Does Reality Bite?

 I got sick of escaping from reality today. 

Oh, it's what we do all the time, escape from reality, that is, but I decided I was nauseated by the constant fudging of perceptions.

I decided to photograph simple reality in as real a way as possible.

It wasn't so bad.

It wasn't exciting. It wasn't stimulating in any way. It didn't make me happy.

I simply felt calm and honest at the end of the experiment.

We're broken if we ignore 
reality for too long.

Modern camera and photography programs offer endless possibilities as far as fudging perceptions go. You can twist reality almost any way you like.

Make it brighter.

Make it darker.

Make it funnier.

Make it outrageous and outraging and entertaining.

Make it more colorful so that you feel you want to just reach out to it and live life fully with a bursting heart as the photograph tells you that you can.

There's a lot of lying that goes on in modern photography.

After awhile, it distorts your brain.

It's obvious but not often noticed that this is happening to us in the modern world.

Reality is often so ugly we want nothing more than to escape into the visual world of roller coasters, beautiful people, endlessly gorgeous sunsets, flowers that open before our eyes in fast motion and gorgeous girls who would love us if only they gave us a chance.

I don't think so.

Why do we escape from the calm?

However much we try to escape it, reality goes on without us.

It's always there, and we ignore it at our peril.

God, I hate flag-waving.

As William Blake said and Jim Morrison quoted, the doors of reality are always open.

After some experience sours us on it, we can't stand to walk through those doors. Sometimes, it's even instructive to see things in a twisted way, to demand reality conform to our desires and fears.

As Blake said another time, the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

Garish colors, loud noises and lies told to provoke or sooth us eventually wear out.

The midsummer woods were
sere and desperate, but they
told no lies about reality.

We don't beat a path back to reality, but we do slide calmly back into it.

We escape again if it becomes too much, or too boring, but the excessive manipulation of it by technology or politicians or artists become wearisome.

You just want to see things as they are.

You want to walk the path of reality again, as long as it doesn't hurt too much.

Honesty in photography isn't
required, and doesn't excite,
but it can calm you.

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