Picture Notes

Absolutely everything needs to be translated.

This photograph was made at Plasmawr in Conwy, Wales a few years ago. It was a display of some of the things this merchant may have had at his dining table, this being his portrait made out of cookie dough. I have photographs of faces to post but I’m not ready to and I have lots of things to say about current events but need to back off and relax for a few weeks until I decide on the imagery. Things have changed in the past few weeks and I’ve picked up some other things to do and made a few new friends.

For the past 5 years I’ve been collecting email addresses from people who would like to be notified when the contents of this site has changed and even though I’ve changed it and moved around a few things and added new images and new technology I’ve never emailed anyone. The reason being that there is so much else going on in the world and we all get so much spam I thought changes to my site aren’t really very important and I didn’t want to bother anyone. I’m really just a click away. I recently added a copy of a 14 minute promotional movie I made for a boys camp in Maine and now I’m in the process of cutting it down to under 3 minutes, just because no one seems to have 14 minutes anymore, including myself.

I was thinking about my headline about everything at work needing a translator and how much better we would all be if we understood what people were saying to us without having to ask for clarification.

This photograph was once displayed on my color laboratory office wall, I was looking for something to shoot one day and put this broken light bulb on a green background. I photographed it as a horizontal and then put it on display as a vertical, just because it fit the space. Someone came into my lab and saw it and asked what it was and started laughing. He saw the face while I was still looking at a broken light bulb.

Not seeing this face makes me wonder how much visual information I fail to recognize each day and think it must be enormous. I’m going to spend the next few weeks looking for things that are right in front of me that I’ve missed. Just the volume of visual information that we receive every day makes sorting through it all a challenge, not just trying to see what is right in front of my face. I’ll post my findings here.

What are you thinking? I’ve decided the next few photographs in this blog are going to be of people’s faces, sort of. I’m going to start out with a mask collection while I’m asking permission from everyone. To warm up to the subject, because I have thousands of photographs to choose from, I’m presenting this metal/glass face. This diver’s helmet was in a display at the Smithsonian Folk Life Festival last summer. Don’t we all sometimes wish that this was the face we present to the world, a face that hides what we are thinking and yet is still attractive and functional while being alien. I was told at a workshop that 93% of personal communications is non verbal, I’m not sure how that is broken down between body language and facial expressions but would guess that most of our communication is with our face. If we could look like this when playing cards we could all become champion poker players.