seen

'Taking the visual world in is a process of loss: learning to see is training careful blindness. To apprehend and recognize the visible is to eliminate as well as absorb visual data. Just as surely as representational technologies—the camera, the canvas, the theatrical frame, language itself—order visual apprehension to accord with a (constructed) notion of the real so too do human eyes.'

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost: 101

A girl was recently murdered in London walking home from the train station. It prompted protests and vigils for a while but was soon muted out in the humdrum of daily global news. Another murder, another missing girl, a trapped hostage in a home. Instances calling attention to what it means to inhabit a certain body in the world. A body like mine. How easily it can be overpowered, co-opted. Our bodies do not belong to us but to the shadowed figures that leer from doorways at night time. To those traces of hands on flesh that weren’t invited. When watching this news online, porn ads pop up repeatedly in ringing reminders. This is the danger of being seen.

With the mediated nature of representation and dispersed subjectivity of the current moment, all we ever see are veneers. With filters on every image and the rise of AI assisted films, it is increasingly difficult to garner the real from the fake. The seen from the synthetic.

Ideas around representation fail because what is seen is never real. A camera is not a objective tool but rather based on the subjective perception of the human eye.

'The camera, modeled on the human eye, reproduces the (faulty) sight of the eye. Together, the eye and the camera, in mimetic correspondence, naturalize the visible real by turning it into something “seen.”