the open field

Carisbroke Station (c) D Harris P hotography and music appear to be different languages. However, the same question underpins both: Why learn and speak the language? It is not about having something to say. Words are available for that. To me it is something more. Time is crucial in music. Sloppy timing isn’t satisfying. Good exposure (recording the light) is important in photography. Both require a level of technique. Let’s call technique facility. Having facility means being free to express, not being stuck or hindered by technique. Both photography and music have structure. Facility through technique requires structure. The rules of harmony allow certain types of soloing as expression. Some sound pleasing, some don’t. The rules of exposure and framing create a certain order as opposed to randomness. Structure is an aid to gaining facility. At a certain level though, structure acts as a constraint on personal expression. Stuck in the same patterns, playing the sam

Shadow Self (c) D Harris T hat we construct our own reality is a fiction. To construct reality, we would have to be apart from it, outside of it, in order to construct it. This is absurd. Yet this is the state of a lot of contemporary art and contemporary art photography. It is a double fiction, because its sincere belief that we construct our own reality has become a 'reality' in itself. It is like the old saying, "tell a lie long and often enough, it becomes a truth." We could argue that, like novelists, we dream up characters that have believability and that these characters interact in real-life plots, and that this can reveal truths about ourselves and our world. Yes it can. It is still fiction if the photographer’s own truths are not expressed. A contemporary course curriculum for art photography states: "Consistency adds believability to your work and persuades your audience to suspend its disbelief." Two critical questions immediately arise:

Interior Landscape #2 (c) D Harris Is this image that of a flat piece of land set against a blue sky, or is it a table top against a wall? Our perception may allow us to recognise it as both. We are programmed to perceive what we expect to see. Sometimes, what we are looking at may not be what we perceive it to be. Which one is true? It depends on your perception. Our logical minds cannot process a “both-and” scenario and dictate that it must be “either/or”. However, truth is linked to perception and perception makes truth relative to the individual. This naturally leads to an experiential point of view, for what I have I experienced, I can ‘know’, in the felt sense, and what I have not experienced, I do not know. I may claim to know, but that is mere conception. In Zen, emptiness is a particularly challenging barrier on the path to ultimate awareness. It is a great test because the barrier is an illusion itself, set up by the conceptual mind, but perceived as real. There i