How to see, seeing, and changing a point-of-view: intractable questions, persistent challenges, fluid realities.

Last fall, after making yet another series of portraits on a trip with German friends to the Grand Canyon, I had the realization that the geometry of my portrait work had been locked-in for years, decades now. Changing subjects, changing situations, surroundings, but the fundamental geometry between camera, Self, and Other was/is essentially static: an unchanging point-of-view. Different Others in the relationship — the collaboration of portraiture — can it be that the essence of relation is also static? To implement a different geometry suggests the necessity of changing the nature of (the) relationship itself. The technical means, the protocol, does have an effect, of course: the choice of lens unequivocally determines a primary geometry of relation. But what is the intersection of that optical geometry and the sacred geometry sketched that is within the continuum of relation?

I use (almost exclusively) a medium-wide-angle (a 28mm with film SLRs, an 18mm with the digital SLR). These tools/technologies and their explicit protocols frame the relationship. The selection is not arbitrary. It’s not simply ‘environmental portraiture’ — that reductive term comes after the process that generates the images. It could similarly be called ‘distant portraiture’, and indeed, distance is a determining factor in the outcome. A wide-angle lens brings the photographer physically closer to the subject while allowing the intimacy to expand, encompassing the context of the situation. A telephoto lens often propagates a stealing-at-a-distance of visage. And it compresses the perspective of that visage in such a way that violates the normal perspective of the eye. The eye sees approximately as a 50mm lens on a 35mm camera.

But all this is merely the technology, the mediatory tool. Strip that away from the eye, and see. Through the wetware optics of the orb alone. Digging deep into the head. Transferring the energy of the world, and of that collaborating Other, inside: seeing, and be-ing in relation to.