RAIN

According to Buddhist ideas, reality is multi-layered and our undeveloped minds and senses perceive only its superficial layers.

However, in the arts, a genius learns from nature, from himself. The talent is constrained to simulate the existing cultural paradigms. We all grow up on fixed ideals and wrong stereotypes about everything, and rarely, in the words of Schoenberg, do we find the courage to present reality as a multitude of view points, excluding only the observer and the mere act of observing.

Perhaps photos reveal to us that other layer of reality hidden beneath the veil of Maya, but which is still in close contact and constant interaction with the visible world. The avant-garde, since the beginning of the last century sought to expand our perception and vision of the world as an organic whole, to break the world beset by the fabric of ordinary language, to poke holes in it through which one can exude the pure “first reality”. In some pictures from Nepal we see such glaring failures, black holes. Their very existence can be perceived as an act of aggression, an attack on the familiar reality. However, we feel that it is not. In all items, there is a small, almost imperceptible harmony. Void and emptiness is transformed into the visible reality of the objective world only for it to later dissolve into the darkness. Water is the main creative element, a primordial matter, from which all forms are born and to which they return, either due to a disaster or gradual regression. So, we are obliged to start afresh every time from the beginning, forgetting the past and the future, feeling “eternity in the moment”.

It is an often forgotten truism, expressed in one of American classics: a photograph bears no relation to reality. It is not an impartial document. It is not news. Beneath the surface of each image is a hidden set of processes, seemingly beyond the boundaries of what is depicted - not just the scientific processes of physical and chemical interactions, but also sacral time and energy.

Photographer is a slave to technology, a captive of the program embedded in the black box camera; and his real problem is to break out of the scope of the program, to overcome it. Thereby, we find ourselves in the vast field of opportunities, that includes ourselves in the so-called “aesthetics of flaw”. Many photographers, amateur and professional, having studied the details of manual processes, as if to reject received knowledge, refuse to control many processes, letting it all flow with behavior of chemicals (emulsions, developers, etc.) and revealing the act of “providence”. Many people try to make this their method. And then, there are the experiments using water - bathing the film in seawater so that the emulsion forms salt crystals, or distorting using water or otherwise the already developed negatives. But talent without imagination becomes a slave to technology again, the form of technology notwithstanding.