Coming into Focus

Michele Beck& Jorge Calvo, Flower Aye,  2003

Over the weekend I went to see the orchid show at the Botanical Gardens.  Orchids are so exquisite that they don’t need to do much except exist to grab people’s attention.  For some reason though, the Botanical Gardens had a set designer and the CEO of an advertising agency for the theatrical industry design the show this year, which they called The Orchid Show: On Broadway.  I guess you would have   to love Broadway shows to enjoy the extravagant displays and songs from Broadway musicals over the load speakers.  I’m not much of a fan, but even for my friend who loved some of the music, still the aural and visual spectacle took away from the quiet and awesome beauty of the flowers.

In any case, I was there, so I decided to ignore the Broadway theme and just focus on the flowers.  They were beautiful and like everyone else I took out my camera and started shooting a ton of photographs of the flowers.  I love taking photographs, especially when I am uncomfortable.  The camera allows me to control my surrounds and create a better composition than the reality that I am in and it allows me escape. Unfortunately it wasn’t all the easy to take photos at the orchid show amid the swarm of visitors snapping away.  You would think that people would be calm in a botanical garden, but actually there was a lot of tension and anxiety there.  I guess that is inevitable in NY somehow and I don’t think the blaring music was helping much either.  So, in any case, I decided to step back and look the old fashioned way- with the naked eye.

I was a little disappointed to put my camera away and I wanted to make my visual experience without the camera just as powerful, so I made a conscious effort to pay attention to what I was seeing.  At first, I realized just how much there was to see without the camera to crop my field of vision.  Everything was a super-wide shot and I had to consciously compose my fields of vision.  Did I want a close-up or a medium shot?  Where did I want the light to come from?  Did I want to focus on the colors or the shapes? And what was I seeing anyway?  Slowly, I could sense my whole relationship to the room change. I started to feel my body moving through the room and I became connected to my environment in a completely different way.  Rather than being located in the the camera, I was inside the space of the conservatory. In a sense I shifted from inside to outside.

When I got home, I was thinking about this shift and it reminded me of the experience I have when I put down my iPhone and stop checking my email or texting.  The cell phone is an enclosed space that blocks out the world around me, but when I choose to put it down I become a part of my surrounding.  I can be sitting in the middle of a crowded restaurant, but once I open the phone, I am inside a little black box in my own private world and I don’t think I am the only one affected this way.  

There is a very interesting interview with the performance artist Marina Abramovic on PBS that I saw this week.  Her work is all about the potential of the physical body and the power of being present in the moment. In many ways, her work is incredibly simple and yet this simplicity can be devastating. Overall, there is no technology, just her, her body, time and energy.  In the interview, she says that so much is lost due to our focus on electronics. For an example she says that we haven’t developed our potential for telepathy because we rely on mobile phones to communicate.  Well, before cell phones we didn’t use telepathy much to communicate, but the point is well taken.  We are a culture that is addicted to and distanced by mediation.  We do not value (or we are scared of)  the power that can be found in our bodies and minds when we are truly present.  I can understand that, after all it is a big and overwhelming wide-shot and that can be too much to hold at times. 

Before my friend and I left the conservatory, we were standing and staring at some plants in a corner of the room.  She said to me, “Look at that amazing tree”. I didn’t see a tree.  I looked at her and I saw that we were looking in the same direction, but I had no idea what she was looking at. It took me a little time, but eventually my vision adjusted and suddenly I saw an exquisite and delicate tree with branches like lace come into focus.