We are sitting by the sea, a girlfriend and I, on a Cycladen island, and we look, as you do, at the bay, the waves and the wind, the sunlight and the colors it causes. We are talking about the objectivity of observations. If you now put down a camera that took this up for an hour, then that was objective, my girlfriend says. For some reason I want to protest. Such a camera also offers a cut -out, which does not see what I see – “but that is precisely what objectively means,” my girlfriend rightly lags against.
That’s right. I look subjectively, of course. And if you had a very grid with cameras, about nine, all of whom would all take part of reality, I would be more satisfied. Because this would approach the human gaze more. But again you could not see all those nine images at the same time, so your gaze would wander again, and the objectivity would be completely theoretical.
Actually, I admit, I am sputtering because I don’t want any objectivity, but truth. The truth of the experience. Or maybe I even want an increase in experience.
Two days later I walk on the island in the morning, and oh how wonderful it is, the scents of the dry herbs, the sound of water through a concrete gutter, the hills and mountains across the valley, the warmth of the muffled sunlight, luckily there are a few clouds. I decide to take a picture of the view that I am just enjoying.
It will be a ridiculous photo. The weather seems very gloomy, in front of my feet is once again a half -completed part of a house with a lot of concrete iron, electricity wires cutting through the image. I love that messy of the Greek view: an empty oil till on which someone once lubricated a lick of paint, poles with threads, crumbling stone from where something is built or maybe, it is all so pleasant, if not at all the atmosphere of a luxury resort with his perfection and boredom. It is the kind of landscape in which you are sweaty to enjoy a tomato and the sound of geitebels further on. When I hear it, I always think of what a friend ever told: that shepherds coordinate the bubbles of the goats, so that harmony rises from the herd. You can hardly imagine it more peacefully and friendlier.
So that objective photo, of that view that I was enjoying so, of course does not transfer anything of that. A better photographer could take a more successful photo of it, but because I aimed for objectivity, I did not look for a framework. Is no framework search more objective or? Many people ensure that there are no other tourists on their holiday photos, that is neither objective nor true.
That I don’t like my photo, is because I believe that I am wearing the truth myself, the truth of the moment, the most subjectionable truth. That is not truth. I want the photo to show the joy that I feel.
Well, what a person is looking for. There is no truth, and objectivity actually seems quite a construction to me. But if you say that, you look like a postmodernist who only calls everything story and quote, and I don’t want that at all. I want to believe in what I see and experience as a subject, without documentary intentions. So just watch and know this moment: being here is wonderful. Not objective.
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