There were ants in the bathroom. They came crawling out of the gutters and cracks in the walls, probing searching, forming roads along the tiles of  the floor. He  slept wide  into the open day. When he  woke, all frights walked in the  blazing sun  without their clothes.

In the lobby  an islam preacher, white robe and beard, the staff of a pilgrim; 

A guy making humming, whistling  noises  and flipping pencils with his fingers, two in each hand, very quickly, eyes  turned  upward, staring at the ceiling.

Distant land, the clock.

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.

In contrast to common belief, sex does not sell: it is the shifting of desire, that does the selling.

Anomie is our condition, Anomia is our curse, Anomaly is our profession. Or to put it another way: our scabrous individuality consists of trying to name our condition.

–e.m. cioran fall into time

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be “interesting” to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference wether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by a the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or the moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Or at least we do for a while.

— Joan Didion, The White Album

what is the visual fabric of memory? A lack of precision, leaving holes to be filled in; an ongoing fight against the indexicality of the image: Not showing something, only reminding me of something the picture does not show.

this constant slipping…

Our deductions from the surface to what lies underneath are usually wrong and photography, as the art of surface, is especially vulnerable to this fraud of looking. The projection of complex circumstances onto a flat plane is misleading; in order to get onto paper or onto the screen, the light has to travel through multiple surfaces, that all leave their mark and tell their own story. The lens-plane, the emulsion/the sensor, the chemical plane of the developer, the scanner, the plane of digital manipulation with its vectors of bending and shifting light, revealing and obfuscating with the same gesture… Yet somehow I still believe that the picture tells some kind of story about what is underneath all these surfaces. I am naïve in that way…

But the dilemma is: I only have the pictures to tell me about the world. The flat world of the TV is in turmoil, yet outside my window, everything is dead calm: So, how is the world then? Scratching the surface only reveals another surface and the idea, that all these surfaces together hint on some kind of meaning is only hypothetical…

The images are a result of this confusion: deliberate misunderstandings, being vulnerable to suggestions, being easily susceptible to these voices of the surface…

The supposed sense of security created by the power of reason as the basis of all understanding has penetrated mans everyday existence creating a terrible need for order in his life so as to achieve stability at all its levels: his working life, love life as well as economic, social and emotional levels of his life. Success depended on the maintenance at all cost of this stability whereas the breakdown of stability necessarily signified failure and consequent exclusion from the benefits thereof.

Our educational system makes us sensitive to these modern precepts; we imbibe the principles of stability together with the letters of the alphabet. We were educated to to achieve success and consequently guarantee ourselves a future free from the slightest insecurity which might endanger this only possible way of life. Nevertheless, parallel to this theory of stability runs the danger of its reversal, which infuses us with fear. We fear the loss of stability and so remain trapped between the desire for job security and fear of unemployment, between the need of finding a permanent partner and fear of loneliness, between the dream of a good salary and the fear of economic misery, between the social prestige of being considered very professional and the fear of not coming up to scratch and finally between the need for an emotionally stable life and the fear of losing ones reason.

The Worlds of Pajcha, Prologue

The Camera is an apparatus to shed the light from the dark, the view of the world worth preserving from the one you allow yourself to forget, remember the moment you deem decisive and discard the myriads of constellations you consider irrelevant; the good (picture) from the bad. The camera is a moralistic apparatus.

(and here Nakahira has burned his negatives; the arrogance of the photographer who assumes a moral position far above the blaze of this world. He wanted to get rid of himself, but everywhere he turned, there he only found himself.)

his alcoholic intoxication; the suicide attempt: It is not enough to die, you want to erase yourself from the world as if you never had existed.

On the edge of this lies the banality of existence itself: An impulse of rage against “the good picture” and then from here on a rage against all pictures and against seeing the world itself, against the “world becoming image”.

It’s difficult to explain, but I like ravens. If I’m reincarnated I want to be a raven.

I’m wishing that I could stop this world. This act[of photography] may represent my own revenge play against life, and perhaps that is what I enjoy most.

— Masahisa Fukase, 1976