at the location of the camera, and the camera makes an image. That image is not a memory, not a slice of time, not a record of the event (!) and certainly not a story. It is a photograph. 

If you want to make something else out of it, that’s your problem.