On the Nature of Being Serpentine

I recently submitted photographs for consideration in a Photo District News competition. According to the rules of submission for most categories, sets of photographs that are related are required. I am learning that this is pretty standard in the world of fine art photography. I am also learning that there needs to be an expressible idea behind them as well if you want them to be considered seriously.

I don’t really photograph out of ideas so much as I photograph out of attraction. When I see something that compels me to want to capture it as an image, I shoot it. Even my 9W series, which is as close as I have come to a theme driven series of photographs, came into being from a strip of 9W that we drive through on our way to the vet. There is a forlornness that compelled me and I see numerous images in my mind that begin to capture that. The idea of extending my photographic quest up and down the length of route 9W is a search for scenes that compel me to shoot that are unified by the road and possibly it’s story.

So I am left with the fact that, as I have always maintained, I shoot what passes before my eyes. I shoot driven by compulsion which is a product of fear and desire.

I have been reading about the human brain lately and about whether we have free will. I have learned that we have a myriad of internal processing units in our brains that have been steadily honed by natural selection to confer some kind of advantage to our genetic essence that ensures its propagation into the future. It turns out that these processing units do all the deciding of what we will do and that they engage in this decision making without our conscious input. Researchers have observed that activity in areas of the brain that are not directly accessible to the conscious part of our brain can precede the conscious expression of an act by as much as ten seconds. Researchers have also discovered that animals remain sensitive to certain predator shapes and actions many generations after the predator has disappeared from their environment.

As with predators, so with all kinds of visual stimulus that register as either more or less threatening (fearsome) or beneficial (desirable). Of course, there are many nuances of fear and desire and in the end it is a complex interaction of experience and response that makes one possible setting more attention getting than another.

And so, my presumption is that I take photographs of things that evoke an unconscious reaction in me, either fear or desire or some subtle intermingling of the two.

As an example consider this photograph of tree trunk with vine twisted around it:

Bittersweet vine and tree trunks. Such vines will eventually kill trees, though this one has been severed.

I have taken many pictures of trees with vines around the trunks. It is a subject matter that attracts me wherever I see it. It has a life and death metaphorical power to me. It turns out that we are probably pre-programmed in our subconscious brain to be wary of serpentine forms for obvious survival reasons. My initial reaction, what brings my human body and brain to attention, is the serpentine form of the vine. It is a fear reaction. The fear effect is ephemeral, however, and probably dissipates so quickly that I can only recognize it as the possible driving force for my attraction well after the fact. From there, my rationalizing and symbolizing mind begins to attribute a metaphorical power to the scene. Serpents kill people, vines kill trees, a metaphor is born. From here it is a short leap to a tree of knowledge, forbidden fruit and serpentine form as primal animal force threatening the rise of rationality.

I suspect that there will be a myriad of threads in my photographs that are underpinned by the fear/desire complex of subliminal assessment and reaction that are at once peculiar to me and universal, and that I will be able to assemble collections of photographs taken at different times and places into coherent sets with a metaphorical story to tell.

Thanks to David and Edy Sargert for helping me be sure this post made sense.

Fear, Desire, and Free Will

I have been asked to give a talk at the New York Society for Ethical Culture in May. NYSEC is a humanist religious organization of which I have been a member for many years. Our equivalent of a religious service is to gather on Sunday and hear a talk that is in some way related to our human experience and through which we can understand how to better engage the world for our own and others success.

For a long time I have thought that I should explore the concept of free will because it appeared to me that if there is no free will, as some argue, humanism falls to pieces as an approach to human betterment. I should also add that the concept of a civil society achieved through democratic institutions founders as well without some concept of rational choice. In short, my belief is that we need some capacity to choose differently to realize our potential as moral actors.

Still, these waters appear very murky to me. Research has been done that suggests the choices we make are made at a level that is not conscious, and that to whatever extent we have a rational explanation for these choices, it is an explanation after the fact. Nor is this a new concept. According to an article in The Economist magazine, a Freudian trained psychologist, Ernest Dichter, arrived in the United States in 1938 and subsequently made millions teaching Madison Avenue how to sell to the hidden subconscious desires of the public. He believed that…

…most people have no idea why they buy things. They might answer questions in an effort to be helpful (particularly in the early 20th century, when consumers were chuffed to be asked to share their thoughts). But these were attempts to make sense of decisions retrospectively.

I suspect we have all caught ourselves looking for ways to rationalize what we somehow know we want to do but about which we have some instinctual understanding that it might not be a good thing to do.

I am in the beginning stages of research for my talk but already I have come across a couple of books that have bearing on the subject. The first is Your Dog is Your Mirror, written by Kevin Behan, which explores at length the emotional capacity of humans and dogs. Mr. Behan comes at this from life long experience of training dogs and their owners. His conviction is that emotion is the essence of the connection of dogs to humans, dogs to dogs, and humans to humans. Emotion, he believes is the basis of our ability to empathize as well. It is also, he claims, the vehicle whereby energy is turned into information, that is, how intelligence is manifested. Among his central points is the idea that social animals are connected at an emotional level into a kind of group being, and that each animal has a role to play in that group being. This is most striking when he discusses the relationship between prey and predator, which is clearly not limited to an interspecies relationship, but also exists within the context of a species. We can see this very clearly when we consider our experience of human agression. According to Behan, we have varying degrees of “prey-fulness,” which shift us on the scale of predatory and prey-ful behavior according to the individual actors present.

The second book I am reading is Steven Pinker‘s The Better Angels of Ourselves. I have only just begun this book but already I have been treated to a crash course in the history of human cruelty and violence and the opening arguments for the case that we are getting progressively less violent and more able to get along together. Although it is hard to believe this in light of all the strife, human atrocity and conflict we are treated to in our news, it appears to be statistically true when you look at the trends of humans killing humans. Even with the two major world wars of the last century, the rate of humans killing humans was down over preceding centuries.

Of critical importance to the case Pinker is making is the arrival of our ability to empathize, which Pinker suggests is a relatively recent development brought on by a number of civilizing factors, perhaps one of the most important of which was the invention of the printing press. He argues that the widespread dissemination of the written word accompanied our increasing awareness that torture is cruel. It was, he claimed, the ability of enlightenment thinkers to argue broadly through books that certain common human practices, which are horrific by our present standards but which were widely viewed as good entertainment at the time, were unacceptable. As importantly, he argues, fiction that related stories from a first person perspective over time developed the capacity of the general public to project themselves into the minds of other human beings, that is, empathize.

For the next couple of months I will be using my blog to explore ideas for my talk. My working premise is that choice does exist, but it exists in a social context. That is, the rational discourse that leads to consciously choosing something better over something worse does not reside within the individual so much as it resides within the group being. Individuals are driven by fear and desire and their decisions emerge from these emotions. It is only within the context of social relationship that reaches beyond kin, clan and immediate community, that a rational process that can be thought of as free will takes hold. By talking and arguing with one another in a superstition free environment we create the space to be moral actors. I welcome your thoughts, opinions and arguments to the contrary about what I am thinking.