I am interested in ceremonies of the present.
What is ceremonious and curious and commonplace
will be legendary.
Diane Arbus, 1962
Nathalie Brilliant’s performance art piece at Fort Mason, San Francisco Art Institute
To get at what’s real, and every artist worth a damn knows this is the whole rotten game, you need to fuck with logic itself. You need the contradiction, the beautiful lie that tells the truth.
The photographer’s stuck with this gorgeous prison: the world as it actually looks. Light, shadow, the brutal specificity of this face, this moment, this grain. I’m a slave to what’s there. But the only way out, the only way, is through the trapdoor of paradox.
So I take that camera, that supposed truth telling machine, that “mirror with a memory” the old timers called it, and I treat it like it’s lying. Like it’s a dream machine. Like it’s not capturing reality but transforming it. The camera becomes some kind of alchemy box, and the picture? The picture’s not a document. It’s a metaphor, a symbol, a secret message written in light.
Once I stop giving a shit about all that surface stuff (the perfect texture, the correct form, the faithful reproduction) that’s when I can actually use all of it. Use it to chase down something that matters. Something true in ways that have nothing to do with accuracy.
The real truth. The poetic truth. The kind that kicks me in the teeth and makes me feel alive.