Magical Realism Photography

It is, first of all, a branch of serious fiction, which is to say, it is not escapist. I like escapist fiction, and some of what I photograph is escapism. I'm with C.S. Lewis when he observes that the only person who opposes escape is, by definition, a jailer.

Entertainment, release, fun...these are all good reasons to take and to see pictures. But serious fiction's task is not escape, but engagement. Serious fiction helps us to name our world and see our place in it. It conveys or explores truth.

Any genre of fiction can get at truths, of course. Some science fiction and fantasy do so, and are serious fiction, others are fantasy and scapist. But magical realism is always serious, never escapist, because it is trying to convey the reality of one or several worldviews that actually exist, or have existed. Magical realism is a kind of realism, but one different from the realism that most of our culture now experiences.

Magical realism is not speculative and does not conduct thought experiments. Instead, it tells its stories from the perspective of people who live in our world and experience a different reality from the one we call objective. If there is a ghost in a story of magical realism, the ghost is not a fantasy element but a manifestation of the reality of people who believe in and have "real" experiences of ghosts.

Magical realist photography depicts the real world of people whose reality is different from ours. It's not a thought experiment. It's not speculation.

Magical realism endeavors to show us the world through other eyes. When it works some viewers will inhabit this other reality so thoroughly that the "unreal" elements of the story will seem frighteningly real long after the image was seen.

Magical realism leaves you with the understanding that this world of gosths is one that people really live in and the feeling that maybe this view is correct.

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge -- and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.

O my soul, I gave you back freedom over created and uncreated things: and who knows as you know the delight of things to come?

O my soul, I thaught you so to persuade that you persuade the elements themsleves to come to you: like the sun that persuades the sea to rise even to its height.

Is giving not a necessity? Is taking not -compassion?

O my soul, I understand the smile of your melancholy: your superabundance itself now stretches out longing hands!

Your fullness looks out over raging seas and searches and waits; the longing of over-fullness gazes out the smiling heaven of your eyes!

O my soul, now I have given you everything and even the last thing I had to give, and my hands have become empty through you: -that I bade you sing, behold, that was the last thing I had to give.