REFER TO GREY: Contemplations by Robert Greigos © 2007-2024

From its beginning, photography has contributed to the elaboration of a bridge between humans offering the possibility for a shared understanding as to what is and is not real, a bridge whose construction began with the invention of tools, language, art, music, and finally literature.

Useful knowledge developed by and shared amongst any group of humans forms the basis of their culture. Such knowledge helps explain, in a predictive sense, aspects of the world in which we live. Don’t eat that. It will make you sick. Do drink this. It will quench your thirst and cool your body. What photography offers different from all those other bridge builders is a kind of pause button. Photograph can stop and fix in place things that are moving and changing, that are dynamic. Language and art may attempt to do that, but for most of human history they have failed to render all the potentially useful details photography does not fail to render.

At its beginning, where photography seemed to fall short, and where language, art, music, and literature were believed to excel, was in its apparent inability to render things beneath the surface, the internally felt reality of human aspiration and human emotion. But almost immediately, a substantial number, if not the majority, of photography’s practitioners sought to remedy that deficiency by using photographic methods and materials to create synthetic renderings of artificial realities whose sole consequence was, and continues to be, the blurring and undermining of any universally shared understanding of what is actually real and what is not. Such is also the current reality we inhabit, the increasingly undermining plague of our time.

But that is not to say human aspirations and emotions are not real, they are and have their place. But, by rendering them untethered and without foundation within the undeniable workings of what is actually real, we quite literally set ourselves up, both individually and as a species, to crash and burn. A truly useful understanding of what is and is not real could help us avoid that outcome.

I am not the first, nor will I be the last, to offer such an analysis. Pick any period in history and there will be voices offering their own version of what I suggest. Regarding the early era of photography’s existence, Alfred Stieglitz and the people with whom he associated were of that voice. A serious reading of just the first two essays in the volume America and Alfred Stieglitz, contributed by William Carlos Williams and Lewis Mumford, will potentially set your hair on fire. Their analyses have certainly blistered my thinking.

Purchased culture, magical thinking, and arrogant willful ignorance: we are currently drowning in all three of them.

The notion of purchased culture includes stories, art, music, and literature that have not been created relative to our own time and place. Such creations are historical or, alternatively, have been created contemporaneously by others, not ourselves, and marketed commercially and largely exploitively. Potentially translatable and useful in the here and now within our own lived reality? Maybe, but not assured. Governmental and public institution attempting to point us toward healthful consumption of such “culture” are currently losing public trust under a misinformation onslaught from would be exploiters of every shape and color.

Magical thing is a wishful, seriously incomplete, unverified, largely dangerous and false understanding of the actual internal workings of the actual reality we face. Coincidence is not causation. Nor is it healthy to consider it so. Research, critical thinking informed by research, consultation with others of both similar and differing experience, debate, and rigorously designed testing can all contribute to a shared culture of useful knowledge we could all healthfully rely upon. Magical thinking propagated and serialized by hucksters, would be prophets, so called “influencers”, and profit making algorithms do not and will not accomplish that objective.

Increasingly prevalent illiteracy and ineffective public education are perhaps excuses for the rampant ignorance and gullibility so many of our numbers suffer these days. But, arrogant willful ignorance is not. Willful ignorance is not caution. And, it is not righteousness. It is a prideful refusal to learn from verified evidence. It is a self-harming short cut around critical thinking. And, it is a distrust of both one’s own and one’s fellows’ ability to learn and think critically. It is often a religious adherence to once useful ideas that no longer test useful in the here and now. And, it commonly finds personally supportive community within the company and fantasies of magical thinkers, thinkers who imagine mere coincidence to be verifying evidence of actual causation.

In speaking of art, culture, and the reality in which one finds one’s self, from rocks and flowers to exploitive propaganda and the latest scientific findings, William Carlos Williams writes in the above mentioned volume: “It is the act of lifting these things into an ordered and utilized whole, which is culture. It isn’t something left over afterward. That is the record only. The act is the thing.”

That act he speaks of isn’t making up and promoting false narratives nor destroying, hiding, or fabricating evidence. The act of which Williams, Stieglitz, and all their associates speak and were earnestly attempting to accomplish during their lifetimes was to grasp onto and illuminate for all to appreciate what is universally useful and verifiably true about life itself, about what it means to be fully and completely human, and about how the intimate workings of the universe we inhabit can function both for and against our benefit. An admirable quest for anyone, both then and now.

I make photographs. I also write down some of my thoughts after living with those photographs for a while within the reality I inhabit. Some of those photographs and thoughts I share with you. My hope is that my act of doing so may in some way be inspiring and useful to you within your quest for a more complete understanding of what is actually real and healthfully useful within this time we inhabit.

Join in. “The act is the thing.”