Nature has forever served as a vehicle for communicating different ideas. Lyrical poets are constantly using metaphors and imagery illustrating their ideas through nature, and old religious texts, such as the bible, use elements or laws of nature to aid in teaching a specific moral or concept. Nature not only has a way of teaching us a thing or two about itself, but it constantly teaches us other life lessons.
In my search to find a life lesson through nature, I stumbled across the amazing power of a little bit of water. Water is constantly changing our perception of objects in nature. The smallest droplet can magnify the details in a blade of grass or it can completely distort your view of what is actually in front of you. Water has the power to change your perception of color, blur out details, and even reflect and refract what you are seeing.
As for the life lesson, one of the things that is very apparent to me about the way humans deal with problems is how extremely tunnel-visioned we tend to be. Caught up in our own perceptions of the world, we are either unable, unwilling, or too oblivious to imagine it could appear very different to other people. I am trying to convey through my piece the benefits of taking a moment and trying to see the world through someone else's eyes.
As we can see in the first frame, the leaf is unchanged or unaffected by the water, but through the water we get to see the leaf in many different ways, some more beautiful and intricate than just the original leaf itself. The film strip that the pictures are displayed in serves as another comment on perception. The idea of actually looking through the lens of a camera to take a picture, relates to our “tunnel-vision” perception and the way the lens eliminates all other context other than what you are focused on. The way you manipulate the camera (zooming in and out, using flash, or changing the settings) mimics the way water manipulates the leaf, or someone else’s view points can influence your own perception. The long sequence of film also serves to illustrate that the way water effects the leaves, and the different view points that can be seen through someone else’s eyes are endless.
Sometimes it is hard to explain the benefits and differences of seeing things from someone else's perspective, but nature is constantly illustrating ideas and concepts that might be difficult to put into words.
2 comments:
i think i need to make it bigger. so you can see the pictures better.
um, there's something about the graphic quality of the "film" frame that i'm not exactly excited about. i'm not sure what it is. maybe because its such a harsh black graphic against these soft and intensely colored photos. what if you were to use... actual film colored film frames? you know how theyre kinda reddish brown? um, also, the fact that it's such a long sequence makes it kind of hard to read as a whole, but maybe that's what you're intending since this is about perception. i don't really know what the signatures add or mean?
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