The Rotating Body

Revelations these days come fewer and simpler. Observations that seem obvious, that I may even be self conscious to make, offer deeper lessons. Perhaps it is again that state of motion, the increased receptivity to seeing things around that nurtures the urge to articulate. Whatever, I'll take it. On Friday cruising around the city on foot, with camera and pen in hand, I reconsider what binds things, places, moments that intrigue me. 

The simplest are the most complex. Intersections for example, define the merging of opposites. What hit me was the union of tools and concept lately - that my camera, the fact that its lens and screen can move independently, nudge my eye toward a straight on view of the world. In architectural terms, this straight on view (where you look through your lens at a right angle to your subject) is called a plan or section, an orthographic projection. It preserves accuracy, measurability. 

These thoughts provoke less an instinct to represent or formalize this interaction and more an urge to suppose that being moved to think about things in this way is a quality of beauty. A flurry in mind and body marking achievement, causing someone to shift along a spectrum.

I ate dinner at Annmarie's last night in the home they rent from Alva Noe. What he writes about hit home. "Perception is not something that happens to us or in us. It is something we do." The inside flap cover goes on..."In Action in Perception (his book), Noe argues that perceptual consciousness depends on capacities for action and thought - that perception is a kind of thoughtful activity. Touch, not vision, should be our model for perception. Perception is not a process in the brain, but a kind of skillful activity of the body as a whole. We enact our perceptual experience. 

....the content of perception is not like the contents of a picture: the world is not given to consciousness all at once but is gained gradually by active inquiry and exploration - exercise of practical bodily knowledge."

But back to the rotating body and finding a frame. 

Drawings that combine multiple view points, collisions between the slice or measured view and the perspective, these continue to fascinate. In terms of framing, Weegee (Arthur Fellig) and Henri Cartier-Bresson, two of my favorite photographers were purists: what you see through your lens is what you get. The frame at the instant of the photograph is not cropped or altered. Something appealing about that to me.