The Eye of the Beholder

This is supposed to be a video about creativity with Photography, and unexpectedly they stumble upon the crux of our human experience. We taint everything we see through eyes that are distorting the truth (or reality or the fact) of each and every moment. We cannot help it, it is based upon all the baggage that has been accumulated since the time the Doctor, Midwife or whom ever delivered us smacked us on the butt to take our first breath.

Most of us live our lives, never being able to see beyond the veil of our filtered existence. We think we see the truth in front of our eyes, and yet that truth is based upon our expectations, our biases and our opinions. So here, in this video, we have a group of photographers who are told a fabricated story about an individual, and they try to portray their idea of who they think he is rather than letting all that fall away and just see the image that is in front of them. 

This is how we do violence to each other, this is how we hurt those around us without even understanding that we have violated them. We say interesting things like, "You aren't the person you were when I met you." or "You have changed so much that I no longer know who you are." If we gave our selves a moment prior to opening our mouths and actually thought about either of these statements we would never utter them. Nothing in life is fixed, everything is in flux, including us. And this is the biggest lie we try to convince ourselves of. We look at pictures of Movie Stars when they were young, and we say, "Wow, they sure have aged "either poorly or gracefully."

We desire so much to keep everything static. This would be akin to going to our local favorite place, perhaps an Ocean side, or a Lake-view, or even at the banks of our favorite river. Perhaps we look at the water as being so clear, so pristine and sparkly that we want to take some of it with us. So we get a bucket and scoop it up and take it home. Perhaps we put it out on our porch and go about our business, only to return weeks later and see some slimy cauldron of mosquito larvae invested mold factory. Once we remove anything from its current environment, which is always changing and in flux, we remove its inherent nature and change it.