Reading Faces Blind
“Blindness is a confinement, but it is also a liberation, a solitude propitious to invention, a key and an algebra.” ~ Jorge Luis Borges
Like the windows of a house at night through whose translucent curtains we may glimpse but a sliver of the lives contained therein. The face of a woman glows with a sunset incandescence from a single screw-in bulb.
We see a man, too, illuminated with a Ticonderoga, graphite sheen.
The alphabet of light and form creates a fleeting emotional language that cannot be deciphered but is at once absorbed. The eye perceives but a narrow spectrum of a man. There are wavelengths of knowing beyond mere reflection through which a woman is revealed.
We are either beings of pure flesh or we are spirit thinly veiled. There is no middle ground.
Who you are is not what you see. The eye perceives but an infintesmal band on the spectrum of the Self. But there is s secret pattern hidden in the flower. We rise up beneath the ultraviolet like Fibonacci pearls.
The trick to mastering the art of living inside bodies is to see without eyes. But blindness is just a state of mind. Look at everything as if you are seeing it for the first time. Including yourself.
The camera is a shamanistic wand.
The photograph is the means to seeing blind.
There’s a difference between looking and seeing. The true image can never be framed. The truth of who we are extends beyond containers composed of right angles and straight lines.
The idea is to illuminate connection. Nothing real can truly be captured. Separation is illusion and the true photograph exposes this.
In this sense I strive not to reveal you, but to reveal me.
We have entered the era of the face as moral currency. Without knowing it we have crossed the threshold. There is no anonymity. Parts of us live in vast server farms, forever. Our eyes are everywhere and everywhere a thousand eyes are upon, us all the time.
The face stands more naked and intimate than any body part for it reveals vastly more. Yet we are so careless in this revelation, having chosen to ignore the power of the subconscious to read its language.
Everyone can read a face. You are reading faces all the time. Your level of face-reading comprehension is extremely high. And you can hardly know or articulate the stories you see. Or the mute stories you tell.
Face-reading is a crucial, life-or-death evolutionary leap. The amount and quality of information you glean from a mere glance is staggering. The power of a Selfie is staggering. A Selfie is you sounding your barbaric yawp to the world. But you cannot tell your own story. You can only truly be revealed by another.
A true portrait is an equation in which one of the variables is you, and the other variable is me.
It is only through each other that we can begin to know ourselves.
