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I have an urge to see differently, to train my eyes to perceive otherwise and I’m querying photography—the tool we have invented to see and memorise in greater details—to accompany myself in this process of un-learning.
In this image I see my son Tian playing with a camera.
I see the strokes of light sensitive emulsion brushed onto a sheet of paper.
I see the passing of time and the fading of contrast.
I see young curiosity.
But, in between all, I see two visual regimes of sight in correspondence: my son’s eye showing me how to see and relate with the world from his instinctual and playful perspective, and photography that since its invention established itself as the universal technology adopted to regulate, compartmentalise, fix, conform, domesticate, and control our mode of viewing.
Like language, writing, pottery, computing, and any other human creation, photography mirrors and maintains our human characteristics of being subjective, partial, temporal, superficial, and infinitely limited. But maybe, as a consequence of our human attributes, we also invented narratives that describe our creations as objective, universal, permanent, and truthful.
We are breathing frames, we are walking frames, we reproduce new frames, and our existence is supported by frames.
Tian, my son, represents a fragile frame, subordinated to adjustments, opened to be broken.
Anatomically, Tian is looking at me to consolidate his frames and I look at Tian with a new sense of responsibility that I never experienced before.
This inter-generational responsibility is an engine for change. It is calling me to change.
We are both living and growing inside a society that adopted specific structural frames and that institutionalised the photographic frame as the regulatory apparatus to coordinate the visible.
I blink.
At times I feel like being a photographic camera in the hands of a society with a bag full of interchangeable lenses. There is the patriarchal lens, the white supremacy lens focused on progress and innovation, the lens of scientific universal truth, the lens of emotional repression, the lens of meritocracy and success, the lens of denial, and many more…
The bag is so heavy!
Tian, your dad really enjoys coming down to the ground to play this game called photography with you.
I know you can teach me how to un-learn, how to soften my sturdy frames, and crack the sophisticated lenses comfortably secured on my eyes.
I blink.
This time I sense an imperceptible noise, the blink reminds me of the sound of the trigger.
Tian, what about if photographs are visual pauses of the sounds of things, and the apparent silence that those images produce are opportunities for digesting the complexity of reality?
…silence…
Tian, what about if cameras are co-creators/partners interested in accompanying us on the act of listening?
Photographic listening requires a fair combination of stillness and movement in search for more receptive positions and clearer sensations.
Photographic listening encourages us to focus not only on the surroundings but also, at the same time, internally, on the invisible creatures populating our bodies, animating our organs, metabolising the nutrients.
Now you blink.
The first thing you did when I handed you the camera was to taste it with your mouth. Your body camera operates differently from mine, your shutter is located in your mouth and your photographs get captured, processed, and stored first in your stomach.
Tian, are you suggesting I should photograph with my guts as well as my eyes?
Should my camera obscura house the microbiome capable of connecting me with intuitive wisdom?
I laugh with you at the mind-body split I cultivated for so many years as the key to access knowledge.
I blink.
Through an automatic impulse I shut both apertures so as to keep my eyes lubricated and healthy.
That same impulse reminds me of the reflex mirror present in the single-lens cameras that allows the photographer to see through the viewfinder and, once activated, lifts up to create the necessary black-out for the image to impress the film or convert via light sensors into digital data.
We need blackness to calm the nervous system.
We need blackness to improve mental clarity.
We need blackness to prevent eye strain.
We need blackness to increase alertness and attention.
We need blackness to be able to see.
On average adults and teens blink about 21,600 times per day, or 15 times per minute.
And now, while I’m having a seamless visual experience facing the bright screen of my computer, I’m sure that I’m blinking even more.
At times, I purposely close my eyes and black out my vision to concentrate better and find sharper focus on specific visual information.
It seems paradoxical that cuts, interruptions, and black-outs are physiological aspects of our capacity to see.
Maybe the blink can be understood as a sort of somatic defence against the visual overstimulation of the brain, or as a sharpening cut on the fabric of the real.
There is a vital loss of information in our daily existence that allows us to cope with the infinite flow exceeding our limited capacity to perceive.
If we add to the 21,600 blinks the time we spend with our eyes closed while we are sleeping, nearly a third of our daily life is spent in darkness.
Let me blink one more time.
I have the sensation that by closing my eyes I give space to other ways of seeing.
In darkness, I can connect with what my eyes cannot register.
In darkness, I can fill the gaps of vision by rendering the apparent.
In darkness, I can see how vulnerable and restricted is the scope of my sight.
In darkness, I can surrender to the fear of not being able to see it all.
Tian, maybe the blink of the eyes can function as an involuntary reminder that we need to valorise darkness as a luminous opportunity to live the actual through new conformations.
In parallel to the fluctuation of day and night and all the variations in between, our optical system oscillates between grasping, cutting, stitching, memorising, forgetting, rendering, and all the mutations in between.
Like a world inside a world, we are in sync to a constant motion of recomposition.
Nothing is universally or permanently defined.
I blink one more time.
Tian, what if our photography operates as a sort of eyelid, and every time we click our cameras we layer a skin called identity onto the skin of things that surround us?
What if what we identify as stable, fixed, and aligned is the temporal fruition of our eyelids’ incessant motion?
What if the same skin that contains us, that circumscribes our partial perspective and delimits our ability to explain it all, is also the artifice of our deceptive mode of identification?
Skin grows, dies, and re-conforms continuously while penetrating and being penetrated through its porosity.
In and out, images and skins, eyelids and identities, seeing and photographing, it is all melting into an erotic flux of shaping while being shaped.
When we see through the skins of reality, the separation we place in between subjects gets neutralised and replaced by erratic exposures.
All the skins in between the skins get simultaneously exposed, we are all exposing and perceiving the exposure of others.
Thanks to our skins we are part of a process of infinite congregations of sensitivity or, in other words, we are constantly moisturising and being moisturised with lighting emulsion that passionately arouses us.
Ah, we just blinked at the same time…
Tian, what about if we play photography as a ritualised gesture aimed to break the clarity of the image?
At school I got educated to use the camera to capture what merits to be memorised, as if the instrument would help me to define what it is important.
Now, here with you we can practise photography as an offering, as a mode of gifting what merits to stay outside the frame of our intellect. We can learn together to offer our attention to what is invisible to our eyes and to worship the absent as significant.
At school I got educated to read the photographic image as a coherent manifestation of facts, as if the actual is evidenced by its clear visibility.
Now, here with you, we can photograph what is in sight so as to con-fuse the order of things with its illusion. We can learn to accept the clarity of the image as an arrogant assumption based on reductionistic and discriminative principles.
Let’s click our cameras!
Tian, your dad really enjoys coming down to the ground to play this game called photography with you.
Eventually skins, flesh, photographs, frames, the order of things, power dynamics, everything decompose and fertilise the soil.
Tian, perhaps our new photographs should grow from the soil and turn into stones.
In geology, petrification is the process by which organic material becomes a fossil through the replacement of the original material and the filling of the pore spaces with minerals.
This time while I blink, I sense a tear forming on my eyes, filling the pore spaces and running down toward the ground.
It tastes of salt.
We know how to cry well before we learn how to speak and write.
And these words taste of salt.
When I was your age, I was told boys don’t cry, I was told to express my strength by holding back my tears and to repress my emotions.
After many years, here with you, I’m learning to cry again.
I want you to witness your dad endorsing the power of his tears washing away the fear to be judged as vulnerable.
Tears are bringing us closer together.
Tears are fertilising the soil of intimacy.
I’m closing my eyes.
I’m thinking about our photographs turned into stone being washed and carved by the action of different fluids: rain, rivers, oceans, tears and, eventually, through erosion and weathering, they get turned again into sand and soil.
When I force my gaze to stay fixed on a subject, my eyes automatically let the lacrimal fluid in, as if I need fluidity to keep my vision sharp.
I blink, a new tear spills out.
It drops.
It touches the ground.
Come on Dad, let’s play!
Image Credits
Image 1 : Tian discovering photography, photographic emulsion brushed on watercolour paper, Folkestone (UK), 2018. Photograph by Manuel Vason.
Image 2: Roots and Branches, Vitoria (Brazil), 2022. Photograph by Manuel Vason.
Image 3: Playing a game called photography, Gran Canaria (Spain), 2021. Photograph taken with a self-timer.
Image 4: Grounding Photography #1, Folkestone (UK), 2024. Photograph by Rubiane Maia.
Image 5: Grounding Photography #2, photograph transferred on ceramic. Folkestone (UK), 2024. Photograph by Maria Maddalena Zangirolami.
Image 6: Grounding Photography #3, Lanzarote (Spain), 2024. Photograph by Tian Maia Vason.
Image 7: The PhotoPerfomer in Action, photograph transferred on ceramic. Folkestone (UK), 2024. Photograph by Maria Sideri.
Image 8: Sodium Salicate cracked texture on ceramic, Folkestone (UK), 2024. Photograph by Manuel Vason.
Image 9: Grounding Photography #4, Folkestone (UK), 2024. Photograph by Rubiane Maia.
Image 10: Divisa (PONTO 12: -20.207250, -41.554266) ESTRADA DA TERRA, Ibatiba (Brasil), 2022. Photograph by Rubiane Maia.
Image 11: Tian Maia Vason looking through a stone, Gran Canaria (Spain), 2021. Photograph by Manuel Vason.
Image 12: Photossification, Folkestone (UK), 2024. Photograph by Manuel Vason
Image 13: Grounding Photography #5, Folkestone (UK), 2024. Photograph by Manuel Vason.
Image 14: Grounding Photography #6, Folkestone (UK), 2024. Photograph by Manuel Vason.
Image 15: Tian & Dad playing a game called photography, Folkestone (UK), 2024. Photograph by Rubiane Maia.
