Blue Chair and Slats

Some peo­ple know the world around them by feel­ing other people’s feel­ings. Oth­ers have a sense in their bod­ies. I look. Then I run what you are doing through the data­base of my bil­lions of watched moments. My brain sifts through nuance and expres­sion and smell and who knows what. I am not sure how it works, but it is what I do. Know­ing how I get my infor­ma­tion about the world is really help­ful. It helps me to try other ways, have com­pas­sion for this way’s lim­its and enjoy the thing I am best at. I also know that I can allow the real feel­ing to come instead of just the act­ing out of what I know a feel­ing looks like. I know, tedious, right? When I was a kid I would hide behind the bushes out­side the house of the girl I had a crush on. I watched. If she walked by a win­dow, I was happy. I wasn’t look­ing in her bed­room (that would have done me in), just the fam­ily room. I was that in love. Just wanted to see her for a sec­ond in a win­dow. Then I would ride home on my Schwinn as fast as I could. The lit­tle watcher. Kind of creepy maybe, but I was a kid so don’t start throw­ing tomatoes. 

This look­ing at things is obvi­ously and lit­er­ally what the pho­tog­ra­phy is doing. The voyeur, I am the pro­tected recorder, keep­ing a light sen­sor between me and what’s really going on. I take the image and study it and make up a story and that some­how makes me feel good. 

This chair works as an image because of what is not the chair. The light through the fence is what I saw, then the blue. The chair adds the story for the photo, but the photo draws you because of the repeat­ing of the slats in the fence and the chair and the light play­ing between them, at least, that is what draws me. Then I cropped it, sat­u­rated up the blue a bit, worked on the vignetting. You know, I devel­oped the pic­ture. As I see it now, I feel good when I look at it. I guess I think it is beau­ti­ful in its own way, and being a part of mak­ing a beau­ti­ful image is a great way to spend an hour in this life. Totally worth it. The con­nec­tion to the beauty is the joy of the art. I don’t care why.