Contemplating That Eye

Mulvey stated in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (p. 835), "It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it;" how very correct she is! As read over a selection of articles, I am reminded of how much I dislike analyzing beauty. The media has distorted beauty to such an extent, I believe society may never recover. It is interesting that the female body is (and seemingly has been for quite awhile) so much on the forefront of advertising...even if the product has nothing to do with a female body at all. Cars, for instance, are rarely ever in an ad without a woman half naked to help "display" it. Even in television commercials a woman's body is the image to help push the product. Oddly enough, you don't even need the entire body to do so! Parts of the body will do just fine, whether it is the long slender legs of a woman, or in my case, the voyeuristic eyes of Leah! Mulvey also made another point that got my mind cranking; she talked about how main stream film focused its attention on the human form (p. 836) which draws in the viewer who is entertained by the search for likeness of themselves. People are naturally voyeuristic; I, myself, possibly a little more so than most people. Maybe that is one thing that is fueling this theme of the Eye in Nature. I view animals (and, in many cases, parts of nature that have no eyes) as "people" too. I am always looking for myself in them. I feel very connected when I do this...when I take the time to "see" our world as they do. Somehow, when my eyes meet those of an animal, I feel they can see our world as I do too! David Friend wrote an article discussing Henri Cartier-Bresson's Decisive Moment in The Digital Journalist, December 2004. H.C.B. was quite a character. According to Friend, H.C.B.'s prevailing ethic was that Instinct always triumphs over mind. With concern to capturing the Decisive Moment on film: "You mustn't know too much. There's nothing to know. Cats know more than human beings on the subject. Cats sniffle: sniff-sniff. Intuition. People use brains too much. Brains are not used for making love." How true this saying is! I recall my own processes as I work in the hospital capturing the smile of a newborn infant. Silence takes over the room and I can feel the parents wondering why I am just sitting there with my finger half holding down the shutter button...and then SNAP! The baby smiles and that perfect image is recorded, to last for years to come! I stand up and turn around to say to the parents, "Sometimes you just KNOW when to wait." I can tell by watching the baby in the hospital (or an animal in nature), that I am about to get "That Shot," the shot I am looking for (so to speak). H.C.B. is right...it really IS intuition.

So out I went with my Rebel and my intuition in hopes of connecting with animals and nature on a different level. I wished today to search for likeness of myself...to find ME out there. I decided to work with these four images:

The first image struck me as I saw an eyeball in the center of the knot...as if I was stuck inside and I wanted to break free, unable to move my "head"... I needed to look around. In the second image I saw a sleeping "Me," VERY upset at the waterfall right by my ear! With the pumpkins (this one is most bizarre), I saw the "Me" that was thinking "OMG WHAT is going on here, how did I get here?!" I am in shock at my new forms and I can feel my eyeball protruding in an attempt to pull myself from these limiting bodies. And finally, the sweet elephant. I took many different shots of this wonderful girl! We made eye contact many times, and I could tell she was just as curious about me as I was her!

The following are the final images:

I experimented with additional layers on this one trying to keep that "rock skin" look around the fleshy part of my eye! 

After completing these images, I considered how they may look if they were hanging together on a gallery wall and decided to make the sizes more uniform. The two below were adjusted to meet these new standards, and more work was done on the Eye Flower:

One last thing. H.C.B. helped me to remember one important aspect when dealing with image. He had saved some of his favorite negatives, in doing so he cut neglected to save the ones to the left and to the right of the treasured image. As someone who has worked in Print Shops I can imagine the frustration the printers felt in trying to reproduce a printed copy! I have kept not only the original RAW files of these photos but have also remembered to save the layered .PSD files as well! Made the mistake of not doing that before, it is a costly and heartbreaking one!