Old gays

"This evolutionary sweep of consciousness is training itself back to spirit." Alex Grey

Alex Grey is one of my favorite artists, not just b/c of his paintings, but also b/c of his performance art in the early 1970s. Since then, Grey has elevated his art in to a new consciousness, a new language of icons, seeming at once to bring in to expression the birth of the new consciousness. He says that, "humanity is gaining a conscious and it is moving forward," whether we are aware of it or not.

I had not posted anything in a while. I have been busy with work and school. This picture was on the cover of the NY Times (the online version) and it totally awoke something in me, something that had been repressed in my memories. Alex Grey's words seem to go along side with what seems to be going on in this photograph.

Funny how photographs seem to open up memory banks in ones data storage, whether it is collectively or privately. Photographs seem to appropriate the Real as if to claim it for its own. As Roland Barthe would say, the facial expression in this photograph is the studium; the punctum is what is going on around her; but i think her facial expression is also a form of punctum. There is a universality in her face, a kind of suffered representation of her inner reality.

Photojournalism seems to capture this interior psyche, as expressed by the faces of the subjective other's and their spatial and temporal position in the world. One could say that through these photographs, published in major newspapers and news magazines, there is a language being communicated, between historical photographic opts. in real time--of people, moments, catastrophes, war--and us, the witnesses of these causalities. We are, whether subconsciously or unconsciously, acquiring a symbolic understanding of the human condition, through the scrutinization of our own existence.

WE want to document the Real as though it is going to disappear forever. The Real being, not the corporeality of our bodies (we tend to die), but the actualities that are certainties around us. We want moments, gestures, expressions, movements, events, to crystallize through our sequestration of their instant of expression. Photographs can do that for us.

I love photographs.

The Future

"We were seeing the future and we knew it for sure. I saw people walking around in it without knowing it, because they were still thinking in the past, in references of the past, but all you had to do was know you were in the future, and that's what put you
there. The mystery was gone, but the amazement was just starting." --Andy Warhol