Project No. 2 - Up River / One Exposure Left

"Up River / One Exposure Left" 

Flickr link: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmR3ba8Y

Picture this: You are the photographer on a boat, with a crew heading deep into the jungle upriver to a destination you were not told. You were told, however, to take as many pictures as you can with a poorly kept camera of the sights you see along the way - most of it being more jungle. The camera's setting dials are sticky, and your shots end up being mostly blurry, overexposed images of green and white. You can barely recognize what's in every shot, but you know each one strangely well because they capture the anxiety of being on that boat, darting your eyes back and forth along the tree line on either side of you, looking for movement. These blurry photos capture the emotion you felt and technically everything you saw, but just as scared as you. The camera doesn't know they're bad, so they're taken anyways. These are the throwaway shots; ones that aren't usable but capture exactly what we see every day but have no reason in attempting to process because they convey no useable information - only the anxiety of being on that boat. They are the apprehension of your camera roll, where your fears hide of not seeing danger that's staring back at you or being lost among the sameness of the blurry green and white. 

 

 

 

Do not get off the boat.

 

My photos were surprisingly hard to get, mostly in getting the settings to be just the right flawed, and combing through the hundreds of shots I blindly took walking around by the river. Some of them are of the same scene, but that doesn't matter in the blur. With a careful selection of just 20 images all collected on Flickr, they became much more exciting to me as a series. This is when I decided to have them mimic a film roll, naming each image "20 exposures left", or "6 exposures left", and putting two standout images at the front. The first, an accidental exposure with my finger covering the lens (this was an actual mistake), and the second being a well-framed and adjusted shot of some grass. The rest would be a nightmarish and beautiful smear of glowing whites and greens. McLuhan's writings connect to this series loosely, thinking about cameras and the way they're used. We use cameras to capture perfect images of what we see for later examination, and we throw away the ones that don't contain any useable information. If what we are trying to capture or are experiencing is going too fast, is too alien, or has got you feeling so anxious that your eyes dart around as scared as your mind, then your photos will not turn out good. McLuhan explores the outdatedness of the camera when referring to the rapid pace of technology's transportation of information, saying "...purely visual means of apprehending the world are no longer possible; they are just too slow to be relevant or effective" (63). With my photo series, I wanted to see what was possible in trying to represent this flaw of the camera, by relating it to the limitations and fears of the human visual sensory source. We are afraid of the blur because it contains no resources, but that does not make it insignificant.