The book, Photographs and Reality, in the project, Out of Context into Chaos:
- Deals with the relationship of photographs to reality.
- Posits that reassembly emphasizes that photographs are immediately and forever taken out of context.
- Posits that reassembly emphasizes frame over content through repetition of the rectangles.
- Posits that the random reassembly serves to emphasize—through repetition—the frames, the finitude, and the lack of context of the constituent images. Reassembly emphasizes the fragmented nature—the discreteness, the finiteness—of photographs.We experience life—our reality—as continuous and unfragmented within certain hard surfaces—discontinuities. The most significant experiences in our continuous life are the hard surfaces that we cannot penetrate, the precipitous losses that we experience, and, ultimately, the limited length of life.
- Posits that life in the continuous realm produces positive experiences and memories. Life at discontinuities produces negative experiences and memories. Discontinuities cause us discomfort and sharply limit our experience and our knowledge.
- Posits that everything is connected. Everything has context. Continuity is defined by recognizing that any object that we identify—within its figurative discontinuities—in a continuous reality is not separated from its neighbors, that is to say, it is not separated from its context. The importance of continuity in our lives is shown by our valuation of integrity and consistency.
- Posits that our construction of knowledge—our description of reality—mimics our continuous experience by connecting our memories as seamlessly as possible.
- Posits that placing new memories in the context of existing memories creates knowledge.
- Posits that knowledge is not only analysis, dissection, and separation; it requires synthesis, context, connection, and construction. Knowledge is the product of connection and integration. It depends on patterns of events, understanding of the situation and the surroundings, control of circumstance, induction, deduction, and prediction—all connections that create context.
- Posits that belief, on the other hand, is a form of hypothesis—conjecture—abduction—an isolated starting position that requires connections to become valid. Belief is a fiction that allows us to suspend connecting an experience into our description of reality.Belief is not knowledge; it is personal and separating; and it is often of little value except for comforting and identifying—naming—the individual.
- Posits that photography creates images by fragmentation—by exclusion and occlusion—by separation and not by connection.
- Posits that slicing and dicing a photograph into hundreds of boxes is tantamount to its destruction. Slicing and dicing destroy reality. Nevertheless, when photography selects a single image from the hundreds—of thousands—of possible images, we call it reality.
- Posits that while a poor description of reality, a photograph is a metaphor for our lives. Photographs and lives are defined by their boundaries—discontinuities—in space and time.
- Posits that photography suggests that moments live on indefinitely, yet the photographic frame and its repetition through slicing and dicing point to the finite—not the infinite, the infinitesimal, the continuous.
- Posits that photography puts captured actors and moments into a finite container and separates them from their infinite context. Looking into a photograph as though it is a container, it appears to be full. The extreme resemblance within the frame has somehow convinced us that photography presents the infinite even though photographs represent the finite. The reassembly of photographs displayed here negates that resemblance. The reassembly of these photographs points literally and figuratively to separation, deterioration and loss of integrity.
- Posits that pursuing the discrete reality of individuation found in photography, we pursue separation, finitude, and loss of context and connection. These processes figuratively herald our greatest loss—our most significant separation—loss of life.
Return to Out of Context into Chaos