Eye and I

Below are bits from three apparently unrelated articles. Try to think of them together.

On the ward’s veranda, there were many small, hungry, and very young children, most so malnourished they had the look of old men and women, loose skin piling up on their sides, features exaggerated by the paucity of flesh padding them.

… Out came the cameras and kit. Reuters, AFP, BBC, NTV and Ugandan broadcaster WBS, all focusing exclusively on one starving boy, a little older than the other children, too frail to stand. Realizing too many lenses were pointed his way for me to even attempt a photo, I left the scene and headed into the ward.

Some of the beds inside the ward were empty, but a few held small bodies that probably weighed less than my bulky camera. I started shooting. I was the lone journalist in the ward—the others were content to all film the same boy outside on the veranda, where his need was immediate and the light was better.
These pictures were doubtlessly moving in the way images of starving children shots always, so I sent a text to a photo editor in Nairobi. “Am at hospital 50 km from main town in Karamoja. Many children starving, malnutrition rampant. Have pix.” He replied back a little bit later, “Not interested for now thank you.” Apparently, they had just done a piece of starving children in Ethiopia, and there’s only so much room in the press for these small bodies.

I thought of the media spectacle outside the feeding ward, and the mothers beckoning me to their children, to take a photo, to take a minute, to care. But I already knew my photos wouldn’t be published on a major news wire. I knew that even if I cared, I wouldn’t be able to tell the story to an audience who could rally outrage into change.

But it isn’t the job of news wires to care—it’s their job to spread news. And this wasn’t as bad as the famine in Ethiopia. It was just a few dozen starving children, somewhere, in some bush, that few people had ever heard of and even fewer people could find on a map and fewer still had visited. Some Africans dying in some bush is not news. It’s sad, but it’s not news.

– above is from If Some Africans Die in Some Bush, Does Anyone Care?; on The Walrus blog of Glenna Gordon, August 18, 2008 (her blog is This is Not a Safari!  and she is based in Kampala, Uganda)

“They’re comfortable in front of the camera,” says Wanda Daniels. In short order, the administrator of the embryonic Indian Residential School Museum of Canada has arranged an interview with two survivors for my documentary about the schools: her seventy-nine-year-old mother, Grace Daniels, and eighty-three-year-old uncle, Max Merrick. “When the last crew was here, they were the ones to speak.” Uh-oh — competition. “Who has been here already?” I ask. “Al Jazeera.”

Little more than a decade after the last one closed its doors, Canada’s Indian residential schools are widely regarded as one of colonialism’s worst excesses — great material for a channel that delights in tarring the West’s moral authority.

… Had you heard of Al Jazeera before they came here, I ask, turning to Grace. “No,” she says, “but they came a long way to see us.” What did they want to know? “The same things you’re asking about. What it was like in this school.”
… I try to imagine how this must have looked to the Al Jazeera crew, and to the network’s audience. “We showed them what we’re showing you,” says Grace.

– above is from A Proper Schooling  by Larry Krotz in the May 2008 issue of The Walrus

In late afternoon in a dim chamber beneath the eastern flank of the volcano, a circle of light the size of a dessert plate slowly traces a path across the wall. The beam is too diffuse to warm a hand. In a few minutes, the disk’s top and bottom melt away and it narrows to a pencil-like shape. Finally, with a strange, brief shudder, the sliver of light disappears.

From the chamber an 874-foot tunnel angles up through the volcano toward an opening to the sky. As it is approached, the portal grows, changes shape and gains color. From one point in the tunnel it resembles a giant, translucent robin’s egg, lit from within.

A bronze stairway rises steeply to the elliptical opening high above. The stairs taper narrowly near the top, with no railings. At the crest there is an explosion of light from the westering sun. To stumble, blinking in the white light, out into the crater’s bowl, pulse and respiration elevated, is to experience a vivid sensation, like rebirth.

“At times the only difference between hallucination and reality is consensus,” says Turrell. “How we respond to light and space, the feeling and sense of space, and how reality is put into question—these sorts of things, and the emotions attached to them, are not much talked about, but I think are worth exploring.”

– above is from an article, The Cosmic Art of James Turrell  by Michael Balchunas in PCM Online. It’s describing his Roden Crater Project.

What’s my point? Aside from the separate interest of each of the three pieces quoted, I see them as a nutshell outline of what one may wish or try to communicate with visual presentations.

First, we have immediate needs (hungry children).

Second we have consideration of who we are — what we look like to each other, evaluation of ourselves relative to one another.

Third we have exploration of our place in the universe.

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Here’s more on Turrell’s Roden Crater Project:

Roden Crater will order basic human interactions with light and space and also with time. It will affect not only the intensity, but also the protensity the extension through time of perceptual experience. The modifications to the cinder cone will be informed by the works Turrell has been producing since the beginning of his career: the light inside the spaces will be like the Skyspaces, but they will be hewn from the natural materials of the volcano and surfaced with the sand stone of the surrounding desert.

Turrell’s Roden Crater Project is an interactive sculptural environment; its subject matter is light and space. At its most profound levels, the completed project will allow us to stand in the present and look into both the past and the future. Light, in one of its aspects, is time. The crater will focus our attention on infinite reaches that are both geologic and astronomical, both personal and psychological. The entire project with its myriad interior and exterior spaces functions in terms of the light in the sky. In these terms, the crater is designed to work closely with what is already available in the sky, but it goes beyond worldly givens into areas of autonomous, unbounded seeing.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/