Don't take it literally folks, your cranium is perfectly safe in my hands, that doesn't sound right anyway, I do always seem to drift from deep water to doggy doo doo when it comes to metaphor. Anyway, I've found a couple of funtographers on Flickr today, they use the art of photography for precisely the right reason, in my opinion the best and only reason, and that is to mess with your head. Play around with the lies that the brain juggles with to approximate the visual reality you see around you.

Perspective for instance, or colour even. Anyone with a modicum of knowledge about light and optics knows that in fact that nothing around us has a colour, it is for the main part the light reflected by objects and in certain cases transmitted that our retinae receive as wavelengths, our brains decipher this information and with a grounding of nurtured observational language we can associate the object in question with a word. The truth is our reality is little more than a collection of unidentifiable grey shapes, each layered imperceptibly over more objects, structures and spaces which are only queued by our visual cortex through the slimmest of clues, shadow formations, converging light and focus.

Anyway, back to the point. I am going to crush your head…

I'm rather fussy when it comes to photography, I like the old guard (sometimes the really old guard), Man Ray, Henri Cartier – Bresson, Weegee, Diane Arbus and Cindy Sherman but my reasons are many and multiplicative. What I do know is that history wears down the imagination, we live in a limited space and we as a race seem to, for all our technological leaps, hit a brick wall when it comes to anything approximating an evolutionary jump in perception, either physically or philosophically. With food, water and space running out, there isn't much time for the masses to stand back and evaluate our existence these days, unless it's inspired by a little bible bashing or the cult of the celebrity. The fact is the photographers I appreciate are equivalent to mountain climbers in their genre, they go there first, they did it first, they planted their flags first. They are only a slice of the innovation pie I know, but I have a personally charged connection with many of their works, as I have with many paintings and movies. Photography is generally higher up on my perceptually pleasing list than say sculpture, though the grandest sculptural works, when encountered in the flesh, loom over even the most powerful of photographs. But when it comes to image, photography has made its impression on me over the years.

I suffer from a lack of depth of perception, it's a little like living in a camera, or rather having a camera lens as an eye, it's clinical, it's tempered by logic, and it takes imagination to pick out the highlights and lowlights of any scene in order to understand it fully. The process is near immediate now, I familiarise my surroundings, I can measure near objects, angles, and far horizons sufficiently to not notice the irregularities of my often synaesthetic mind. I use sound to judge distance more than most, asides those who are partially sighted or blind. But on the upside, it helps me appreciate all the more the work of these two charactes displaying their wares at Flickr. They are Jason E. Powell and Michael Hughes. Both masters of illusion and punch drunk heavyweight fighters for the reality afflicted. If you're somewhat dubious of your reality, if you have a habit of throwing a double take once in a while, if you glance at the world with peripheral vision from time to time, you should like these two.

Jason E. Powell – Looking into the Past

Looking Into the Past- Union Station Square, Washington, DC

Looking Into the Past- Leader Theater, 9th Street, Washington, DC

Looking Into the Past- Carvel Hall, Annapolis, MD

Looking Into the Past- Boy Scouts, US Capitol, Washington, DC

Michael Hughes – Souvenirs

Rio de Janeiro

Cadillac Ranch, Amarillo

Statue of Liberty

Eiffel Tower.

Anyway keep an eye out, reality does have a habit of giving up on ya when you least expect it

This post is tagged funtographers, illusion, perspective, photography, surrealism, trompe l'oeil