Sounds lightly

BART eyes

BART is a public transit system bringing people to, and back from, San Francisco. These are some images I made through the window of BART about 17 years ago while riding to Oakland.

What is there to see? more like why is this what we see.. We have so much ability to design and produce beautiful places for people to live.

A world organized around the needs of an economy constructed to make a few people “very wealthy” means controlling the behavior of others

Alameda Creek

For some a photograph is the ”a standard to the best of our knowledge,” —The Standard . . . except if its been altered in any way, or more specifically, any way which would alter the “Real Meaning” of it.

If its a “commonly accepted thing” in the photograph, such as a hammer, or a steak, or a box of Cheerios, we usually accept it with little hesitation.

People like to have a common unity between what their eyes see and how their mind defines the meaning of the “things” that they see. To see a photograph is to ask what are the things in it and how do they relate to each other.

The process by which, through the behavior of growing up, we come to know and create ourselves and the universe. is referred to as “socialization.”

Often its said that people are socialized into the society, and then, well some individuals are not. Actually the purpose of “socialization” is no purpose, its a property of being human, and while each of us has a unique experience, being human means as we learn the tools of adulthood we learn to repress some of those unique experiences to the general society accepted definition . . .

we replace our unique experience with the common one of society and perhaps this is what makes a society —people living together— and all of its benefits possible

We experience the world through our senses, as we develop from child to adult the experiences collect in the “mind” and human beings. using the skills and abilities not just from the biological qualities, but the social experiences of growing up to make some sense of it., to find “our” way.”While learning a language facilitates this process, it also inhibits as learning words may also mean redefining your individual unique experiences with an inappropriate word.The “thing” we experienced is not the same “thing” the word means.

Humans have language, we could say we have a “capacity for language.” Where other “higher level” animals may have the ability to communicate, such as to communicate danger, all the recipients of that message already understand the “danger,” the message only says “the danger is here.”
People can not only express a danger but they can communicate new information about that situation.

When we see an image and define it as a photograph our mind gives us certain assumptions about the nature of the information. A photograph is a visual image which usually is made up of recognizable “things”, things which our mind has defined as “recognizable things.”

Photography is interesting because it may spark a confrontation between the visual experience of the eye and the common experience of the mind .

Sometimes a photograph has “things” which we do not recognize and instead of appreciating the direct visual experience our mind wants to keep working to find a “solid definition of the thing,” put it into its correct category, “to find its name” and often we confuse knowing the name of a thing with understanding the thing..

EndPapers

Why do these images seem to have nothing in common. That is a puzzle of my life. When there seems to be no place for me. or for my photographs then together we do have something in common.

People like order, they like to differentiate one thing from another, have a name for each thing and understand the relationship of one thing to another. Order in the Universe.

Driving from Fremont, California to Albuquerque or back, you may pass by Boron, California, population 2,280 (1920).

20 Mule Team Borax soap .used to sponsor a radio show (1930-1945), and in the 1950s a TV western, called Death Valley Days, stories about over coming the hard times living in Death Valley .

According to legend, two men, a young muleskinner — or mule driver — named Ed Stiles and J.W.S. Perry, local superintendent of Coleman’s Borax Co., came up with the idea of hitching two 10-mule teams together to make one 100-yard-long, 20-mule team. The mules pulled two huge custom-made wagons, each loaded with 10 tons of borax.

A smaller accompanying wagon of supplies and food was hitched behind the two big wagons. Together they made the 20-day round trip between 1883 and 1889, hauling more than 20 million pounds out of Death Valley. Not one animal was lost, nor did one wagon break down.

An abandoned house along a country road in New England, one kanknot wonder what happened, did they own the land and house and leave it, did a husband and wife break up to leave the house to live separate lives , were there children born in the house?