Interviews are significant for bring diverse perspectives, expertise and insights towards understanding ideas. Here I share long form audio essays, interviews and conversations I’m having with people.

I examine the statement “photography is more intelligent than we are” by Andreas Gursky, a renowned German photographer. 

Photography is more intelligent than we are

The dust floating on the monitor reminds me that I’m alive, it's been a few days since I last cleaned it, rubbing my eyes, I regret it. Arching my back I return to looking at the tiny tabs that I have opened on my screen. I’m always looking through archival photographs for resources, for ideas, inspiration and sometimes context. It's a straightforward process when I know what I’m looking for. But to get to know what I’m looking for, it takes a lot of testing of my eye and experimenting how one image sits with my thoughts, talking to myself, negotiating what I want from an image versus what it will be regardless of my wishes for it. In selecting and looking at particular images arrives this process where I attempt to decontextualize these images to reconstruct my own narrative. Propelling the story these images are holding forward, in new ways, in an accurate way but still in a fictionalized way. In any healing journey a shift occurs. When one moves through a liminal state, a waiting period necessary to cross a threshold between one world and another. What some might call an empty mind. In that moment you are waiting to open your eyes and your mind is emptied of thought, empty of content, whatever you are ready for is mirrored directly and immediately inside of you. In anthropology, liminality is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite passage. It is the space within which an individual is no longer who they once were but not yet who they will become. Photography embodies a liminal experience that helps me through a small and subtle suggestions of values, alter what I’m seeing. My perspective is tunneled into a infinite network of hope, a desire for possibilities. The capacity for hope which can grow and flourish in individuals. Hope defined as the experience of uncertainty; expressing hope becomes a way of expressing awareness of this uncertainty. When we hope for some kind of positive future without knowing exactly how this future will look like, it requires a fundamental openness to the future. Enacting memory and time, sorting through interior history. When we look at photographs we are essentially also looking through or beyond them, negating what is shaping our attention. A photograph speaks to us without words, and yet it is still language that plays diligently with obscuring reality from us while at the same time shoving us to see with excessive clarity what we missed. Fashion photography when executed intentionally awkwardly shapes my attention and allows me to engage into this liminal process. Scenic environments, lush earthy aesthetics, exquisitely curated composition muddle my mind and reason as precise and unusual garments press on the skin of models. These images throw me into another reality while also making me participant in a lie. A lie that resembles hope in me, a lie that foolishly allows me to be fooled from art. That fashion bears a one sided bond with nature. A robust relationship that fashion brands repurpose and reinvigorate to stay relevant in our hearts and minds. That request of us to suspend our belief for a moment and celebrate this matrimony of contour lines and palette of beauty on this planet. An exhausting experiment of wasteful insertion of carbon footprint that Emanuele Farneti, the former magazine’s editor in chief Vogue Italia says has its toll in creating and contaminating spaces, where by they use “one hundred and fifty people involved, about twenty flights and a dozen or so train journeys, forty cars on standby and sixty international deliveries, plus lights turned on for at least ten hours nonstop, powered by gasoline-fueled generators, with the added food wasted from the catering services, plastic to wrap the garments, electricity to recharge phones, cameras” to say the least is troublesome, he admits, in an interview for Vogue during the launch of their first ever non photo shoot production cover and features, around the beginning of Covid 19 pandemic for the magazine. The thought that a fashion photograph can have so much significance to me is scary and probably amusing and absurd to you. Which I can not deny might be true but make no mistake photographs are powerful and in one sense even “more intelligent than we are '' to borrow the sentiment of renowned German photographer of our times Andreas Gursky, a man who is not invisible to the photography community. Clenching the largest sale prices for his photograph at $4,338,500 (Rhein II), auctioned at Christie's New York on 8th November 2011, but also in proxy he has come to define recent photography and its hard fought place within art. His monumental extraordinarily detailed pictures, that allure without narratives, causing a multitude of confusion for a viewer to take in what they are seeing. Is carefully tamed by his ability to construct compositions as harmoniously and technically exact as he can. What artist and filmmaker Dwayne LeBlanc explains as “positive manipulation”. Subduing the visual tension that his work choreographs in. Outside of the pale and wrinkled assertions of Peter Galassi’s words, an American writer, curator, and former head of Department of Photography of MOMA regarding his well written essay of Gursky, very little is known about Gursky and only a few have had the opportunity to interview him beyond the scope of photography. With that buffer of ambiguity it can come quite natural to treat figures, of his stature in the art world as delusional, imbecile, untethered from reality, shrink-wrapped with privileges. Perhaps to even diagnose their statements as humor “just artists talking shit” and this is a fair assumption to make. How can a two dimensional photo hold more depth and intelligence than that of a three dimensional life giver? Can there really be any validity to Gursky’s words? 

Intelligence is a complicated matter, on the account of we don’t truly have firm definition for it. When we talk about Intelligence is often defined as our intellectual potential; something we are born with, something that can be measured, and a capacity that is difficult to change but not dubious to improve. This is a very narrow outline and definition that we have come accustomed to associating brain activity, particularly activity in the human brain with this annotation we call “intelligence”. In general cognitive psychology tends to emphasize the study process and function of interactions of thinking, emotion, creativity, and problem-solving abilities, where cognitive neuroscience works to explain how cognition is implemented in the brain. However, other views of intelligence have emerged within the last decade where scientists are taking emotions capaciously and seriously, studying emotions in new ways through their labs of forms of emotional intelligence. Professor Dacher Keltner from Berkeley Psychology, research on the economy of emotions and emotional experience like awe and hope which aren't fluent to measure like other foundational emotions we express, has been stacking up empirical data of how these emotions transform our mind and body. Looking at physical responses to our emotions and our intelligence. Their findings discovered and measured the activation of respiratory sinus arrhythmia, the alteration in cardiac rhythm generated from stimulation of the vagus nerve and cardiac filling pressures, and the parasympathetic activation, the slowing of our heart and breathing rate, that lowers the blood pressure to promote digestion. Through their selected stimulus of images to evoke awe they saw the reduction of these respiratory systems. Within these emotional states, they were able to also look at participant’s minds and see the accuracy of the cognitive recollection to increase through a state of awe and wonder versus positive emotions like pride and enthusiasm. What they learned was the subjective feeling of these emotions are calm and pleasant that pulls our attention away from self and towards the world around us. Just like how a photograph pulls me into its reality, the emotion of awe reduces our tendency to filter our current experience through what we think we already know. A photograph has no desire to survive and doesn’t require this designation we call “cognitive abilities” that we desperately need. A photograph’s intelligence lies elsewhere and what it does have is “data”, an insurmountable amount of information and insight that allows technology to proliferate and be smarter than us. It holds a recognizable expanding linguistic model without words for the human condition. It can evoke emotions that we were not prepared for. It can educate us of the unknown through time and space like no other medium. But most importantly, a photograph can personalize a story beyond our own logic and experience, giving us intellectual curiosity for what we are seeing. Here some analysis can be useful, by helping us sort out and consider the threads that are emblematic, mathematical and sociologically interwoven in Gursky’s statement, that are in fact true. Photography is more intelligent than us, and is becoming a source of epistemic values. The word epistemic traces back to the Greeks, It comes from epistēmē, Greek for "knowledge." That Greek word is from the verb epistanai, meaning "to know or understand.      

John Szarkowski, the director of Photography the Museum of Modern Art argued In 1978 that photography is seen either as mirror, a romantic expression of a photographer's sensibility as it projects itself on the things and sights of this world; or as window through which the exterior world is explored in all its presence and reality. Photography is not only a mirror to reality but also a mirror to the unseen. When the first Covid-19 vaccines were distributed during the pandemic Linda Alterwitz, a visual artist, utilized photography, as she focused on the unseen rhythms of the human body and our relationship to the natural world. She used a high-resolution thermal camera to document and track several body’s reactions to the vaccine. Tediously photographing 130 participants at their injection site. The resulting photographs revealed something many were weary to share or talk about, she captured each participant’s unique immunological response to the injection, tracking the degree of physical reaction to the virus in a way that corresponds to their individual physiology. Her work demonstrates the unprecedented value a photograph has in simplifying the complex experiences of the human body and the unseen. Unveiling how a photograph can intuitively display to us regardless of our own inability to consciously be aware of our bodies' reactions. Offering the generosity and fortitude that allows us to speak with sophistication and confidence about our bodies. Her exhibition opened the way for us to be critical outside of the knowledge, limitations and authorities of doctors and expertise of disease control to see with our own eyes that COVID-19 vaccines were not neutral to our bodies.

In 1914, racial hygiene was born of a new drive for society to be governed by scientific principles, irrespective of all other considerations. It represented a new variant of German nationalism. Permitting a variety of dissatisfaction, forged out of the feelings that Germany’s spiritual and political development had come to a halt and needed pushing forward again. That brought forth many unfolding philosophies and sequences of events that led to the First World War. Which was massively deadly and destructive but across a bloody landscape and the Rhein River that flowed to the North Sea, laid an arbitrary but as good a dividing line in the evolution of arts. Many German soldiers were eager to capture the moment of war through their Kodak Vest Pocket Camera, a portable camera that sold out on its third year of release of almost two million units that were actually forbidden from the battlefield. Away from the war something else was transcending with the use of cameras, a remarkably diverse group of artists began to challenge the choke hold on perception and the old gave way to the new. Artists wouldn’t be attracted and would care less about following the paths of recognition or getting acknowledged from traditional art institutions, instead they were interested in a renewal of perception, referred to as the process of making sense of the world around us. To their eyes, a photograph meant real world and non art content. Their pictures reflected their function and focus of the technologies that were rapidly transforming urban life. Collecting images from magazines to circulate and elucidate their modern ideas. Converting the romantic idea of the artist as individual genius and instead substituting that notion of artist as a subversive critiquing the system. These concepts were blended and shown through the Russian Exhibition in Berlin in 1922. The First Russian Art Exhibition (Erste Russische Kunstausstellung), which opened in the Galerie van Diemen in Berlin on October 15, that caused an astonishing stir of curiosity in the Western art world. With Russia having been isolated from the West for almost a decade due to the First World War. The exhibition offered a unique opportunity for Western audiences to view artistic developments. Without any specialized training some artists began to add photography, this modern style of picture making to their tools for creating. Through the probing and pragmatic process that is typical of artistic practice the medium of photography for Europeans had developed an experimental and sometimes playful approach for them. These radical European artists explored the amazing qualities of the medium itself. They wanted to shape reality and they were looking beyond just a pair of eyes. Artists like Alexander Rodchenko, a graphic designer who used dynamic angles and extreme closeups to make overpowering portraits of women workers. 

The swiping of my thumb now, allows me to look at images that are uploaded online every day, devices where our eyes linger on images for 0.03 seconds. We now embellish photos in every part of our lives. Our photographic identity and habits is significantly shifting the utility and conversation of photography not only as an art form for expression but also through its purpose and place in the world. However, despite its eminence in our lives, the photography community still is very much talking about it, seeing it, through old eyes, as Rashed Haq, a Bangladeshi-American artist and scientist shares his disagreement with, in an article from Wired; Are you sure you know what a photograph is? He questions how we define photography as new technology begins to emerge with this practice. “These types of images will expand how we view the world, how we see ourselves in that world and how we construct our sense of self in the twenty-first century” he shares in his article. For instance, most of us consider how objectively attractive we are in a photo but very few of us know how that image is made on our phones. In recent years Ai (Artificial Intelligence) has taken over the mobile phone capability and possibility to enhance your image. Ai is used in computational operations of photo processes like Neural Processing Units (NPU). The NPU is what manages deep neural networks, that help the camera make decisions that control functions like shutter speed and aperture based on your environment, meaning the camera is already decoding where you are rather than detecting your light source and is already optimizing the colors in your images before you press the button to take the photo. Technically speaking the whole operation of the camera now supersedes any human capacity for vision. Essentially it is the software in your phone that makes a difference and not you, who is taking the image. Which means that some Ai are observing through online and on our phones, more images than we can in our lifetime over a few hours.

Ai advancements rely on the constant contact it has with images and the ways in which photos possess so much data that allows them to learn. To learn and mimic the human nature of the image making process. The algorithmic model that is making them more intelligent and dominant in this way, is not solely logical and is sometimes overwhelmingly unexplainable. Computational models and the natural ones are perhaps not as distinct and separate as we might imagine. There is this illusion that technological superiority is predicted in large part by the separation of ourselves and our own complexities, this is misguided. In general, there are a few common criteria that usually determine image quality: noise, sharpness, color, contrast, and dynamic range. Before the image is shown to the viewer as mentioned for mobile phone, the image is enhanced with different algorithms. A machine learning algorithm that fosters these kinds of achievements is called Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), which in simple terms looks to have two Ai models go against each other. Most machine learning models are used to produce accurate predictions using some input training data that is fed to the model, the model then makes a prediction and creates an output. Which then we can compare to what should have been the expected outcome. With Generative Adversarial Networks it has unsupervised learning, where it learns patterns from untagged data (un-seen).

What is very intriguing to note about this particular process is that it closely resembles the qualities of photographers I’ve interviewed and their process for image making, not in the engineering sense, per se but rather the internal conversation or the types of conflicts they are having intrinsically. That happens before the image is produced. Photographers are usually asked by the “arts” about their work in two domains, the first one is more of a tangible critique of the meaning of their images, and the second is an exploration of their aesthetic and process in relation to other works or artists. Rarely does a sincere conversation come up with a photographer about their internal conversations, conversations photographers are having with themselves. Most of us would like to think images of vulnerability and beauty came in a calm matter, where it was just a moment, a moment that stopped in its track and reposition itself beautifully. This is perhaps a whimsical calculation we have made as humans to protect us from questioning and misinterpreting their work. The adversarial is vital for GAN to function and contention is also present in the minds of photographers when creating images.

Take for example the work of award winning American Photographer and Writer Gioncarlo Valentine. On a gloomy day on October 11, 2021, I waited for him to get on a video call. The first thing I noticed about Valentine is his hair, the second is his soft but serious eyes. He began using photography as a way to reflect the beauty he was seeing. Very much obsessed with fashion, he spent seven years as a social worker, In 2014 he began investing in the fashion industry to emerge as a self taught photographer. Immersing himself in fashion’s photographic aesthetic, his idea of beauty was altered through the tragic death and murder of Freddie Gray, a 25 year old Black American male who was arrested by the Baltimore Police Department over what former prosecutor Marilyn Mosby claimed was his legal possession of a knife. Gray's death was ascribed to injuries to his cervical spinal cord, a long flexible column that extends through the body. Disgusted by the pixelated image used of Freddie Gray, Valentine recognized he can give agency to people in a new way through photographs but was uncertain how he would go about it. 

GAN, needs and starts with uncertainty, its process is built of incompleteness. Referencing the diagram at the bottom, conceptually, Z represents the latent features of the images generated, for example, the color and the shape. In Deep learning classification, the order is that it doesn’t control the features of the model it is learning. Similarly, in GAN, they don’t control the semantic, relating to meaning in language or logic, of “Z”. They let the training process to learn it.

In other words, what these models teach us, is that they are not fully derived from logic. Ai images are data patterns inscribed into pictures. They work around the parameters of what they don’t know and the computational intelligence that mirrors dominance over each other, through this combative and relentless process to build something real. To know that, they must know what a real image contains and elicits, to a portion of all the ways in which that data remains true. To the curvature of someone's lips and to their hairline, to the way light falls off their skin. What appears as sophisticated and self-regulating thinking can only be possible through the conception that photos give it, the truth. Through a visual language that holds emotions but is extracted from the control and increase of its power. Which draws on our labor, our soil and our energy. Their body, an invisible system to us, rests on perception whereby they are asking entirely different questions that our tongue can not imitate. Their complexity is a byproduct of this incompleteness.

What Khadijah Abdurahman, Editor In Chief of Logic Magazine declares is dehumanizing. Making a comparison between colonialism and the relationship we have to computation with technology. Stressing the question; what does it mean when we say Black people were dehumanized? “A huge part of colonialism is this artificial separation of human and nature, so do we really seek to be human in the sense that we seek to be abstracted from nature” she explains to me during an interview. Expressed in a different way, we think in images regularly so much that it would be effortless for generative images to separate us from the connections we have to natural images. Natural in the sense that we associate a human behind a lens when we see an image, so what will that mean when we no longer associate that element of (human) for an image in our thought process, spirituality and being with the images that form our thinking? We are already widely engaging in what scientists call “cognitive offloading”, the use of physical action to alter the information processing requirements of a task so as to reduce cognitive demand. To free up bandwidth within ourselves, like a reliance on the internet to assemble a product rather than just reading the manual. Unfortunately, the result of this behavior also has a side effect and makes us very receptive to deception. 

Czech-born German philosopher Vilém Flusser was already thinking about an image deception superiority In 1983. Before their capacity was even imagined or ever manifested in what is called “synthetic images”. An author, who lost all of his family in the extermination camps, managed to flee first to London in 1939 and then to Brazil in 1940. Flusser wrote a book called Towards a Philosophy of Photography. In less than a hundred pages, he sketched out an abnormal and counterintuitive definition of photography as a kind of world-spanning artificial intelligence, using human beings as tools to realize its sole directive: the production of more, and more varied, photographic images. In the same manner how computation has changed the way we think and therefore has changed what is thinkable. Photos are deeply occupying how we communicate and how we communicate concepts to the world. This is also shaping how we think about the people around us. As we are now entering an era where pixels are being generated, not rendered. Where our perspective is being shifted and put on a treadmill and our mental flexibility to look at things with fresh eyes becomes ever more difficult. The growth seen in generative images comes from the backdrop of a not so popular but widely influential paper that was released in 2017 titled; Attention Is All You Need. The reference to attention is “self-attention” or what some might call “self-reference” regarding large language models. Attention is a way of sequencing context to words that may have a different meaning within a larger context of words. This paper proposed a unique Transformer architecture that galvanized new ways to scale Language Ai models and their performance. This gave birth and life to GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) which also led to latent diffusion architecture used by stable diffusion. The prompting of words into an image. The emergence of artificial intelligence is learning data and that learning for data, is increasingly happening through the quantification of uncertainty.

Much of the progress we are seeing with these technologies stems from the spectrum of different successes in many different problems of domains of incompleteness. The conceptualization of incompleteness wasn’t openly accepted or formatively recognized by mathematicians as a tool for innovation in this way. Until Austrian logician mathematician Kurt Godel, a scrawny, rigorous thinker of numbers started to upset and increase the anxiety of mathematicians with its contradictions. Through proving limitations of logic, mathematical logic in model theory, proof theory and set theory. More promptly, he constructed a specific statement through numbers as a theorem, a fundamental concept in logic that describes the relationship between statements that hold true when one statement logically follows from one or more statements (deductive calculus for order of logic), that demonstrated an algorithm can prove its logic but can also by design not explain itself through its own procedure (self-reference). This was a theorem that Goel shared in 1930 at the Second Conference on the Epistemology of Exact Sciences held in Konigsberg, present-day Kaliningrad. This translated into, that you can’t make meaning from your understanding of the logic that you are applying; rather you are trusting logic based on the rules that make it true which are not actually procured through rules but rather the virtue we put in the belief of those rules (the faith we put in rules). Godel’s discovery paved the way for mathematicians to feel more inclined, and comfortable with unprovable statements. Allowing uncertainty of answer to be a much greater variable outside of an equation for understanding complex problems. In 1931 he became the founder of theoretical computer science, introducing the first universal coding language based on natural numbers. He used this language to represent both data and programs to prove the limitation not only of computing therefore after, but also now the potential of artificial intelligence today with incompleteness.

As humans, we are agitated and uncomfortable with incompleteness. It can greatly challenge our psyche, our emotions and our understanding, where our urge to force logic becomes innate to what we are experiencing. Photography is a language or way of knowing hope, precisely because it allows incompleteness to not have those same attributes or feelings. It is a language in which uncertainty is accepted and beautiful. Photographers don’t think from the place of binary of what is real, inefficient, or incomplete, but rather a collective consciousness and relation to what they are seeing, that is pulling them. Valentine is a delicate photographer, not an impulsive one. He found his comprehension and visual voice through the uncertainty he faced with repurposing death. Like air, its presence constantly surrounds us. Much like the composition of the air we breathe, there're many components that make up what we are inhaling. The same can be said about death, there are many emotions we can be experiencing. When we iterate on them, when we hold spaces for them, we can begin to approach it with a level of seriousness. When we are least lovable, raw, and hurt, when all we can acknowledge is to trust in moving forward. An opinion encapsulated and reverberated by American poet Aja Monet, in her poem; There Is Another Way, “before a movement happens it is first imagined summoned by the elsewhere, a truthful tone seen a new way, a God thundering in the mind, visions remembered”. This is what Valentine did, he created a boundary for us to see and exhale slowly watching the beauty in our breath in a new way. The breath that we are blessed to still take and the breath we see others can no longer take. His work continuously teaches me what it means to be alive and full as a Black man. Whereby vulnerability doesn’t escape from the edges of his compositions. 

1950–1965 was the defining time of the American Civil Rights Movement. As a participant and observer of this struggle for racial equality, Bruce Davidson, a young photographer who attended Rochester Institute of Technology, chronicled the demonstrations, and the social and political atmosphere that arose out of the conflict in New York and other cities. It was also a period where a small gospel quartet called the Isley Brothers would wander into New York to form a band to make a record that would drastically change the trajectory of the Beatles’ musical career and their own. No other band has reinvented its sound and itself and has been successful, to this day in doing so like the Isley Brothers. Recruiting Jimi Hendrix, one of the most prolific guitar players as a backup. As Ernie Isley was the lead guitarist and for good reasons. a self-taught musician, his first professional recording was playing bass on the Isley Brothers' breakthrough funk “ It’s Your Thing” released in 1969. In 1977 Ernie would write and compose the chords for a groovy and solemn soulful song sung by the smooth voice of Ronald Isley, for a ballad that will forever send goosebumps and stop time for me, titled “Footsteps In The Dark ''. The song’s lyrics focus on the uncertainty of relationships, and the need to take responsibility for oneself and make sure one is making the right choices, whereas the idea and themes of the song are “distractions”. This evidently very much echoes our current relationship with time now. Time has become such a valuable commodity that it is now culturally ingrained in platforms and their performance metrics, our time is their attention. Where the companies we engage with for our leisure and time, spend millions to keep us on their platforms robbing us of our precious time and creating distractions in screen size addictions. Whereas the complete opposite happens with a photograph, the mere act of its dance is to stop time, to pause a moment. Those paused moments allow us to understand our own behaviors and heal our trauma and wounds with communication. We build our hearts, even the hurt ones, the closed ones, through the movement and gestures of others. Where words fail us we find instead earnestness through how we move through space to interpret one another. The contribution of Paul Emanuel Byers, an amateur photographer, illuminated this hidden speech we have with our bodies during the infancy of behavior science to adapt photos and to look at behavior in this way. An undergraduate dropout from the University of Chicago during World War II, later joined the Navy as an expert in cryptanalysis, breaking encrypted code. Byers would become a scholar of human behavior using sequential still photography to isolate the instants and reconstruct the patterns of movement. He would publish later in 1977 two articles regarding the ethics of still photography and anthropology: “Cameras don’t take pictures” and “Still Photography in the systematic recording and Analysis of behavioral data”. His collaboration with other profound scholars would draw on dissecting human gestures and movements to show relationships, among colleagues, individuals and social dynamics, allowing group-level behaviors to be predicted and understood.

All of this was accomplished through the constant pausing of time. Before Byer came across these characteristics through his research he first witnessed them as a commercial photographer of family portraits. Early on he saw the nature of family systems and how much they reflected organisms, whose members give and receive signals, whereas for us through the nonverbal cues. We form relationships by understanding the distance and meaning of these gestures through the development of our visual system, that in turn helps us affirm our culture. When we are born our visual system is not fully developed yet, it is still trying to bring scattered information together, and that is why mothers are encouraged to talk to their children after pregnancy. It isn’t until around five months that our eyes gain the capability to form a three dimensional view of the world and begin to see in depth. The retina in our eyes contains millions and millions of photoreceptors that sense and absorb the light, transforming it into electrochemical energy that neurons use and communicate back to the brain. Within two years our visual system helps us understand who cares for us, our language, and the patterns and dynamics within our family, our eyes become our photo album. As we grow older we keep photos of those we care about because we want them near us, we want to remember the moments we had with them. When I was born my father was a military doctor in Somalia, I keep a photo of him wearing his uniform hidden on my phone that I sometimes look at to ground me in moments I find discomfort. The relationship I have with my father is not the same for my older sister Ebyan, it took an innocent photo to show me that. Our father arrived in Canada in the late 90s, we were separated from him for almost six years. During my adolescence, I was oblivious to their fragmented relationship between them. Growing up she was always remote from the family but I equated that with her ambitious spirit and desires. She was much different than all of my other sisters. When I confronted her regarding her relationship with our father I did so with disapproval and closed off her own experience. Unsure and scared of what information I would learn nor having the skills to communicate how this would affect me and the perception I had of my father, I ignored asking her again. Now with her own daughter, I revisited what was ultimately the cause of the tension in her relationship with him. “I’m the black sheep, I’m not like the other three, I know that” She shares with me. Ebyan’s relationship with our father was nonexistent growing up she explains that during this time she was a teenager and was in her rebellion stage. My father was trying to assert his authority in her life. As a parent, she learned what that experience was like with her own daughter, although she has new knowledge in approaching similar problems. She is also nervous and afraid of her daughter becoming a teenager. As a divorced mother, she is aware of the ingredients that cause a rupture in a relationship and is deeply aware of the current disconnect her daughter is displaying subconsciously for her father. But she is young and children at that early age of their life, just like my sister need their father to make time for them and to be present. On my phone, I have a specific folder of images of her daughter and a separate folder for images that she has taken on my phone. Often times I find some surprising photos that she takes that help me cope with my emotions, I use images of her almost like a compass guiding my feelings. She is very dear to me. When she was born I was descending into depression. I had no head space to care, but like most children born, your emotions don’t matter to them and their problems become your problems. You learn to love, you learn to forgive and you learn what the mystical power of curiosity is like on a young mind. You learn to cherish it, you learn to encourage it and to photograph their small wins, one milestone at a time.  

Photographs meet us where we are, some have different effects on different people. Cozy can be claustrophobic, open can be overwhelming, and dark can be intimidating. It is hard to escape what they can do to us, what they can communicate to us, our environment’s disarray, what they can help us remember, losing a significant amount of weight and what they can teach us throughout our life, our starting points. This is why contemporary photographer Andre Wagner, who moved to New York to obtain a master's in social work but instead diverted to hone into the craft of image making doesn’t hesitate to give it human-like traits. When describing it, when talking about it, when engaging with its creation, it is a living thing and a story to be unraveled. The Nazis in World War II also knew of its brilliance early on and tried to manipulate and control the images that were shaping the opinions and perceptions of the war. They wanted to ensure that the ideas and experiences would be accumulated through their views, nothing else matter. Their obsession with visual aesthetics was not a strategy for covering up their atrocious ethnic cleansing and war crimes but rather Hilter’s vision for a new Germany. A failed painter and artist who reached a pinnacle of power through photographic aesthetics and aggressive communication. To make a strong plea Hilter would work with a photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, and with his assistance, Hilter would practice his gesture, his posture and his appearance to allure stronger attention when he spoke. Through the camera he perfected its performance, each movement, each composure meant to get a message across. Frederic Spotts's book carefully investigates Hitler's keen interest in analyzing images and art; Hitler And Power Of Aesthetics, which brings to light and demonstrates even as a dictator Hitler was very much a steward and a pursuer of artistic vision for new visual culture for Germany. His motivation was as intense as racism. The Nazi’s greed and dependence on optics allowed a manufacturer of a microscope company to pioneer a portable lightweight medium format mirrorless camera called Leica, producing special additions to the German Airforce and the Army. Some of the most extraordinary photographs from World War II were those taken by German soldiers. Precisely because they did not try to disguise their horrific tyranny, their disregard for life and their violations of the human fletch. We think regularly and are reminded about the death camps, and the gas chambers, that we unmistakenly will the erasure of the processes and continuation of the experiences of the deep humiliation, and degradation that occurs before these crimes are committed. Before these victims reach these death facilities and concentration camps. These photographs captured the important small details through that lineage, a timeline and the evidence, that would be crucial to reveal to the world human ugliness and its use of violence. Other photographs of soldiers reveal what it feels like to be an outcast from Nazis ideologies having drag shows in camps, writing poems on the battlefield and even pretending to orchestrate a play.  Some German collectors after the war even possess photos of male prostitutes. Dr. Jennifer Evans, Professor of the Department of History at Carleton University, was able to see a negative of one (a tonally reversed image on film used in the process of developing the final picture). An image by Herbert Tobias, she thought she understood. Having access to the non-reproduction of an image of a boy prostitute in West Berlin 1950. Witnessing its original, changed her first impression and ultimately how she interpreted the boy. Photography opens the door for us to think differently while also giving us the distance to disarm our thoughts. These images are as much a teacher as they are pixels and are capable to push us to our demise just like the disruptive nature of Ai. This is what we do as humans we find yearning in little places, and we find community in the shadows of despair. Because we know at any moment letting go of hope is much more frightening. At the root of our untangling state of mind and psychology, we know the inkling possibility at a split moment through our experience we can be influenced, and triggered, to hate people, to have a prejudice for their hardship, to lack compassion and to question their intelligence. We don’t need to look far, then what Oprah Winfrey proved gracefully in 1992, her conversation from the identification of audiences’ eye color. From the start of her monologue to the introduction of her guess Jane Elliott, teacher and researcher, it takes approximately 2 minutes 50 seconds for one female audience to stand up wearing a light brown dress coat and black top on the brown eye side, to come to the conclusion and deem the intelligence of the blue eye people unworthy and stupid, using anecdotal experience to justify her point. This is Elliott’s main argument for the episode but for primary different and experimental reasons.

The problems we face are not generative, in life what we do, how we feel and the way we think isn’t always consistent but they are of real substance. We cry about them, we sweat about them and we internalize them. We are vastly approaching an era where we will no longer hold the podium for intellectual cognition but our intelligence lies elsewhere and so do those we have discarded, perhaps we can begin to nurture and care for intelligence we have mistreated and misinterpreted with this misfortune. To begin to honor them in new ways. A photograph is not trying to compete with our intelligence, it is already far more superior. It is simply helping us be more at one with nature, more at one with our thoughts, more at one with what we want to see in ourselves, hope.