BURNING WEATHER, CLEAR VISION, USEFUL PHOTOGRAPHS

As this burning weather continues
we must insist that the current Neoliberal plutocracy¹,
including all complicit million and billionaire fossil fuel tycoons
retreat into a dark space
(perhaps the cages where they are keeping children near the Mexican border)
leaving us to heal the dying earth and our troubled brothers and sisters
in Ukraine, Gaza, Somalia, Iran and and and…
and those others of all hues, places and beliefs,
in their troubled silences,
as they and we await insects to hum and birds to sing again.

Or will we allow the Neoliberals to continue burning our forests,
to again scar our earth with their toxins,
to continue to carve away our mountain tops
and to starve our children and slaughter other’s children
while we play into distraction with their AI trinkets?

Soon, when this boiling phase becomes,
with the help of the media,
the new normal,
we may discover sufficient wisdom to seek a crack in our Western Civilisation,
that crack, as Leonard Cohen wrote,
“where the light gets in”,
when we will truly witness and bid farewell to present cruelty.
This will allow the best of our souls to become mentors of kindness
– willing to say,
for the sake of our planet and for our civilization,
“we the people will determine all economic, political, social and cultural life
from a point of view which replaces wealth with fairness,
inequality with justice
hatred with love”.

Without these changes we will continue to live in unresolved sorrow and isolation,
surviving in the on-going Neoliberal/totalitarian climate-hell.
This will be midnight in the Holocene,²
when we will have extinguished the next dawn in our children’s eyes
before any meaningful life could be reprieved.

What is the unspoken promise
few of us can intrude into our long silence?
Do we wait to see if wise people and potential leaders
offer us profound changes to our broken moral compass?
Surely, in the 21st century, it is no longer God, Yahweh or Allah.
It must be, before all other measures: ‘human kindness’.

The British philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, (1909-1997)
wrote that within a democracy,
for social freedom and personal liberty to exist,
so must pluralism³
– the theory that reality contains more than one credible set of truths
that may, in peaceful discussions, strive for dominance.

It also means that one must choose between negative freedom –
in which the weak and poor are protected by laws written to discourage
the strongest in the room from dominating with force,
rather than positive freedom in which the strongest may do what they wish
to increase their power and wealth.

Within a

Totalitarian and neoliberal brain washing
(and also the perpetuation of wars, terror and poverty)
destroy individual’s ability to imagine change.

These impositions reduce our capacity to be fully human
and therefore to be fully free.
The psychic exhaustion from terror or poverty,
defeats the imagination.
This could be why we have witnessed
the inability of long-term impoverished individuals
to not be willing to participate in their own potential freedom.
They have become victims to their own submission.
And this is why so many young people become nihilists.

All the above help to set out for me why and what I hold dear
as one of my goals when using a camera
to make the invisible powers and wealth become visible to others.

Neoliberal politicians, journalists and bureaucrats
do all they can to keep invisible behind thick propaganda curtains
the unjust, unfair exploitative conditions they create.
This is so we capitulate to their myths
which tell us over and over
living in a world of vulgar material consumerism,
exploitation by wage slavery,
believing, in our hollowed out lives,
they offer the only true path to happiness.

For photographers to understand how to use their images
and indeed what images they may make,
they need to think more about their power and role in society
in regard to continually offering other ways to imagine hope for a better world.

One of these ways is to understand that producing work
that offers individuals a glimmer into the validity of their pain, loves, kindness
and perhaps their reasons to exist and to hope,
is a way to embrace the souls of other suffering people.

My Substack essays feed directly into my new website:

Over the years I’ve read about the work of photographers and film-makers,
about painters and poets,
and about aesthetics and the politics of art.
I have taken notes, written essays and taught a small number of people,
always looking for better ways to expose them
to the profound underpinnings of their concerns.
This is to help them access what’s important
and to unite these things with who they are
because that is what makes wonderful images.
The first 3 of 12 films have been released along with an instructive manual
and numerous other essays, talks and Q%As to be announced soon.

You can access the website for free by tabbing the logo above….

Robert

A viewers comment:

“Your film is gorgeous, wise, compelling. I liked very much the humanity, the care for others, and you as an agent of change. I am very interested in this question of transformation – how can we use words, images, creativity to change people’s sense of agency. To get them across the threshold, to set them on a path?”
PROFESSOR J.P

Plutocracy¹ the rule of a few wealthy people over many

Holocene,² relating to or denoting the present historical epoch, which is the second epoch in the Quaternary period.

Pluralism/³ is a way of thinking and living in which many different groups, beliefs and ideas live together in peace. It means people with different religions, cultures, or political views respect each other and share power instead of trying to make everyone the same.