RiQ Augustus


Photo
Looking and seeing imply a desire to enter into something, to inhabit it. Yet too often this desire turns out to be mere curiosity, and even before crossing the threshold, we find ourselves helplessly on the outside, feeling somewhat sheepish, as reason has replaced both our senses and our spirits as the principal means of comprehending an elsewhere that has become colder and ever more remote. What remains is an abstract form of understanding that no longer requires presence. Reality is precluded from us because the world appears to be entangled in our very pointing. In pointing, we produce truths about the world, while the real remains what is there, whether we understand it or not. Photography mirrors this crisis of seeing, fracturing the immediacy between observer and observed. Images are a way of looking (a viewing experience) rather than a true copy of reality as it is. They make the absent present and the present absent. Thus, what has become important is not the seeing but perhaps the observation of the instrument that is looking.