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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, like the eye that grounds our sight but is itself unseen.

The moment we began believing that the world is its own meaning rather than an image of something deeper, we lost the sense that it points beyond itself.

Photography mirrors this crisis of seeing, fracturing the immediacy between observer and observed. The subjectivity that is necessary for apprehending what appears must itself be folded into the event of perception; we perceive largely accurately, but not truthfully. Thus, what has become important is not the seeing but perhaps the observation of the instrument that is looking.

Seeing clearly is only a function of the degree of resolution you choose to apply to the encounter. I'm not interested in certainties. I'm interested in the shape of things that speak to me as real.