1855FORTRUTH
WREN KRISZTIN
A white toilet bleached twice weekly falsifies the realities of taking a shit. In order to be productive– hence, meaningful– a toilet needs an efficient flush to erase our bodily discharges into the plumber’s oblivion. Everyone “would like to think, that their shit don’t stink.” I do not often wish to remember our own vulgarity because it increases my pleasure to think of it as something else, or not at all. With time my shit will become something else regardless of where I put it. With time my shit will no longer stink; in this way, to make an image is to lean close and smell nothing.
An image lies. The subject of a portrait dies, the landscape gets paved over, and an image lies comatose in limbo between living and dying. What quantifies the meaning of a moment is the way in which we honor it, so meaning is commensurate with memory.
To forget death and its specific smell we dig a hole six feet deep. To remember a life, we place pictures of the dead and flowers above the grave in part of our urge to give life to them again as symbolic trinkets. A sheet of grass grows atop the box; a box surrounds the body. These enclosures abstract the rot, obscure the smell, and provide a visual answer more pleasant than decay to the question of death. The engraved stone above insists we all call the body by name. The box separates the body from the earth, so that the earth does not return the body back to the Earth from whence it came. If forgetting were more desirable there would be no box, no stone, and no pictures.
The motive to practice photography may as well be like the motivation to endure chemotherapy, or the collective drive to find cure for disease. To still time, to make more time, to ensure your life lasts long enough to tire of it: the impulse to take a picture speaks to the desirability and heroics of preservation, even when to save something like a life with cancer, so much must also be necessarily destroyed.
Once upon a time, a being called God mandated to a man named Moses on top of a mountain dubbed Mount Sinai, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the Earth beneath, or that is in the water under the Earth.”At this far-removed point in the human story, that imagemaking is technically a sin is moot, perhaps, but I know I have felt shame from looking at an image. I know that it is possible to wholeheartedly hate myself because of my own image, and to hate others for theirs. I know that it is possible to condition a people to believe an image is ideal, that it is righteous, even holy. I know that violence is used against those who do not fit the mold of the image. I know that it is easier to empathize with another who looks like you, easier to demonize those who look different. Wars are waged for images, and for imagined ideals.
This particular commandment is one of ten, all of which arguably gave Anglo-American culture (and others) the main principles of public morality. Regardless of your belief, the latter half of the framework–thou shalt not kill, steal, lie, etc.–holds a sort of secular compass rose for social concepts of right and wrong.
After the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie was released in 2014, North American turtle smuggling experienced a dramatic boom. In memory of the excess clownfish harvesting that followed Finding Nemo in 2003, pet vendors bred large numbers of blue tang fish to edge off the possible effects Finding Dory (2016) may have on their market. The entire premise of Finding Nemo is the capture of Nemo from the wild. And yet, I empathize with the child who, after falling in love with the fish onscreen, begged their parents into submission at Petco, and who, thinking themselves a renegade savior of clownfish, flushed their new fish down the toilet in a valiant effort to give this fish safe passage to the ocean.
Anthropomorphizing is seldom done maliciously, as we often relate to the world that way. It’s probably why we talk about ourselves often, and it’s likely what drives the compulsion to share images. We yearn to share experiences. To take and share a picture is to appropriate time and space, as Louis Daguerre wrote in 1838 that `“The daguerreotype is not merely an instrument which serves to draw nature... it gives her the power to reproduce herself.” In other words, photography gives humans the power to reproduce nature.
A landscape retains natural memory with dead leaves from many autumns over, while an image of land composes the memory for the beholder. Landscape was a term borrowed from a Dutch word, landschap, the use of which was popularized by painters. The suffix of landschap has a linguistic heritage meaning “to shape,” and so a landscape begs a spectator to form it even when land alone requires no seer. Like time, land exists even when your eyes are closed. Oil is the oldest memory, lava the earliest. Fossils are silent monographs of the extinct, and archeologists revere well-preserved burial sites and garbage pits as informative resources. From graves they can observe how a culture understood things like death, time, and love. From garbage they can discern what was unimportant, and reckon what was. So into landfills and cemeteries aplenty the memory of a culture is archived.
We author the world like we pull white bread from wheat grain, and paper from a tree. Factseeking endeavors seem to distill the world, box it up and name it Truth. Religion has its divine scripture; science has its laws; authors have their treatises; photographers have their photographs. The process obliges (a narrator to give form to the box and organize its contents.
Looking for Truth’s content can begin with naming what is false, which incites a compulsive sorting of essentialized parts into pairable wholes: good/evil, up/down, black/white, north/south, natural/artifice, ad infinitum. Except the axis from which the two absolute values swing is rarely named. Sometimes we call it “the grey area,” though often it’s characterized like a line in the sand drawn to cut off one from the other, church and state. Even so, like a yinyang, the necessity of opposites entails that one cannot exist without the other. Things like fact and fiction are woven together so inextricably that to perceive them as two separate, hermetically sealed things is to falsify their respective realities.
There is a Jewish tradition that maintains that on Mount Sinai, God never told Moses about the first five books. Exodus and Deuteronomy inclusive, that would mean he didn’t beam down those Ten Commandments via loudspeaker. In the tradition of the Kabbalah, one such account claims that God never said, “I am the Lord your God,” nor did he even say “I.” The account continues that God only stuttered the first letter of the first word, or the Hebrew letter aleph, which when said out loud is just a really quiet click in throat. Moses was burdened with narration.
Physical transformations aside, human evolution has been a violent ride on the everrising learning curve of empathy. If imagined to exist as two lines on a graph, empathy and the number of images in the world have a similar curvature of positive growth. If a picture’s potency correlates with its population count, then perhaps their exponential overabundance could dilute the world in such a way that makes it transparent. Perhaps pictures hold the potential to make visible those who were heretofore overlooked. Perhaps looking at pictures actually increases empathy.
In the Beginning there was nothing, and then there was light. Days are measured out in tea bags, weeks are metered by garbage days, years by new shoes. When I make a picture I am writing with light and I am God, mortal and continuous, omniscient when I look at my picture of you, and you can only return my gaze. I am as we all are, my own type of God. Although the geographic world is contiguous, my personal topography begins with my head and ends with my feet. Humanity isolated themself from Nature in a box of God. That we live in such a way that alienates us from the foodchain does not make us less true, but does conflate the context in which we can understand our own fragility. We pretend to have dominion over time, space and other species, and together we coauthored the grand delusion that our bodies are from the natural world, not of it. Nonetheless, we cover our dead bodies in dirt.