STATE OF THE ART : Peter Brown Leighton : Camera Songs
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Out Of The Ordinary 1

According to cognitive neuroscientists, we are conscious of only about 5 percent of our cognitive activity, so most of our decisions, actions, emotions, and behavior depends on the 95 percent of brain activity that goes beyond our conscious awareness. –Mysteries of the Mind, Marianne Szegedy-Maszak

How we internalize and view who we are and how we “fit” in the universe isn’t always the same as how others view who we are and how we fit, and vice versa. One might think that in the beginning whatever divinities in attendance at the time would have ordained that communications between humans be more efficient. But, nada… Millions of years later, just as it seemed we might start making real progress, the next thing you know, someone threw the Internet into our kennel. Since then the dog that barks the loudest typically gets the bone.

Our species understanding of the meaning of the word “perfection” spans the distance from holy grails to burdens to bear, from hubris to humility. Perhaps, this is why, given our current obsession with robot-like efficiency in all things, we so rarely manage to attain it. And, perhaps, this is the reason, as well, that the myth of Icarus has retained its cultural vitality.

Today, the butterflies of modern chaos theory determine in which direction our futures will trend. And the intricate networks of social convention we’ve woven around the globe to control their flight patterns are suddenly proving to not be as well constructed as we thought.

In such a time, if a person were so inclined, he might start taking photographs of the ordinary world around him as it becomes increasingly more disorderly, while imagining the exercise to be like writing poetry. After many years of which, with a glass of wine in hand, and “Choctaw Bingo” playing in the background, this person might even be inclined to call his ever expanding collection of images, “Camera Songs”. 

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Out Of The Ordinary 2

The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody. –Albert Camus

When I first learned how to use a camera, develop film, and make prints, I simply wanted to gobble up everything I saw. I named my camera “World Eater”. That was a long time ago,

Today, my approach to photography, while not as radical, still inclines toward improvisation. Wherever I am is a catalyst for what I shoot. Photography is the only medium I can think of that affords one the possibility to create this way, to instantaneously turn what is in our minds inside out. Sometimes, like junk DNA, these efforts don’t amount to much. Sometimes they reveal more about us than we’re willing to admit.

My series of camera songs, intentionally and by its very nature is a rickety, imperfect construct. Its photographs are of ordinary circumstances, taken with a point and shoot camera as I’ve gone about my days. There is an aura of impromptu playfulness and amateurishness about them. Only when assembled in pairs do its images begin to evidence some deeper intelligence at work, resonating like Camus’s chords playing over a background of white noise, searching for a melody.

Such, as they say, is life. 

In the undertaking of this series, then, I’m not unlike the example of the demented patient in Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus” whose doctor discovered him fishing in a bathtub and who then asked him if the fish were biting. “Of course not, you fool,” the patient replied, “this is just a bathtub.”

In my case, the bathtub would be full of camera songs.

That said in the context of the 21st Century, the psychopathy of fishing in bathtubs seems to be in vogue, admired by the aspirational today as a profitable way to get ahead, especially if one is also selling bait and fishing poles.

To balance the scales, then, I’m reminded, as well, of another story, located at the other end of the absurdity spectrum. It is about a boy who was always so overly optimistic that his parents, to teach him about life’s inevitable disappointments, determined to give him a load of horse manure for Christmas – instead of the pony he had asked Santa for and was utterly convinced he was going to get.

On Christmas day, the boy’s parents woke to screams outside on their lawn where the manure had been dumped the night before. With sinking feelings, they made their way from their bedroom into their front yard, there to find their son feverishly digging through a massive pile of excrement with his bare hands, shouting, “I just know that there’s a pony in here somewhere!”

Which brings us, at last, to the moral of this post: That instead of fishing in a bathtub that contains no fish, we might, rather, more beneficially spend our time digging through piles of fertilizer in search of some deeper meaning there. Therein, at least, resides the slim chance that fate might intervene one day and reward our efforts with a pony.  

All Copyrights Peter Brown Leighton

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