packaging may be one hell of an important thing...
but somehow I can’t help feeling annoyed by this...
and talk about annoyed...you should have seen the scowl the lady behind the deli counter gave me when I took this photo...
it’s like she was reading my mind...
but just now I remembered seeing Rauschenberg’s Coca Cola Plan for the first time...and realizing that he was doing (among other things) some very valuable, albeit subversive, deconstructing of advertising and packaging....
so...I didn’t take this photo because I wanted to be like Bob...
Robert Rauschenberg simply had a unique talent and genius for actually seeing what was right in front of him, and eloquently exposing the emperor’s new clothes....
I took it because I felt compelled...
Because somehow I always need to point at what I see in order to acknowledge anything and everything that feels important...
And what I was seeing here was something parading around in pathos...
so in my struggle to point out that somewhat gut-wrenching pathos, I tried (as I always do) putting a frame around it...
but don’t think I understood this at the time...
I was only annoyed...and acting somewhat sarcastically with my camera lens...
so of course that deli lady was miffed...
but I also know that I sometimes see clearly only after I've separated the image from its surroundings...
and that lady’s annoyance was only mirroring my own...
so maybe that’s one use of photography...
something I could probably call alchemy...
seeing clearly enough to turn my own ignorant annoyance into something much more valuable...
like empathy...
and that, for sure, is why it felt so fucking important...
