Every Image is a Self-portrait

From the first photograph, or piece of moving image footage, all that it was was a vessel that a person can take self portraits.

The view of the camera is a coldness, a machine, that stares without emotion, records documents. For some may it can present fears, nerves, or for others it is a vessel through which their ‘truth’ can be shared. It stares, and everything before it presents themselves. All it cares about is that you are a surface to bounce light over and for it to then interpret. It looks, with no judgement, no concern. Present as a record keeper of what is presented to it. Its fabrication requires the hand of an operator to give opportunities for it to achieve its function as a recording device. It can only record, through the hand of humanity.

So we place ourselves intrinsically at the heart of its purpose and function. A mechanical object/ tool to fulfil ascribed functions for humanity. It’s purpose is to record the passage of light bouncing off 3 dimensional reality

The most romantic sentiment in the concept that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, is not the beholden. It is the sense that oneself, the beholder can have a view, that no other has, that through your own eyes, holistically, you can see love, beauty as only you can. The lens of the camera shifted this as for the first time with the very grounded reality of the world the beholder, could attempt to present the beauty that was once only for them. Now it would be a mistake to say that painting, sculpture, drawing, poetry, the arts have not in their own rights played with the visions of the beholder. However, the lens presented an opportunity of a ‘reflection of the truth’ of the world. Truth through the lens is a misconception. All is a fabrication. A fabrication of the beholder. Akin to the aforementioned arts (not limited to). But it is this delving into the materials of reality that for me make the fabricated truth of the beholder so fascinating.

As through the lens, there is a presented familiarity, that the viewer belongs to that world, and should they be transported to that very moment, stand where you stand, they would look upon the exact scene that your eyes do, and there would be a shared truth. And so, by you lifting your lens you create a noble act of gifting to the viewer/ receiver the moment so they can receive it in the absolute visual truth, they can share that lens. And indeed there is a sharing, the viewer does receive, there is a gifting; However the truth is threaded from the variegated truth of the moment, and absorbed into the beholder, via a machine, to then be reproduced in a framed format, digitally projected, confirmed to outputs, and presented from a form of truth from beholder eyes.

It might be pertinent at this point to question what eyes see, and what they perceive. Your eye receives light bouncing about much as the camera does. It converts it in to a readable format for you (flips it back from upside down) and then the image rests within your eyes. This is the closet screening that scene will have to the objective truth as it projects upon the back of your eye. And even that, is manipulated, a flip to correct the image. Editing of the image has begun. Immediately as the image comes to rest, interpretation, narrative, perception begin. We ‘read’ the images and a form of shaping occurs. Tarkovsky describes filmmaking as ’sculpting with time’ and here I begin to imagine the image as a clay, and your role is to shape it.

So, as the camera becomes an ‘extension’ of our ability to visually share our experiences and stories, there is a huge amount of layering to even the most free of compositions. As we look at the world, we are looking through a two way mirror, were the world is there, the focus point, and yet we only see it through a transparent image of ourselves presented back at us. Sometimes our own reflection is more defined, sometimes we notice it more, but the world as we see it, is always through a reflection of the self.

The beholder’s truth, their vision, comes via themselves, a projection of the self as we look at the world we inhabit.