All We Ever Know Is The Obvious

California, July 2016

America will always be a mystical place, with photos just being an additional layer on the pop-image constructed by countless films, songs, movies, tv-shows, news-flashes that form the fabric of what we mistakenly perceive to be the USA. 

But there is no inner core to it, nothing we can unwrap and suddenly find the Being of America, it is only layers wrapped in layers of images of places that remain imaginary. 

Maybe its different when you live there and the shop on the corner is an actual shop where you can buy stuff instead of a stand-in. But I doubt that: 

What then is the Becher-project? Vectors of obscurity and mystification vs. Clarity and Enlightenment 

Photography as a vehicle of enlightenment; in the very same moment, it also widens the gaps that enlightenment leaves in its wake: Is there really any revelatory impulse in the endless parade of  Gas Tanks? Or is it just a reminder that the world surrounding us will always remain an impenetrable mystery, no matter how hard we look at it? 

The dialectic of enlightenment as it manifests in photography; the clearest, most objective way of depicting something only heightens our awareness, that the world will always remain unreadable.  While the most mystifying way of showing something often falls flat and reminds us that all we ever know is the obvious.

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