Much of my photographic work is concerned with how our visual perception works, in particular how we impose a sense of order in perceiving the visual world, stitching together arguably unrelated elements into a cohesive whole. In doing so we necessarily decide what’s important, and what’s not important – in other words, what’s signal, and what’s noise. We do this because without this “narrative” the visual world is largely incomprehensible, and we do this even though there’s not necessarily a clear order to how things go.
We do the same thing when we look at photographic images, deciding which elements are important, and which are not – or even flaws that, had the viewer been the photographer, would have been edited out of the shot or corrected after the fact. In Handball Court, for example, is the black stripe of tape an essential element of the photograph, or a mere distraction that can be safely disregarded? The same goes for the (perhaps) random orange colored splotches on rear wall. Similar questions can be posed about each of these photographs.
I know what I think are the “correct” answers to these questions, but I’m equally clear that while my answers – and my intent – are obvious to me, I can’t meaningfully predict, much less bind, the viewer. In the end, my intent, while important to me, is (arguably) simply noise since there’s no clear way of discerning it without either a written explanation or reliance on cliché.
