Photography as Qualia's Art Form

 I’ve always wanted since I was a child to take a photo using my eyes.

Whether it be a sunset that isn’t captured well enough on a phone or a memory that is too pure to contaminate with a mechanical camera, I had always desired to preserve the present moment in ether. 

The fleeting nature of life has never been something I have stomached easily. I wish the present moment could be eternal. There are some memories I would live in forever if I could. It feels like being a human inherently means you will mourn your passed moments forever. I’m scared I will be missing things for the rest of my life, and that I will miss them longer than they were in my life to begin with.

I found my way of self-preservation. I found a way to memorialize the unrecordable. All I have to do to save a moment I know I’ll miss is just to capture it in photo format.

Photography was always a hobby I admired from afar, mostly because of how unique it is. It requires no artistic talent, only simply an ‘eye’ for moments. Photography is a language that operates in experiences and the catching of them, like a net catching a butterfly to save its wings. It made me feel like a poacher of reality’s present.

It’s a magical thing that I cannot see out of anyone else’s eyes. Some may consider this the barrier of subjectivity, but I see it more as a bridge. Subjectivity is a tricky subject, as it is frustrating and beautiful at the same time. It is the thing that gives life meaning but also can cause one to come to the conclusion that life is meaningless. The funny thing is subjectivity is actually the ‘subject’ hidden in all photographs. It is the thing we are all shooting in the back of our heads all the time.

The retina has 1.5 million image sensors meanwhile a Nikon D300 has 12 million, while the retina contains rods and cones that cameras cannot mimic. But, a camera is the closest we can come to a computerized model of the human eye. It is the closest we can come to playing God.

With photography, you beat subjectivity down to a pulp. You take away the personal aspect of one’s eyesight and make it objective. 

The present moment is so brief and experiences are so few and far in between. It’s hard to know what to focus on and what to ignore. The easy part is realizing life is full of these moments bustling with potential to be fulfilled. In fact, subjective experience is built on the building blocks of snapshots from one’s eyes. The hard part is figuring out which moments to capture that will provide you with the same feeling looking back on that picture as when you took it. It’s duplicating reality. 

The first time I met JD, my first photographer friend, the very first thing he said to me was that he liked my ‘eye,’ and after much pondering, I only now know how special that compliment is.

One’s ‘eye’ in photography is pure intuition. It’s being able to selectively breed the best subjective experience into one singular picture from an infinite amount of moments. One’s ‘eye’ cannot be taught, but is instead felt through the energy of the event they are intending on capturing. It felt like he was complimenting my perception and the qualia of me. He was complimenting my je ne sais quoi.

The term ‘qualia’ is one from philosophy of mind, which is basically the subjective experience one feels from an objective event that happens. Everyone interprets an event a different way and that different way can be preserved with photography. People can go to the same concert yet have completely different pictures to show for it. This is due to the different eyes everyone walks in with and how they choose to utilize them.

            When JD complimented my eye, he complimented me in my entirety.

In essence, photography is the closest tool we have to understand qualia. It captures these transient moments that seem to only slip through our fingertips. Photography seems to be the tweezers of subjective experience, and is able to delicately select the experience being captured. In a world riddled with powerlessness of humans, this gives something back to us. We get to laugh in the face of our higher power and consciousness, and say that technology can indeed compete with the human mind and it can save one crumb of sand from the eternal hourglass. We can make these moments that seem to not be ours, ours. Things that happen to us now are things we are involved in and play a part in. Even when I shoot a concert and I know I’m not on the stage, I still feel important in another way. They gave me this experience, but I made it my own. As someone who has felt defeated by her lack of artistic talent, I realize now that all I need is to be confident in myself and my abilities and the qualia will pass through me like I’m a train station heading to its final destination in the camera. I’m okay being a translator to explain the language of me into understandable pixels to be viewed by others. I’m okay just being a vessel for the time being.

            Centuries ago, they used to think creative genius meant you were possessed by a divine figure. After some thought, I realize they weren’t so far off.

            The only way subjective experience can be understood is to be shown it. In the Mary’s Room Experiment, a thought experiment in philosophy of mind, it states that Mary studied all her life in a black and white room about colors. She read all about rods and cones and color theory and had learned all she could learn. But one day she left the room and went into reality, and she said reality is nothing like anything she could’ve read. You cannot read and understand colors, you can only witness them to fully conceptualize them.

            Photography is similar in the fact that it cannot be studied, but to understand it, you must give yourself way to experiencing it. Photography is the art of capturing experience, and thus, it requires you must experience. You cannot tell someone the contents of your subjective experience; it’s merely too much to put into words. But, as a wise man once said, a picture can tell a thousand words. In fact, it can tell so much more than verbalizations can ever attempt. You cannot tell someone your world; you must show them, and photography gives you a handheld or digital copy of your eyesight. You can show and share your qualia as they can share theirs with you. That is how you demolish the barrier of subjectivity and build a bridge.

Our subjective experience is nobody’s but our own. Photography is us reclaiming what is ours. We stop being afraid of qualia and instead, start using it as a tool. Qualia is the ‘eye’ everyone revels about and it makes sense, since qualia cannot be taught either. Qualia is one’s perceptions, personality, subconscious imprints, conscious beliefs and aesthetic desires. It is the collaboration of all that you are and it is impossible to calculate. Photography feels like the closest formula.

Do you not feel a bit stronger controlling experience that isn’t meant to be controlled in this way? With every shot, you are taking your humanity back for yourself. We make these experiences that are of the world ours instead.

             Through taking pictures, percept becomes the concept.

Another Relocation, Another Recollection

   I've found that writing on Medium has only depressed me further about writing in general. That website is supposed to be one for writers, yet I find nobody there really genuinely loves writing. There's a lot of sincerity lost once you are eligible for the Partner Program, I've found. Once you are able to profit off of your art, it feels like it stops becoming art.

   I was writing things that I found interesting, while everyone was writing things that others found interesting. This caused them to blow up their followers while I laid stagnant. For someone that has been writing since she was a child, it feels weird to be overlooked by others who knew how to follow a simple formula and nothing more.

   The center of the problem is I believe I'm much too special for my writing. I thought years of experience meant people were supposed to recognize that and pay you with their time adequately; it would only be fair for everything you've sacrificed. But, it was humbling to be put into a competitive atmosphere with others and realize I have no desire to compete at all. 

    I realized I am far too entitled to publish my writings for a global audience. Just because of the years I've bled, I assume I'm supposed to be paid back for it. The sick reality is nobody cares about your pain except you. The length of time I've struggled to get these writings out are essentially erased when I publish it and pretend like it didn't take years to squeeze those words out. I am expected to erase who I was and seem stable. But, I am not stable in the slightest, I hate pattern and routine and I hate even more disingenuous writings that people think they are supposed to write. I'm scared I will become like that, that I will see writings as a chore and an obligation. I can't see it as something to appease people with instead of something to crawl underneath people's skin with.

    If I wrote the way famous writers wrote on Medium, I would lose who I am. And I can't write the way that I write, because it doesn't attract viewership. I can't clickbait, I can't manipulate people for views, mostly because I have no desire to. I want to own my readers honestly and genuinely. I have no desire in squishing my writings down from 15 minute reads to 3 minute reads to accommodate for our decreased attention span. I don't want to dumb down my writings like I've seen so many writers lose. 

    I don't want to sacrifice any sentences and I don't want to be someone that I'm not. I refuse to play by the game that Medium was set up upon, one that is based on competition, insecurity and greed. I refuse to agree that writing should be about anything monetary and unique pieces should be discarded just because they aren't immediately interesting.

    I want my writings to burn, not set a calm warming fire underneath you. I want it to be fire right on your ass, so direct you have to stand up and take action. I don't want it to be something easily shoved under the rug and walked over. I want it to trip you and wake you up from your in-between trance between sleep and awareness. I will never write for the sake of writing. I write for the sake of myself.

    Because of this, I am transferring to Blogspot. I am going to write album reviews, book reviews, trip reports, poems, journal entries and just musings about my life. I also want to do a "Sex and the City" type weekly column, about college and life. I need somewhere to bleed out onto that won't suck me dry anymore than I already am.