BREAKING THE LIGHT

      “The times they are a’changin,” sang Bob Dylan in the sixties. Photography wasn’t going to change come Vietnam or Korea. Painters haven’t had to see the world as realistic for over a hundred years. Photographers, for some reason, think they have to. Two hundred years of realism from cameras are like too many boring dinners of warmed over pasta. Henri Cartier Bresson coined the term “Decisive Moment,” and cozened and corrupted generations with “concerned” realism. Diane Arbus made ugly realism the mother’s milk of young photographers. Later, Nan Goldin made sex and homosexuaism, drugs and despair the holy grail. From photojournalism to fashion the slowly emerging art form got stuck in the past or manipulated by “realists.” No photographer freed the camera and the medium from the tendentious and repetitive shackles of virtual realism, including those who made “abstract” images such as the Westons, Steiglitz, White, Brandt, Haas and Siskind.

      In those days, I made flower child and hippie light shows and multi-screen extravaganzas, while my staff grew pot in my studio. I was a smart aleck youngster with a passion for the demoniac and a crazed, metaphysical yen to run amok among the stalled stodgy visual mediums. I got hooked on traveling the world. I specialized in aerial photography, wrote the book on how to do it, and sold the luxury cruise lines on my talents. A million and a half miles, seven seas and continents and eight picture books later it was a great ride. But that devil itch was still there, the burning demon with the forked tongue and tail who wanted out. I ran into a few years of personal tragedy with the passing of a much loved one, and wild alchemy or witchercraft spewed out a torrent of images made in my digital Canon cameras. Ivana, my lady friend, called them “Breaking the Light.” These chaotic archetypes shatter the myths of realism in the art of photography the way Kandinsky and Futurists, Picasso and Matisse among others destroyed romantic painting at the end of the nineteenth century and roared into the twentieth. Turner’s late abstract seascape paintings predicted the tidal wave fifty years earlier.

      New art, new vision comes from not knowing or “seeing.” If Isee what is in front of my camera, I am controlled by my old vision, my cliche vision, my vision which is like everyone else’s. When I will not, dare not and cannot simply see, I rely on blind, intuitive vision, the vision of prophets and seers, shamans, sorcerers and necromancers. Their visions, however incredible, spectral or bizarre, remain hidden in their trances. While wielding my camera in an entranced state, I am blind to everything except a phantasmagoria of mesmerizing illusions, apparitions, wraiths, chimeras, phantasms and hallucinations. Like Tiresias, the blind prophet of ancient Greece, I simultaneously envision, soar into and inhabit the future. During this metaphysical flight into darkness, my trained instincts and intuition inspire and propel my digital camera to record what cannot be seen with my naked eyes. I explore the psychic, mysterious transmutation of light’s “quantum electrodynamic indeterminacy.” I record the kaleidoscopic spectrums of light’s dazzling, iridescent, ravishing asymmetrical singularities.

      Art that boldly sails into the hazardous shoals and raging tempests of the future is a product of uncertainty, passion, chance and quantum fluctuations in an artist’s brain. An artist lashes out against mediocrity, yells a war cry, and abandons the safety net of mind sets and early conditioning to go for broke. He or she invents and discovers revelations and epiphanies which flare up like celestial fireworks. It is a game of blind man’s buff played out on the blazing light filled spectrum of the entire universe. We are nothing if we do not seek and imagine unbounded totality, the infinite wisdom of light and its endless astonishing manifestations. Light, enigmatic light, timeless light, fills our brains like the most luminous objects known in the universe, exploding quasars powered by super massive rotating black holes, To create the future of the art of photography we must dare to dance with exploding quasars around the rims of black holes. By taking such wildly imaginative risks, hazards and shaman like adventures, we make the invisible visible, dance with light, and explode the tired myths of the past. The art of photography can ‘reveal’ the entire light struck spectrum and chaos of the human condition and the natural world. You must embrace the wild and anarchic high stakes poker game of the principle of indeterminacy, the risky quantum pandemonium which rules the world. What we see is purely a matter of how each individual sees it. Our brains, our Pavlovian trained brains, not our eyes, command our vision. There can be no sober, fundamental reality, only phenomenal and fantastical chaos which illuminates and frees our inspired, creative fantasies and visual manifestations. We are children of light.