Picture Notes

When my children were young they reached a point when they wanted to know the how and why of everything. It wasn’t just why are we having this for dinner but why is the grass green, how does television work, why do trees grow, how tall will I be, why did my toy break. The exercise usually started out simple and then became a serious test of knowledge when they would ask things like how do airplanes fly, how many stars are there, how do automobile engines work, or why is grandma sick. Explaining how airplanes fly was always easier than than trying to explain the reasons for anyone’s illness, with illness there is always uncertainty.

Why do I like this photograph? I did this photograph in the late 70s and has been in and out of my portfolio and I just found it again in a slide box. I don’t know why I like it and it might be because I connect with this mask on some emotional level. I’ve seen art directors have strange and different reactions to it also. This masked performer was trying to annoy me and I responded by making a series of photographs of him/her and this one became my favorite because it was unexpected.

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.

Our Masks, Our History

This mask in the British Museum came from Rome around the start of the millennium and it’s great to see, to find something that seems so small when compared to other found objects and the fact that it’s survived all this time intact so I was able to photograph it in this cabinet 2000 years later. I wonder if the maker would have cared that most of the things that exist today will be almost immortal now because of the invention of digital photography.

I keep wondering if every day our lives take on new meaning because we are all on camera hundreds of times a day in London or if this is all just noise, some kind of feel good justification for civilization.

Still photography with film gave us a a crude way to record history and preserve the past and digital photography has extended the ability to make high quality images to everyone at any time or place with few technical restrictions. There seems to be an explosion of digital images coming into the world - millions of images everyday that will all need to be captioned, cataloged and preserved. I have a few more at istockphoto.