Photography and the Unconscious Panopticon: Part One

In Wim Wenders' beautiful, epic, 280 minute film Until the End of the World, Dr. Farber has made an electronic machine that can electronically project images directly into the brain, effectively restoring sight to his blind wife. She is able to see with a pair of electronic goggles wired to her head, viewing the video without optical vision. This is an incredible development for her and the characters spend much energy and time bringing video of their shared lives so that she can catch up on the visuals of what she has been missing.

They soon discover that the machine is also capable of the reverse process. Images can be recorded directly from the brain and played back on a screen for the viewer to watch in real time, making it possible to record one's dreams and then watch them back while awake. Soon, some of the characters find themselves completely addicted to looking at images from their own dreams, spending their days watching ghostly pictures on static filled computer screens, peering into real world depictions of their mysterious inner lives while the world outside increasingly threatens with isolation, mass destruction and environmental collapse.

Wenders' film was first released in 1991, before the widespread explosion of the internet, but the core critique of images and their addictive properties seems even more relevant today. If images can liberate us, they are just as capable of trapping us in unconscious processes and systems of rewards and penalties beyond our conscious awareness.

The popularity of photo sharing electronically across the media through vehicles such as Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace and hundreds of other sites has made it possible for us to take the 'real' as it may be, and transform it into visual metaphors that can be transmitted out to an invisible public where the images perform in ways separate and independent from their origin and subject. A great head shot on MySpace can get more traffic than a bad one, regardless of the real appearance of the person depicted. We are rapidly becoming addicted to the transformational ease by which photographs can trade in identities and personae. It is possible through photography to see ourselves as we would like to be, as we fantasize ourselves to be, stripped away of the flaws, messiness and complexities that life in its totality entails. The word fantasy here is the key, for we are looking in these moments for images that reinforce the ego. They require little effort. Instead they clarify and perfect our fantasies rather than amplify our vision.

This is part one in a summer serial posting. Click here for part two.

Harlem

The Studio Museum In Harlem has left a deep imprint on my own inner landscape. I have yet to leave an exhibition at the museum without feeling as though my world has been turned upside down with possibility. So it was with great enthusiasm that I accepted a second commission from the museum to make a body of photographs for the museum's journal, Studio.

Harlem is unlike any place that I have been in the world. The streets pullulate with an energy that gets me back to the places in Kenya where I was born and raised, where culture comes to you in the places in your body where you feel the beat of a drum. The deep African American and African roots in Harlem combine with a century of metropolitan life in New York City to create a place that is unique in the world, and is one of its treasures.

And so it was with a lot of trepidation that I began my first work in Harlem in 2006. I am in no position to comment with authority on all that Harlem stands for historically, culturally and politically. After much thought I decided to simply go there and walk, as if I was entering any other landscape in the world, and let the place take me where it would.

This second time, now more familiar with the neighborhood, I began to work simply with the word "earth" resonating in the back of my consciousness. This was not the western notion of earth which is something that we consider to be largely tamed by now, something that needs to be protected from us, but rather the Kenyan concept of "nchi" with which I grew up. The word means "land" in Swahili, but instead of referring to western ideas of the scenic or to a retreat from normal life, it refers to the vessel of all that is. The land is the home of the spirits, alive with unseen portent and containing an invisible world as influential and real as the visible one.

To put this into Post-Modern parlance, the western notions of signifier and signified are significantly altered. The land itself is a signifier for another world that is full of meaning outside of the visual. The signified is understood to exist on a spiritual plane, and there is no need for photographs or any other kind of picture to mediate the exchange.

It has been and continues to be my goal to explore this western need for pictures to place us in relationship with our environments. My hope is that these images resonate as having emerged from Harlem, rather than being about it.

Above is a selection of images from my recent work this past winter. You can see a complete edit of all 32 images from both commissions under the title "Harlem" in my archives.