Focus

I haven’t shot for my [Muse]ums series in a while.  Things go in cycles and right now I’m thinking more about shooting some meaningful color work than I am about much of anything else.  Today I woke up fixated on black and white… or in this case grey.  Sadly that’s the way that I work as a human being.  I jokingly tell people that I have a focus that is about the same size as a quarter.  Inside the penumbra it burns with an intensity brighter than the sun, but outside in the shadow, things cease to exist.  


But in truth, this used to be a more accurate description of me a few years back than it is now.  The period at which my attention used to drift was that of a slow pendulum, gliding back and forth and from side to side on my circle of interest–my mind planted at the origin, the vector of my attention gliding around the edge.  But the older I’ve gotten the quicker the period has become and now I glide in and out of points of interest considerably faster and more fluid than I did even a five years ago.  The pace intensifies with each passing day in fact.  I’m wondering if I’ve got some form of degenerative attention deficit disorder, where the spans of cohesive focus are decreasing by milliseconds per day–some small amount not even perceptible, but that after a year or so I notice some small difference.  


But there’s something else I’ve started to realize through this strange process.  Looming behind the spotlight of my immediate consciousness, there is form and structure that I can just barely sense, looming silently in the background.  It’s in the shadow,  two stops underexposed and absolutely there.  I can start to make to make out it’s corners as the spot light swings around the circle and the faster the light swings, the cleaner the form starts to be.  Years ago I was just vaguely aware of this form’s existence. Today I feel I’m starting to understand pieces of it.  When I wrote “corners” that’s actually a pretty accurate analogy of how it feels.  These edges I can make out are a puzzle that I’m slowly filling in.  The faster the spotlight races across the surface the more acute the form becomes.  I’ve come to understand that my consciousness is creating a zoetrope.  I’ve also come to understand that the corners of the form rimmed with the increasingly frenetic swinging spotlight of my A.D.D. consciousness are actually the edges of me.  


The quicker my attention waxes and wanes the more light my consciousness casts on my form.  The faster the zoetrope spins the more in focus I become.  I can feel that I’m getting closer and closer and sharper and sharper but the centrifugal force is threatening to pull me out of orbit.  I need one more minute see through the light and into the vastness beyond, but I’m not there yet… 


Shot on my LeicaM7 at 35mm on Tri-X at 800.       


 

Using Format