How I See the World

Touch is my favorite sense for some reason. Tactile sensation seems to be the most pleasurable to me. When I was younger I couldn't stand to see an object that I wasn't allowed to touch. Museums took a while for me to tolerate, especially visiting dinosaur bones. I remember a particular instance when my 2nd grade teacher asked for volunteers to deliver an attendance paper to the office. It was laminated. I nearly had a seizure tryign to get picked to do it. At one point I was and the relief of knowing what the plastic-covered tagboard felt like was really amazing. I no longer had any need to deliver the attendace sheet again.

Despite this, images are to me the greatest expression of worldly existence. An image displays for me more about what it means to enjoy life than anything else. This of course is coming from my growing interest in photography, but I also have always been really drawn to pictures.

I recently read Bone and found it to be one of the few comics that I've read who's structure is very similar to a typical novel. The length, depth, plot elements, character development, all very similar to how a novel is often structured. The use of pictures served to embed me in the world more fully and more quickly than textual descriptions usually do in a story. I feel like I remember more of it, and have a better sense of it, because it used images and not descriptions.

Images become a world unto themselves the more you stare at them. At first they are just a representation of something that exists. But when you separate them from the rest of the world, by staring at them, by framing them, by placing them in public somewhere, the image takes on its own separate life. Then, contained within whatever boundaries have been set for it, there is so much.

Although I love to touch, I can't touch everything. But I can see just about anything. Even the invisible leaves a visible trace of itself most of the time. Every sound, feeling and thought is inexorably linked to a sight.

When I look at an image I see movement, smell, memory, temporature, sound, and most of all, shape. Sometimes all of photography seems like cheating in art, like photographing people seems like cheating in photography. The things around us, when held and studied, are so incredibly well organized and structured and ballanced, whether it's a meadow or a city, that it seems like all one has to do to create a work of beauty is to depict things as they are.

A really good image is something I can touch, too. Some of my favorite photos are ones that make me feel like I can run my hands over the things in the picture just by staring at it.

Images help me transcent states of mind like only illegal, harmful substances can. Thats not true, music can too, but images moreso. Images take me back to places I've been and things I've felt, and more importantly, take me to places others have been that I never will.

My thing about written word is this: I cannot imagine anything that I've never seen before. Nothing you describe to me can possibly be truly unique in my own mind, because my concept of all those words you're using are limited to my personal experience. You can go ahead and make really detailed, flowery descriptions, but all that's going to do is rearange my already established experiences differently. Images, on the other hand, can be totally new to me. There are textures, compositions, colors and shapes that I have never seen before that can be shown to me.

Images contain everything that I love about the world: sensory pleasure (experience is the meaning of life, btw), descriptive information, aesthetics, emotional communication, perspective, all wraped up in something that can be easily absorbed in an instant on a computer screen or blown up to the size of a building.

Don't even get me started on icons...