Introperspectives Preview

Introperspectives by SM Boris Robinson | Make Your Own Book

Another Blurb book preview.

This book reflects the first toss up in the air of some of my photographs to see how and where they will land. The book size required 76 images and the first run through my photos revealed about 4 I liked, which would have left 72 pages blank white. This seemed wasteful. So, I explored again, which was the point of the exercise anyway. The exploration revealed some good stuff that will, with hope and perseverance, provide for more clarity going forward. The book, therefore, represents a point before the beginning. And, yes I know Introperspectives isn't a real word.

(Excerpt - woohoo)
Introduction, as it were...

It's quite easy to take a photo, it is really hard to hold on to them.

The drive to take a photograph is not something I understand. Sure, I can philosophize, especially after drinking a few glasses of limoncello, but knowing or pretending to know the answer has so far not altered the drive. I will, for the moment, not worry about it.

A photo represents an experience for me. One may look into it and think it is about the objects or subjects being seen, but that's because we look at photos from above instead of from behind. A photo is me looking back at myself. It is connected to a time and a place, or maybe my mood, or something as simple as the bent of humor in my mind.

The problem in this digital age is the speed with which we can process and view a facsimile of the image on the monitor. At this point, only two real things were done - I was there and I pressed the shutter. The image does not yet really exist in any permanent, touchable, or materially crafted form. Similis vulgus, I see it, process it, get a nice feeling about it, and then go on with my life.
A while later when viewing the photo (not sure how long as time is a bit out of control at the moment) it elicits a more critical reaction. Missing are the sympathetic gray-matter synapse firings representing a more tactile reliving of the experience. The image is now only one of the one-hundred or maybe two-hundred billion photos taken on planet earth that year.

It is rather amazing the way most people view images these days. Incredible marketing has programmed the masses that it is all about them. Images are viewed with such inwardness that those that don't press an immediate Warm & Fuzzy button are cast aside without any thought or appreciation. The point of all of this is that the sheer number of images taken and this affliction of the masses somehow lowers the net worth, even in my eyes, of images that may have had some potential when taken, but not a time later. This is my problem, of course, and I do not presume to blame anyone else.

And so I make this book as an indication of some permanence in a world dominated by linear electron flow trans-matrixed into blinking walls of photons that when focused on the back of my eye, even upside down, make me think I am looking at something real. The book is minimally hand-crafted, but nonetheless, provides one something to touch, to hold in ones hands, and find a good patch of light in which to view the ink printed images.

I thank friends like Jim Cohoe, Dick Robertson, and Ben Dallas for giving me the basis to take this seriously enough to put together a collection no matter how bored I am with the lot. Going forward, I promise I will process the images during the time that they pique my interest and save them in an appropriate format so that they may be stuck into another one of these books.

SMBR