9.14.23

The poverty of the image. How is it that the better cameras get that the image becomes everyday so much poorer? Today, the movies and photographs invite us to look but not to see. To watch and never to feel. Even emotion feels like a trap, always keeping us on the outside of something, a strange emptiness settling into our stomachs. The texture of images, slowly deteriorating into a smooth, poreless product that we can't get our hands into. Sit back, relax, and forget. The people we see on screen, trapped in an ageless kind of limbo, always so young, so beautiful, silhouettes perfectly sculpted. We look at ourselves in the mirror, another kind of screen and we are ashamed of how time shows on our faces, on our bodies. Beings in motion, in time, we are never still, never the same moment to moment, always shifting and changing. How do we make an image that celebrates true beauty, invites true motion, true seeing? The stifling of image and so-called identity, identity's so-called claim to politics, to representation, has never been farther from the truth. Must the movies rob of us something when we go to visit them? Must we be sold, must we sell our attention? Must we settle for "sensation without feeling?" (Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic). Can't the movies give us life instead of taking it from us? How do we take our time instead of giving it away? Making a slow image...doesn't necessarily have to do with frame rate or narrative pacing. A slow image, an image with texture, with faces that betray their age, their complexity, a face like yours and mine, a face like somebody's on the street. How do we make an image like an invitation to go deeper, to enter the world. How do we make an image that is more than a machine?