Like many photographers, I was trained as a painter. Unlike painting, photography is literally writing with light in which information becomes the narrative brought into the picture. This narrative records perceptions known through the optical unconscious, but not accurately articulated, to become incipit. Photographic images are thus perceived differently than painted images. Photographs are the residue of memory. The perceptual aspect of photographic image-making is what is so intriguing about photography as a medium of expression. The camera is a tool which allows the photographer to produce a philosophical investigation of a rational truth in an idiom which theorist Roland Barthes described as “an abstract circle of truths, outside of which alone the solid residue of an individual logos begins to settle.” The order of interpreting photographic argot is not, like a written text, left to right or right to left, but in all directions simultaneously. This construal allows the viewer to perceive a more arcane inner-statement as the eye continually returns to a central subject. Photography contributes to the dislocation of time and space through a semiotic structure to produce a phenomenological impact. The photographer Edward Putzar described this approach in which the photographer must “...turn to Conceptual Photography through Zen camera of the mind. Or take up gardening––which is surely the most perfect practice of Zen outside of non-gardening.” In doing so, the photographer creates a narrative which is like both a garden as well as a non-garden and contains images which are like flowers and plants as well as non-flowers and non-plants. For further information about my non-gardening photographic principles please see:

www.harvard.com/book/thusness_and_image/

and

www.scribd.com/document/395969179/The-Legions-of-Gaia

I prefer a square or circular format for my photographs. These shapes better isolate an experience while creating a world of seeming original experience and gestell. A memory is framed in a more balanced fashion. Rectangular images create a tension as the eye moves from one side of the photo to the other, whereas a square or circle encourages a more relaxed flow of vision. This relaxed vision allows the artist to, as the photographer Minor White suggested, “perceive with the inner eye, and by an act of choice to capture the essence of that perception.”

For further information please see my website:

www.denniscordell.zenfolio.com