Okay stop.
Okay start.
And please me, I don't care how.
- Behave, Frightened Rabbit
Forces of the universe - cosmic laws, such as fate, time, inertia, and gravity, are quite difficult to ignore. Equally unavoidable, though arguably less biblical, are the countless images we encounter each day. These are the simulacra of a postmodern epoch, the copies of things that can define or erase us. We cannot call these representations malicious, but we can call them ubiquitous in whatever way they manifest (occasionally associated with a humiliatingly repetitive musical jingle). They can be found hanging on the wall of your living room, in the worn fabric of a tired recliner, within a industrially-lit hallway, through the click of a search engine, the proclamation of a vintage ironic T-shirt, on the visual procession of a NFL half-time show, resting open on a coffee table, in the back seat of a yellow taxi cab, or splayed across the surface of an indefatigable airplane banner (old school). You get the idea. Look left - a suavely dressed gentleman confidently exits his Gulfstream jet to meet his lady, eyes locked, legs open, on the fine Italian leather seat of her Mclaren supercar. Look right, a billboard, ironically enough, proclaiming that Big Brother is watching. Straight in front of you, televised snapshots of a helicopter flying over the impossibly rugged mountains of Afghanistan. Behind you that field just outside of Boulder, a toss of the hair, hands on the hips. Right again, and you notice stored memories of that week in the Bahamas - you remember - the vacation wherein you may or may not have repeatedly climbed up and down a spiral staircase, only to lose grip at the last possible moment (or so it seemed), falling dramatically onto the four stove burner beneath you resulting in a reverberating bang, followed immediately by a complimentary clang!
Decorative staircases aside, consider the palette of this visual circus act. Vivid greens, dark reds, fair blues. They blend in infinite ways. The results are eye catching and they sustain us to some degree. But a billboard is tacky while a photograph can be intimate in a way that is hard to express. A Russian-born author once wrote that images have the ability to send a shiver through the body, a brilliant flash, a sudden, heavy impact of passionate recognition. But then it remains, why is the billboard of poor taste while a simple, poorly focused black and white photograph can set the heart ablaze?
