the impossibility of a shared experience
Look! I want you to see what I see, experience what I feel. I want us to merge, if only for a second, in a shared experience. Who is a stranger to this desire? However, you do not see what I see. I mean that quite literally. The photoreceptors in your eyes do not share the same sensitivity as mine—or anyone else's. Consequently, the way you experience colors is different from how I experience those same colors. Whether either of us is colorblind or not, we will never see things the same way.
I believe this is a beautiful metaphor, symbolizing that our eagerness to connect and share our experiences as social beings is limited by the fact that, in the end, we are all individuals. A large part of this voyage we undertake in life is traveled alone, through experiences that can never be fully comprehended by anyone else. We can understand one another by approximation, but the essence of what we mean, feel, or are will forever remain a mystery.
As a photographer, I found that quite unsettling—the sheer loneliness it implies is almost unbearable. After all, the whole purpose of taking a photograph is to be able to share, at some point in the future, what you have seen or experienced in the past, when you took the picture. It is a testimony to everything that's worth living for in your experience—or so I thought.
What is left of this experience we so eagerly wish to share by the time it reaches the person we want to share it with? Imagine going to a lake, forming a cup with your hands, and picking up some water. Now bring the water home to your garden to irrigate it. By the time you reach your garden, most of the water will have slipped through your fingers. The little that is left in the palms of your hands in no way resembles what you initially picked up.
Les cygnes, Marken 2021 / The swans, Marken 2021
But even if only one drop of water survives this endeavor, it might still enable something in your garden to grow. Perhaps not what you had in mind, but certainly something beautiful. It might even surprise and inspire you, bringing new ideas that you could not have imagined without going through all that trouble. And likely, it will be good for the garden as well. It might not grow what you intended, but perhaps it doesn’t need to.
In the same way, the person you share your photographic work with does not need to see what you saw. They need to see something within their own individual experience. If a photograph manages to open those internal doors to new perspectives, ideas, and experiences, then it has done exactly what it needs to do. And this is how we, as individuals, ultimately connect.
From an academic perspective, it is interesting as well. The medium of photography is already an interpretation of what the eye sees. The way tonality is captured by film or a digital sensor replicates the scene only to a certain extent. Retouching and printing add yet another layer of interpretation. By the time the artist looks at their print, they often have to admit that the work rarely, if ever, matches what they saw, remember, or envisioned.
In the spirit of these contemplations, I have made a new work available in an edition of six prints, A2 format. The prints can be ordered here.