Folkcal Fraim 2
An Accidental Chart (of the Phases) of White Blood Cells Becoming Moonlight / TSE / 2015
Might we, for a few word-moments, imagine the difference and distance between seeing and sight as the same difference and distance between sunlight and daylight. Sight surrounds seeing. Daylight surrounds sunlight. The local (or lower) is imitative of the heavens (or higher) and together they combine (in an exchange of invisible layers) to express the unknowable and unrestricted realm of creation. And while I am extremely suspicious of the “round” in surround or Sir Round (a noble ball), I ask you as I have asked myself, “Is the eye half of a sphere” or “Is a sphere a whole eye?” If the shape of reality and its contents are sight-built, then it could be the role of photography to, either, continue or discontinue symbols. I close my left eye and look through the view-finder with my right eye. Every photograph I have ever taken has been done so with one eye but it has always felt like I was using one hundred eyes or one really large one. As a poet, I’ve always wanted to end language. As a photographer, I am fast arriving at the place of desperately needing to end symbols. Stare into a lens and an eye, a mechanical one holding the reflection of an organic one, stares back. Might we, crop the paragraph-frame, and not debate the enormous clear and unclear realm of natural versus available-light. Might we, also, conclude that there is a slight possibility that some inner origin of both is responsible for whatever is passed from artist to art object and art object to viewer. The speed of light, then, is false, because light is everywhere — seeded — even inside the things that are surrounded by darkness and seemingly dead. Lightlessness is momentary. It is but a pore on the huge dot of supreme vision.
Stare too long, unfocused, as if in a deep daydream, and everything about the sky becomes a miracle, a miraculous sea of microscopic life. Allow the stare to marinate or become solid, the statuesque gaze, and the moment becomes as religious as releasing the shutter in a summer storm, the photographer becoming crime-implicit or a practitioner of the Craft — every Snap, a slice of a neck, or a light-induced guillotine between likeness and life where everything that was once lit, darkens. Twice mentioned “distance” is the only word (above) that should surprise anyone because, as of now (to my knowledge), the hu-mind eye cannot separate the transparent fabrics of the upper atmosphere and into distinguishable sheets of photographic paper. Skywriting is still just skywriting until it becomes sky-scribble or some other unrecognizable, floating non-geometric form polluting the blue upper rooms of the earth’s mood. Perspective teaches us that trees are grass and mountains are enormous tree stumps. Trunk, tunnel, portal. The goal of every lens is not to be an eye but to be a tree, the good glass of transport, twisting, like an optic tornado, the limited vision of the hu-mind and the human eye, a zooming cyclone cloning the cycle of allowed sight. The invisible realm does not want to be advertised or put on blast. Foe or friend to this realm, photography is still deciding.
And, as any non Mandela-effected activist and artist knows, “getting the light right” in painting and “writing without light” in photography are rival twin strategies in the natural arsenal in the dark room and light room of good and evil that street photography has become. In fact, the act of shooting in public has become something of a constant battleground state between the cunning photographer and hive sensitivity, hive mindlessness, hive paranoia and worst of all: possible hive retaliation. Everyone who sees the photographer take the photograph, points all of their finger-lids at him at once as if, not only is his mother dead but as if she has died many times on many rolls of film. The photographer, however, does not care, for he knows that there is birth, too, in the photograph, especially if he has well-received — without disdain — the energy of all of the pointing eyes as they too have each created their own likeness and dislike-ness as a service, partially-inspired, to his. Exiting the shooting range, Art, he tells himself, has many routes.
To lift a camera to one’s face is to become the Janus of Gemini, the “eer / ear” in seer behind a Mechanical Mask and the Cyclops framed by the Small High Window at the Center of Visual Malfunctioning. Winogrand was right, “A photograph is what something looks like to a camera.” What the photographer captures is usually neither because so many unrecorded photographs occur and un-occur in the visual decision-making infinity. To be inside of finishing, as such is lens-life, and still becoming is the moving goal post that every exposure tries to kick the dissolving into being football through. As a creative-result of the willingness within the width of his ability to watch (without watching), he sees an inch of the image before it begins and before it ends. This particular ability to predict-a-picture arrives from an acute awareness of the puzzle-ling and un-puzzle-ing of looking. The sort of photography I am speaking of is a junkie addicted to the crossroads, layers and interruptions of reality. I speak of this as if it is special, some sort of gift, but it is nothing more than one aspect of the temperament we (all) left the last dimension with, but one we have to re-tune and re-discover once we come into the flash of flesh. In this way the camera is a bit of a nurse, bedside, holding a pan beneath all of the photographer’s senses except sight. The thing that ruins most good photographs is not that the photographer is not close enough (as Robert Capa so famously stated) but that sight, the sight of the photographer and all he knows how to see, refuses to shut up. Thus we are fortunate, are we not, when darkness or a lack of available light comes along and stuffs the throats of our retinas with a new version of “In the beginning…”
No one, least-of-all the artist, really knows in which direction the shooting (through darkness) actually goes, inner to the outer world or outer to the inner. Maybe the camera sees something that’s already inside of you, something organic but trapped in artistic expression. Funny how often we associate artistic freedom with unlocking the toolbox of the creative process. If unlocking is necessary, it makes one wonder about the actual tools, especially where poetry is concerned. Apprenticeship, study, training, and craft all load the toolbox whereas the actual practice of making a poem or a photograph unloads it. All cameras, with or without film or a digital censor, come pre-loaded, loaded with possibility and the tradition of perpetual propaganda production — like any other art machine. On the face of the photographer there is the propaganda eye and the eye of the Other. Too often, it seems, it is the role of advertising and certain easy newspaper photography to confuse the rolls of each eye. Whatever happens in the eye of the Other, the closed eye, the non view-finder eye, during shooting, is more akin to the source of consciousness than all of the Knowing Nothingness in the void that exists between cell life and solar life. Reduction, enlargements, microcosm, macrocosm, yes size matters to the eye and to photography. With light, the size of darkness is what the camera was created to explore and, either, serve or destroy. It is this darkness that the shutter, speedier than a visual lie, mocks. Created by some way-out program acquired in the fib-rib-land of depth of field, little things can only be made big again (and vice versa) or reversed or repaired if the camera, being held at one end of the field, acknowledges its connectedness to the, real or imagined, camera facing it and being held at the other end of the field because lifting a camera creates a mirror, a reality error, whether you see the mirror or not. Every time you pick up a camera, you are facing another camera; it’s the magic and mechanical feedback that you must avoid taking a picture of. At this very moment, writing, do I sound like me — writing — and sounding like me, the me writing across from me making a picture? Signifying another and another and another, the y in eye can only nose or be nosey or become noseye or nonseyense. In one eye, a séance. In the other, Science. The phases of such an eclipse cannot eye-know unless it is rendered, stop bathing, into the realm of anatomical homelessness reproductive as the Kodak-chromosomes in moonlight.
Poet, photographer, professor and bandleader Thomas Sayers Ellis is the author of The Maverick Room and Skin, Inc. He co-founded The Dark Room Collective and The Dark Room Reading Series in 1989 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has taught in various Universities and published, both poems and photographs, in numerous journals, including The Paris Review, Poetry, The Nation, and Best American Poetry (1997, 2001, 2010, 2015). In 2015, he co-founded Heroes Are Gang Leaders, a literary free Jazz band of artists who were awarded the American Book Award for Oral Literature in 2018. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in Poetry. His latest book Crank Shaped Notes was published by Arrowsmith Press in 2021. TSE was recently named the first Photo Laureate of St. Petersburg, Florida.