Love Letters, Pt II, Dear John, Dear CA, Dear Me

crab nebula

Dear Common Application,

I am sorry it has taken me so long to write to you, but things have been very hectic this year. I am involved in a number of activities, am trying to compose essays  (it feels  like one almost every day!), and am doing all I can to make myself stand out from among the thousands and thousands of people who need you and want you to be their special friend.

I know how busy you are, but I ask that you take a few minutes to see if you might be willing to accept my proposal.  And if I am going to be forthright, I have to say I am actually surprised I have not already heard from you.  I am not sure how this is going to sound but I feel you need to know, that I have had quite few suitors in my time. Some of them were simple folk, the kind that were just out for some fun, as they used to say in the old days. I think the phrase was, ‘just a kick’, although I think what they really meant was just a click.

Walker Evans photo

I am not very good with words, so forgive me if I am not being clear. But some of these seemingly innumerable people were, I have to say, obsessed. They never stopped. Every day, every hour, and now, these days, every outing, every event, everything is something they want to save or show or use to somehow use me. See what I mean? I am just not good with words.

So maybe what I will do is to let others who have written to me talk instead. They are full of words about e. They just can’t seem to say enough. And yet from you, nothing. Not a word. Not a hint that there is any future between us. Why? What have I done to you? I am willing to help you, to give you beauty, pleasure, laughter and yes, tears too. I can give you more than I can say. And I guess that is the point. But you have to be willing to try.  Will you? Do I have to reveal my innermost nature, prove to you I am more than just some image, something superficial?  

Napalm Victims, Vietnam War

If you will only listen to my friends. They will tell you I am far more than just a pretty picture. I have depth, soul, and some would say art. I believe I do too. Why won’t you?

Maybe it sounds to you like I am saying ‘use me’. That is not right. I want us to share, to treat each other with respect, to learn from each other. That is what a true relationship is, isn’t it?  I know I can teach you things you never even dreamed about. I know I can take you to laces you have never been. I can take you to galaxies that curl like newborns, I can show you particles so small that contain worlds within them. I know. I have the proof. 

All I am asking is for you to let me show you let me join you. It would be such a happy union. I promise. We can show the world. Just let me. Please. It is for your own good too. You are just too old and set in your ways. There, I said it. I knew I would have to and I have dreading it but it is true. You are living in the past. You are living like, well, like it was 200 years ago. It isn’t. Wake up. Look around. I am here. I am waiting. I can make you young again.

And if you don’t believe me, just ask my friends, ask anyone who knows me. They will tell you. They might convince you even if I can’t. But you really need to listen. I am saying all this for your own good. You are letting an opportunity pass and you don’t want that happen. It isn’t too late. Be brave. I will help you. I have taken the first step. Now it is time for you. 

neurons

Please write me and let me know what you are thinking. Time is running out on this year and I really need to know what do. I trust you to make the right decision. People call me crazy but I have seen so much change, you don’t even have the slightest clue about how much I have seen. Open your eyes. See me. Let others see us together. Don’t be afraid. Everyone will be happy for us. Really.  Now smile. On the count of 3.

1,2….say cheese,

Grace Kelly, Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window

Your future friend and partner,

Photography

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In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads—as an anthology of images. 

Cindy Sherman

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern.

Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.

Susan Sontag, On Photography

Daguerre's first surviving daguerreotype

The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Words always fail. Jacques Lacan

Sally