Speaking Photography

Tanks and Barracks. Antarctica – February, 2007
Hasselblad H2 with 35mm lens and Phase One P45 back. ISO 100
The ruins of a whaling station at Gritviken, South Georgia island.
I saw a documentary on TV a while ago about a remote tribe found upriver on the Amazon in the 1960's. They had had little to no prior exposure to the outside world, and when a documentary film crew arrived at their village for the second time in a year, with footage shot during their previous visit, the crew set up a movie projector running off a portable generator and showed them the film.
The point of the anecdote is that none of the tribes people could at first understand what they were seeing. They had no experience of seeing flat two dimensional representations of realty. Their culture had no experience with painting, and not even drawing existed in their society. So, when shown the film they simply could not figure out what it was they were looking at. It was light and colour and shapes and patterns,...