Statement of Intent

 Think, Victoreen Geiger Counter Company, Cleveland (2010) 

In one word, the IMG, can state RealStill’s intent – THINK, and READ as well. The Intellectual Graffiti Movement that began in Cleveland in 1967, is still an active force in reminding locals of matters that might be forgotten.

Read, Abandoned Docks of the Upson Nut & Bolt Company, (2009)

 

Whatabouit, Detroit Superior Bridge, Cleveland (1975)

The RealStill archive contains Intellectual Graffiti dating back to the seventies including “Vermont is for old people” and the classic utterance, “Whataboutit” – that dates back to the Viet Nam era, before tagging became a school.

Of course, we’ve got that little problem with intentions and the world  Nevertheless, ain’t that about it? I’m going to begin and end with this. There is no story here. When I hear the word narrative, I immediately think of something false. It’s been mighty episodic though. No living thing ever had a say in their birth and who their family would be, let alone, their race, gender, religion and all that. I lucked out, my originator’s priorities revolved around death and life, falsehood and truth. What’s in your blood can’t be helped. That’s fact and no complaint. 

Overall? 20,00 years ago, the place i live was under one mile deep ice. Soon we will no longer have to wait for annihalation.

View. Think. Read, Intuition. Undersatand by living. Realize. Self-actualize.

   “RealStill – the site for everyone and no one.”- F.N.“

I’m a blue-collar worker…I’m nobody, and I’m everybody,” – Michael Dilorenzo

“The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.” – T.A.

PREFACE

I never waste time on the distraction of “being understood” particularly when i can prove so much. RealStill, intellectually, is rated X. I don’t care about your level of agreement or not, but the level of understanding, that a fool is incapable of.

To explain my “art” that has nothing to do with the business of the art world or the art world itself. Amongst many things, it ends with me returning to the folks, places and things i represent, and giving them their pictures, and/or giving them my best prints of my best work, to brighten their lives, not in a gallery. It costs a lot, anyways, doing this picture work, alone, and providing free pictures means more work to get the money to do that, but, no money is made from my work, and, like much of what i shoot, there is only loss, including tons of money that i gotta earn, to document in a skilled way, that folks might remember. There is no currency, for me, in fame, celebtity or the Name, although that’s the only way to have the work be seen and have your work remembered.

This is not media, it’s a medium. I operate the camera and command it to work in a mix of empathy and objectivity. That’s my thing. To refine things down to a single image wa never my intent. Cinema, the moving image was my intent, lost since the early 1990s.

It’s not what is so obvious, that “change is the constant” it’s more accurate to say, never have things changed so much, so quickly and that is speeding up as we make machines that are brainier than us and adept. Meanwhile, before an asteroid collision, or the possibilty of war, or emerging new viruses, our smallest and most feared enemy, we have culture.

A site for everyone and for no one, too art for documentary, too documentary for art, and too real for its own good.

It’s the will to make a still, real. And RealStill is the post-facto philosophy of a source artist.

The will to realstillcodev.wpenginepowered, what a joke – the still, as a purely visual language, is silent, no smell, and no taste, and, one of my few pleasures with it, was supposed to be silence – not speaking, explaining or writing about what should be simply sensed visually, and, with a documentary, realistic base shouldn’t be very necessary. I’m a damn source artist in the time of the lost source, and, i’ve never been so compelled to do what i didn’t set out to do – explain.

Robbed intentions, is the other fact of life, and no matter what the intention and commitment, the image ends up in a viewer’s mind, and that’s it. It’s just that, after postmod thought and deconstruction, we are in a time of social schizophrenia, when the documentary footage that was intended to provide absolute proof of something and its occurrence and existence, is flipped, in a mental operation, into its antipode – that, in fact, it’s only proof of a fraud – from the U. S. moon landing to the Sandy Hook Massacre and so much of what we saw in the year, 2020.

It shouldn’t be explainable, that’s why i got into it in the first place, to avoid discussions, by creating proof, but with subjectivity dominating and misinformation rising crazily, the walking schizophrenia of our times, i’m motivated to speak about it, even though, it’s futile. The picture eliminates the use of a thousand words of description, and a few other things – atmosphere and description are physically there, and the power of editing makes it all seem like visual music, giving photography its power, to connect with areas of the mind that only cultural paraphenelia have the ability to do.

Intention matters less than ever, especially today, when the documentary footage that was shot to record something that really happened, is flipped, by a purely mental and emotional process, into its opposite – that it’s proof that something never happened, or was staged to happen. Alternative or faith-based facts is just the kind of thing RealStill stands against, but realizes any effort to shore up intentions is a waste of time, a literary and photographic humiliation and, as Adorno said, a suicide. In these times, in particular, but, ironically, going back over forty years ago when not just critics, but artists, began to believe too strongly in the fiction of images, and played with that thought for a long time.

So if it’s an art, RealStill is the art of existence and its avowed realism is social, critical, caustic, sarcastic, aesthetic, or combinations of that, it’s based in experiencing whatever i represent, and, as Mr. Williams famously said, RealStill has “no ideas but in things.” It’s the aesthetics of experience.

I’ve done my job and done it well by leaving thousands of real (lived) pictures as my trace, but pictures are consumed by minds, often with no experience in the subject, and will become something unintended whether it’s liked or not, and, whether, RealStill, the creator and intender likes it or not. A small example is the Republican habit of appropriating pop songs as their theme, even while the musicians who created it, absolutely disagree on all levels with its use, which is one of both theft and flipping into exactly what it is against.

Thou shalt not misinform, there is harm to be done in untruth, and to misinform, scales bull shit to unprecedented levels. Intent is important, but has become impotent, in the face of flipped intentions leaving only sarcasm as a method to express the truth.

Having the long view, an asteroid, as time passes, increases its chances of slamming civilization, its collections and artifacts, as well as, its life, in the long run, in a clock that’s ticking, and, in the short-term, novel viruses, the flip of an asteroid’s size, and misinformation that could ruin us, is the clearer present danger.

Elon Musk, his hipster wife and son, X Æ A-12, might have the ultimate insider’s eye, and, while people are yapping about Bill Gates putting a computer chip in his vaccine, today’s tech people, so far inside technology right now, younger and still working in the tech business, have a greater hand in affecting, even changing your life, without asking, or submitting, at a minimum, an application to create a social network, let alone tracking and collecting your most private information and selling it? They’ve been tracking you all along for the last 15 years, and they know you better than yourself. The computers today are smarter than any human is, or will ever be. Mr. Musk revels in it. The man has a sick sense of humor, you know, and the sense of the future.

Beginning in 1989, i went under, one of the reasons was robbed intentions, miscommunication in the very field and institutions of communication. When i came up briefly, it was far worse. Gross cultivation of individuality has left everyone in a world of their own and right-wing versions of deconstruction like conspiracy theory, sounds like another academic course on the myth of photographic truth, has led to the gross proliferation of misinformation. Ten years ago it was ten percent, now twenty per cent of Americans believe a host of wide-ranging documented historical events are staged. From the moon landings to George Floyd’s murder, the actual documentary footage that records actual events to prove they happened is flipped by a belief in faith-based facts or politically based, that, in fact, are completely unreal. Intentions? Why would anyone make real pictures anymore? First, in the art world, and now with social media, a constructed individual performance has taken both precedent and value over truth.

Social change is about performance or showing, even, statues, praying, or asking for it, but only unity/action changes things. More about that another time.

To be clear there are a few big stand-alone truths, but usually, whenever i say, truth, it’s as a debunking. RealStill is only source work and stands against remakes, reinvention and flipping. As source work it’s entirely experiential and, thus, real. This is mostly about the complete expansion of virtuality brought on by the computer-driven world, now in the first phase of introducing true A.I., burying the Source, and rendering our senses useless. It’s no accident that it’s occurring during the Great Era of the Lie. Truth, warmth, soul, connection continues its decline from reinvention and disruption, the dominant cultural philosophy for a long time now.

All this in a time of extreme ubiquitous lies and disinformation, led by the biggest liar in the history of civilization, and that was before he told the single biggest most damging lie ever told, about voter fraud, that, alone, would be enough to call him out as the biggest bull shitter of all time. And his voice and platform, he calls truth social. Intent? In this sea of lies?

INTENT      

Completely realist, but only as a starting point. If ideas are not tied to things, they become free-floating concepts, ungrounded. The style, when satirical or caustic is gonzo-sober. Selfless in a world of self-promotion. The intent is both soul and truth, and, since it’s an object, at a minimum, i possess the physical truth to things, if not more.

Let’s begin by recognizing, amongst millons of things, that the two most influential events of anyone’s life is not done by their intention. Birth and death – one decided by parents who may or may not have intended it, the other, by its nature, is not usually intended by the self, but can, through suicide and murder, be brought about. What we do have control over to a large degree is what our response to that fact will be. What we do and how it’s done – the way we spend our time between our births and deaths. Beyond that i’ve found human living intention to be futile. I think Adorno said it best – “The great joke of our time is the suicide of intention.” – our times are what makes aims less worthy and meaning robbed, even as media technology can produce clarity depending on the operator and director, but is so often used to confuse, disrupt, trivialize, and, ironically, further mythologize the world possibley worse than the ancients with the Big Liar Trump, as one of a million examples.

A mission statement seems so highfalutin. And, like i said, just look at the pictures. Intent? Soul. End of statement.

Intent? This site is more a last will, a testament and, more than intent, the will to RealStill, whose work is captured on actual missions, and, every move is motivated by intention, at least to start, while keeping the mind open to the random moment and chance just as much. The discomfort with mission statements, has nothing to do with this site, it’s due to the proliferation of sites whose mission is on the level of selling cupcakes or that of self-expressing careerists, or media supported by ads, the worst, the conspiracists or just good old self-expression and sales, and that is most of the net. But, in this site, make no mistake, every mission is initially intended, and what follows is for all intents and purposes. Developed over a forty-six year period of shooting that is ongoing, a philosophy, the intention, propels RealStill’s mission, which is execution of the assignment. What’s intended, the unconscious pretext to RealStill, is easily transcribed if not directly seen in the image:

Pictures, like aphorisms, can trap and provide a  brief hit of an undeniable truth about our existence and human nature. Strung together they make books. Photographic pictures don’t need help outside themselves, but, in order to communicate my point, a picture is not a novel, feature documentary, movie or book of non-fiction. It’s more like a painting or aphoristic writing, as art. Aphoristic hits have only intrinsic value – they’re part of what’s real, and are purely experiential as in, the ironic statement after viewing truth, “Yeah, but what do people realy think and do?

People. RealStill has many, but these pictures are treated with some discretion, respecting trust, privacy and specificity, by virtue of, sometimes, complete participation, and always a connection. Slowly these will roll out. Sometimes, RealStill waits for a person’s passing before exposing it to the public. But don’t expect me to spill the beans on the most public platform ever seen. Landscapes, too, but they allow a lot more viewer subjectivity to pour in – the empty vessel effect – where the viewer can see more of what they believe and intention, that is mine, or my subjects, is more easily ignored. People shots, captioned, lived out, are too specific and full of solids for gross speculation. For shooting, the landscapes offer great freedom, but portraits require compromise, and, if you’re an honorable shooter, there’s a lot more give to the give and take. If you want to portray someone, as an example of an opposing group or ideology, perhaps someone who disgusts, but you still have to get close.

Another thing about landscapes particularly depicting entire cities, regions or neighborhoods, there is no “narrative” as everyone in the institutions of art, politics and law talks today. That’s precisely what i enjoy about spending my limited amount of time on earth, portraying cities – there’s no damn story, i show up and inject myself into a city’s history for a relatively short time in that city’s history. That’s all it is, thank god. Shootin cities is freedom, pure freedom without permissions. Shooting what’s real is mastering that chaos and unpredictability of the living city, not jamming it into a narrative always outside itself. Yeah, all organisms have a beginning and end, but few cities, and, where is the middle point of the city “story” that, by its own nature, will usually, always be unknown.

And natural landscapes provide the ultimate in freedom and fresh air, alone in a vast landscape, as a speck.

Up until this time, these pictures were only seen in the homes of RealStill’s subjects because those involved always get their prints – portraits, landscapes, architecture what they call home, and represent in their pictures. It’s a two-way thing. Reciprocation, seldom seen in art and media, has meant the distribution of many thousands of prints, looped in the real, my subjects become my only audience.

RealStill’s money is where its mouth is, and believes what it sees, (senses), not the other way around. No school, no model, and no baloney. Not trained. Experience, the most effective teacher of what’s ingrained through actions, and what bestows such intrinsic worth, not market worth, on RealStill’s production.

As we age and lose our memories and grip on life, all this matters less. While the mind is strong we can’t stop it from mattering. About the only thing of any good I could say about the aging mind is, there’s a bunch of things i’d like to forget. We would fight to keep our memories, if we knew we would lose them because without recollection, life is completely diminished, and what is sensory perception without it?

“The realists do not take the photograph for a ‘copy’ of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.” – Roland Barthes

“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.” – Albert Einstein

“Time discovers truth.” – Seneca

RealStill is photography. RealStill, then, is very much about time.

RealStill crawled out of its whole, and, logically, it’s never changed as a self-taught, no school and source-hungry way of perceiving the existent world. The philosophy that emerges from the work of a source artist. With a mind on how accurately it will be looked back on in the future, while never denying the immediate pleasure of the image. RealStill aims to embed an electronic presence of something lost, or worthwhile in the viewer’s temporal lobe, where i have no say.

No quid pro quo here. It’s a no-commerce site, nor a self-promotion site, there’s not even a self to promote. Trust me, going to the source isn’t about sharing either. That’s the danger. Show some respect while here. These aren’t postings, temporary and trifling, on the internet, where things are consumed like candy. That’s the given, just reminding folks that’s very unlike their capture.

RealStill cares nothing for sharing, but has no choice. With expression, which is a bunch of people or an individual discharging solid and gaseous waste products in a closed room, RealStill chooses communication, mostly about the possibility of existence. RealStill cares nothing for expression, or the modern monads whose only passion is for the self.

To this day, declarative memory, memory stated, is best done by a camera. That is RealStill’s starting point technically. RealStill ignores as much mediation as possible, and is not a story, but the world of the story. It’s the landscape of history before the story because it’s immediate and concentrates on the elemental. Pure memory before the tale of it. The component before the ideology of the component. The time to appropriately ask a man fighting a battle, what he feels, knows and has experienced about the situation, is after the war.

RealStill is not art. There’s conjuring, but it’s tied, not to photographic opportunity, a career, commerce or expression, but everyday existence within certain events and at certain times. Hilda Becher can be seen on youtube stating that what she and her husband did is not art, but photography. RealStill, for its own reasons is in complete agreement even before the age of youtube – that would be 1977, the year i began to take serious, taking/making pictures.

Photography, like language, is innate, and, since understood by everybody, even more so than language, realistic pictures have vernacular roots, and anyone can immediately understand that a picture of a bird is a bird. Initially celebrated by the art world, making art from reality, even the brutal and ugly, has been downgraded with a few exceptions.

Photography as art or art as photography, with the expansion of the art industry, the time was right to make photography-based work function and be on the same level as every other big time art. Of course, there are a lot of other factors here, one of which is that artist aren’t particularly world-oriented anymore. Much of their work takes place between four walls, a ceiling, and a floor. And, although the image inside the artist head could’ve began in the actual world, it’s now being worked on and is a mental operation in the studio.

RealStill, is often recognized as art, by ignoring its own stated intention. RealStill wants recognition as truth, not art in order to be (my idea of) art, but neither art nor RealStill, I think, believe that equation as being possible. Even JZ, the pop star’s pop star said, after not getting a 2018 grammy in eight nominations, “It’s art, and all art is subjective.” Yeah, he’s right. Art ain’t about truth. What institution is?

And who does not will things? Ding an sich. The object that has no will or desire attached to it, is seen clearly and for what it is.

Today art may have become cool, hip, clever and smart, and a career to boot, not to mention a type of economic engine tied to the destruction of blue-collar neighborhoods, but i’m not sure of its intention. Whatever it is, it’s not mine. RealStill is based in experience. That alone is pretty much outside the realm of art. If art were truthful it would have to discount itself. Art is equally unconcerned with character. That’s true, generally agreed upon, but nothing stops it, certainly not its critique. One deals with it, though.

The larger picture of art – as commerce, partnered with real estate and finance especially on the high end – is jolting. Ivy league trained or not, it’s a career, complete with new models and worse – a life style. Colonizing artists in blue-collar neighborhoods are seen literally as an invasive species by the natives – because they are. It’s monumental damage by colonialists. From days of rust to the day of the smart, healthy-wealthy locusts busy turning our long-suffering cities upside down, leaving the urban WCA with head trauma.

The “creative class” that comprises the entire cultural life and institutions of the city, the class that has been deemed the great white hope for the declining city neighborhood, obviously are not going to give voice to the horrors of being displaced from your home, by the “creative class.” That ambitious class unintentionally displaces by their uncontrolled reinvention of the city – in their image, from elsewhere, now here.

The amount of pretending we have to do in the face of universal farce, is absurd. That is if forced pretending revolts you. So, at least, in the midst of all the bloated suffocating baloney, there’s a place that can unconsciously prove it, by turning its back on it, and all the other nonsense of vaporous opinions. That’s why RealStill can speak of truth without flinching, or flipping, because it’s mostly as a debunking, by positive action using a camera and a computer. In other words, i can prove it.

Lincoln said, “we can’t escape history” yet we have managed to do just that. The only tolling bells heard are at the opening and closing in the New York Stock Exchange. Getting real is what RealStill intends to do. The real, as in documentary is only the starting point, thus, i’m saying that i will deliver the real, but what is always entirely real is the method, the approach and the all-encompassing environment of reality. If you laugh, and if it’s because you say, “there’s nothing real anymore,” then, at least, you’re on to something. Positive action though, would lead you to what’s left of the real world. That’s what RealStill is saying, self-activate, you may find the truth to whatever it is you’re talking about, and you can stop talking. It’s changing (reality), but still possible. There are tons of people doing that although you don’t hear them much, I guess they’re busy and not a lot of them are photographers, but there’s many. You can always stay in your controlled environment and click on this, or be like them and get out there, if not to prove your arguments, but only your existence.

The disparity between what I experience and what I have been told about my experience, and will be told from that which is mediated by others outside the experience of what they are reporting/depicting – that enormous difference between what i’m informed or not informed about events, and that situation’s unmitigated pervasiveness, is just what RealStill ignores, or, maybe, is what it’s all about. On the most basic level, as you walk the streets, ride the subway, or sit with your family at home, how many match up to what were told is ideal. Much culture and advertising speaks down to us, and RealStill now speaks down to them by the powers invested in it by its intention – to dispute with simply what’s real in a visual aphorism or a relic roughed by change but still beautiful in its depiction as a physical object.

One of the possible meanings in RealStill’s polymorphous title, is the choice to be involved in what’s rarest, least practiced and most worthless – in the world of the two-legged. RealStill recognizes the existence of an eroding reality with very little truth to begin with, but also the absurdity of denying basic truths that are universal, and allow for communication. Here’s a few – we are born, we will die, it’s up to us to fill the time in between. By sticking to descriptive truth, RealStill can use the word seriously. What they call prescriptive truth, attached to individual or mass desire or delusional subjectivity is dealt with by ignorance. Any contempt is silently overcome by involvement with the other side of things that are real, using its description as a starting point we then can all agree on, and to deny, with this proof available, run the risk of being termed, an asshole.

Images, words and sounds are the only things “physically” transportable over the internet, they come to you whole, and downloadable. You can still go to the store, buy a book or vinyl and add it to your home library or purchase a print for display. That’s probably considered a ritual today but i believe these things are cherished most for the truth they bring. The fact is, artifacts bestow an aura to themselves, much different than a website. Nevertheless it’s in this spirit that RealStill created its books and displays them electronically.

RealStill, from its start has very much, as they use to say, been underground, though not intentionally. Begun long ago, basically it’s barely seen the light of day, let alone electrons. It’s just that all attempts to go public failed over a stunning 42-year period of, to translate from the original art-speak – “with regards to your vision, what’s in it for me.” Nothing, i paid for all this myself, i’m doing you the favor. With the internet, and one’s site, one is freed from reliance on third party assholes that decide what others see. The implications of that alone are astounding to an untrained primate such as myself. The negative aspect is there is no difference between the internet and public square – all is represented, and, yes, it is an open unregulated sewer at its most negative.

RealStill is not about the past. It began 44 years ago and, like Charles Cushman’s work, its debut is much later and on the internet, making it seem that way. Unfortunately Mr. Cushman died long before his archive went public. He shot his present times, much of it, Chicago, and it looked like long ago when he shot it.

Make no mistake RealStill is always shot in real time, not to mention place, mindful that it will immediately become our past. The archive sat dormant this whole time. Books, many years in the making, were put away upon completion, and for many years, 1993 to 2003, I never made a print or any sort of positive image. All I saw was my negs. Slowly because of the volume of work, through scanning and processing beginning in 2007, the archive was converted digitally. Shooting has never ceased except for death, injury, displacement and the new time demands of digital photography. Shooting is occurring now. But digital, its practice and its expense, in post-production, cuts into time available for the atual task, which is not lining the pockets of tech people with my hard-earned money.

What is realstill.com? It’s an archive of electronic bitmaps that sit on a server. When activated RealStill’s digitized, film archive, becomes an electronic diegesis. RealStill is not a place for stories, as much as the place of the story. And, of course, the people of the story, something very much there in the archive, but not often shown. But watch out with stupid buzzwords like “narrative” because when it comes to cities there might be a traceable beginning, but there usually is no middle or end, but evolution.

Electronic images will be sensed, discarded or processed into the hippocampal core, sent for storage where needed, and may not be forgotten, given their importance, in a universal unconscious process we all posses. Delivered and embedded electronically, and perhaps given a kind of existence as a seemingly trappable figment (to the firmament) housed in our own neural electronics.

There’s snake oil online and, punk-ass image thieves – as in any public display – but it’s still the greatest single information source ever created, the ultimate fact-checker, and, for all its digital potential to fantasize, it’s also a hell of a depository for the unfiltered and real. Obviously the ubiquity of cameras many for security, has given cinema-verite a whole new life on the internet and cable where there are many shows made up solely of surveillance footage.

And it’s relatively inexpensive, I hope, in more ways than one. For a small monthly fee, the poor get free self-education. It’s the home of today’s raw and unprocessed images, the voice of the people, and there are no economic (class) requirements for its use and entry. I remember when the streets of New York and a lot of other cities were as public, free and chaotic as that.

The price is steep, but relatively hidden – it’s your information being sold behind your bank as payment for all the “free” technology and content.

RealStill can no longer find any avenue but screens, and film is gone. So be it, this light staring at screens is not like viewing the reflective light of prints and cinema. Fragmented and decentralized by customization, the screen is a sea of images, the likes of which have never been seen.

Pictures, words and sound are the few direct “things” delivered whole electronically. At worst images on the net are like the cocaine fed to monkeys in a stimulus/reward experiment, but with mouse clicks. RealStill respects its viewers by use of the scroll.

Image search – what you like, is now, how you see.

Most of the shots that comprise RealStill are scanned film (1978 – 2013), which, presumably, has a more unaltered presence. The digital process of scanning and editng gets the film out there electronically and can enhance the “realness” that the original film is considered closer to, and, by some, inherently bound to.

A good portion of RealStill, thankfully, lies within the golden age of color film photography (1989-2012) when color negative was perfected in a large line of products, which, for me, was usually PHR 25. Preceding this is a large archive of, the then, fully matured, state of the art, Kodachrome 25, extending the reach of RealStill back into the birth of what, it seems, had become a permanent fixture, the rust belt of untold indignities, and now its inverse, as it has become, of all things, cool. The low iso of both films, while allowing maximum resolution, can be physically difficult for shooting, that, in the long run, is good for living and archiving.

All Kodachrome was gone by 2010. It had the longest run of all color films by far and dates back to 1935 with the first attempts at widespread color emulsions. It was Kodachrome that saw the acceptance of color photographs as an art equal to any other processes, and it remains the only truly archival color film material ever made.

Film isn’t gone, just for all intents and purposes. RealStill feels good about being in the ripe golden years of color film, but does not bemoan digital except for the disruption it created, and its post production consumes thrice as much time as with film, and film, after all these years of digital change, is still better in one area, the most important, quality, but only when it comes to light. Other than that, digital is superior in most concerns. In the field it’s a breeze to do things that film made you pay for. there’s no film/processing expense, where just pressing the trigger in film mean two bucks a shot for just the neg.

Much of this shooting takes place in the original cities, all with industrial beginnings. Presently, and over a long time, towns and cities between New York and Chicago (even Butte), one hundred miles north and south of Interstate 80, are mapped in RealStill. All these places evolved from a collective decline into a rift between the richest and poorest of cities, say, for instance, New York and Cleveland, Chicago and Buffalo. Now the new rift is within rust belt cities as parts finally gentrify into their dream of revitalization. (And all can pick on Detroit). The devastated cities have by now come to the same final solution, there’s no mourning, and no saving any more, all are in agreement for the first time. The old city must go. Torn down, what’s left made over in the image of the newtowner. The old city must be cut and will purposely be forgotten.

RealStill also goes further off the map and into the natural environment, which can be very real too. This includes all the American badlands, ice, falls and weather itself. Whether city or less inhabited, RealStill never stops, in day and night, in all weather and seasons.

RealStill favors living history, over recreation, or just showing up for the remains. When all the life was gone then so was i, unless i was stuck there. When it comes to truthful things, the use of a camera, should make it more unarguable but only if it’s tied to the work of reliable deeds.

FIRST

Kracauer famously called film the redemption of physical reality. That was a while back, but a very long way back in image history. Like any primate RealStill can’t get over the initial thrill of an accurate recording machine. Accuracy doesn’t imply lack of technique at all, it’s just a great starting point. That accuracy can be used for trick or truth because it’s operated by a human who decides.

As an analogy, a monkey can use a twig as a tool. It can stick its twig in a beehive and pull out honey, or it can use the same twig to pick its nose.

Photography is still the ultimate in capturing descriptive truth. And the altering of that truth. RealStill now, uses entirely digital means to make, hopefully, an even more accurate rendering than scanned and processed film. A photograph can authenticate anything from fake to real, and as the sole operator of my camera machine, i fix on the real.

Practicing self-control i learned to use wholly digital means to get closer to reality, not control it.

The experience of being there aids accuracy, but the undeniable hedonism of living it, won’t be ignored in the image.

It’s simple and direct on paper – go to the source. But recognizing, origins have been replicated so much (as revenue streams) the source is becoming lost in a cultural shell game. All the more reason to get to work with cameras, now powered by processors, but still the clearest most direct way to capture the physical world of experience while it lasts.

RealStill’s opposes ruins photography correctly. Ruins photography, which should be derided, but not as porn, but as a fetish. You’ll see that crop up, but that’s still probably a waste of valuable time, when RealStill can quickly hammer proof, spitting images like a “K” in a fire fight. Toursists see ruins, natives see abandonment.

The core approach, advancing to the source, placing experience first, minimizes baloney, and layers of mediation. Relying on five senses and the medial lobe’s ability to process, store and retrieve, we can also tap in to emotions that fuel, for lack of a better word, compassion. Often mistaken entirely for “drama,” it’s my connection to what’s before the lens, a transferred sentiment is one attempt to describe it, while the art-trained get a treat, for calling it “romantic.”

It’s probably hard to argue with that or speculate about it. The undeniable should get some respect, which it does, just not from art and media.

Not like, but is. RealStill sublimates towards documentary, if only to keep itself anonymous. If you want to see this as a visiting photographic opportunity, that’s fine. But, for the record it ain’t, i am not that one. I don’t even care to talk about it, beyond the purposes of this statement of intention, whose length, along with the lack of attention span existent today, will most likely discourage anyone from discovering this embarrassment.

It’s disclaimed as art. An unmediated link with existence, makes it something preferable in the view of certain individuals. And, if it is art, it’s value is absolutely and only intrinsic, inadvertently proving a lot beyond an image.

TRUTH FIX

If a more creative class of people displaces a less creative class of people, let’s say blue-collar types, is it simply a matter of different “truths” clashing, expressing their differences, then show over, everyone had their say, time to go home?

I ask because i was in that situation, and, when it ended, I had no home to go back to after the show.

An image that lies is made by a liar, an image that tricks is made by a trickster and an image that is true is made by a debunker.

RealStill is intended but poorly controlled. You’ll make of it what you will. The words – truth, reality – so loaded, even RealStill cringes at their mention. But that loading has got nothing to do with RealStill, which recognizes, what’s generally perceived, as reality’s disappearance. RealStill interprerts that, not as motivation to join the fantasy machine, but to flee it, and savor what is being replaced, and link it to the capture of what’s rare, disappearing and original.

To those snickering, what the hell is this RealStill saying, there’s no longer such things as truth or reality. You’re on to something, but you’ve left it untested. RealStill confirms the existence of a few truths, and a world of bullshit, and is not afraid to say it. Mostly truth here is a debunking.

But there are truths, at a minimum, the physical truth of things that the camera is built to capture.

And when I speak of truths in the larger sense, there are few and they’re pretty unarguable, we are born, we die and have decisions as to our time spent in physical being. That’s another great thing about America. RealStill recognizes only a very few truths, proven but with enormous consequences. Who are we kidding? If you’re basing your view on the fantasy you will survive and not face the truth, or go to heaven, god bless your comfort.

The RealStill moniker, its anonymity, in this case functions as a barrier to any sort of quid pro quo. Not sharing, i’m forced to allow electronic views, and, as such, feel like a sucker. There’s nothing for sale here and no career to advance. My money is where my mouth is, and RealStill is not the means for a sale, or self-promotion. It’s an end. Considering I don’t do expression, there’s nothing in it for RealStill and it costs a lot. Nothing, then, but the real, at least physical truth.

Detached by ignorance to anything even close to hypostatic thought, conceptual shells, opinions that emerge from lifestyles and the whole slew of visual stew, sound effects and music, in short, whatever the modern brain happens to be filled with – Lady Gaga, Forest Gump, Howard Stern, Picasso, Bob Dylan, you name it.

Staying true to the earth, the five senses, and the intention.

There’s a nice detachment in that RealStill isn’t particularly thrilled with the choice of photography to build its diegesis, or world based on the world. It thinks of it as no better than anything else we invented to communicate.

If one were to pay attention to an extremely temporal art world the last twenty years, it seems the next latest is praised for breaking photography’s long, now supposed “special relation to truth” whatever that means. The contemporary blur and blend school of art, recognizes no “lines” which I presume are better to push boundaries, envelopes and more buzzwords. Out of actual contact comes something far less opinionated, and conceptual.

RealStill fills the whole that most media can’t communicate, especially with its absurd comfort images aimed at self-interest. The source of the absurdity has become lost in the eternal egress of its depictions, more importantly, what one can be, too, is getting lost. RealStill climbed out of its whole to show a photographic path marked without references to itself, ambling to the source.

RealStill actually goes against the grain of images, and especially the internet, which, like photography, seems built for short bursts and multiple hits, the BSR model (brain stimulation reward). Photographers “going in” whole hog for 90 straight days is a marvel of focus and stamina, and typical RealStill, or, typically what it takes to do it for real, including commitments to books of images demanding at least 10 years of shooting.

The art of the real, what’s called documentary, most often remains within that realm. It’s not over, for RealStill, when the show is done, i’m two steps back or is it, forward, there never is a show, or its consideration. Multiple books are being done at the same time, they’re simply laid to rest in the archive. It saves time for being real, so that when i leave the field i’m still in it.

Through time, we tell how closely one’s mission was achieved. RealStill grows with the work, that takes time too. It’s a fit for life. Getting your plan to sync with the world of chance, chaos, when, experienced, nothing else measures up, as does the fall from bad timing, which might even be death. Which reminds me, end things, are not avoided here, but thought of, because there is no substance like the last. It follows this has been the only place worth my time, with the forgotten, in their last moments.

And there’s detachment. I don’t necessarily like photography, i’m not an advocate for it. Most importantly it’s without preordination, detachment from inside out and separation from things not resourceful. It’s go to the source, if it’s already in you, there’s not a lot of distance to travel.

In the world of RealStill, hypostasis, the speculative concept, is banished. Only the senses are relied upon for perception. Using a camera’s eidetic/hyperthymestic potential, the possibility to experience descriptive truth is enlarged, enough that communication, can occur, particularly since it isn’t the camera that assigns the purpose or emotion “in” the shot, but in the conspiracy between viewer and shooter.

Episodic recall in mind and archive, both descriptive and, for RealStill, also, quietly, biographical. Long live the archive.

TIME

It’s not just you are there because i was there in the moment, chances are you’ll be in time-lapse because i also live there, and use a cinematic, over photographic approach.

Photography is built for the rapid hit. RealStill does that over time. By trying to shoot current things as timeless in order to make an especially memorable shot, and doing it over, sometimes, long periods of time, you’ll get a persistent image of place.

A camera sees time. Dating photographs, why is that important? Why is it a habit? Cameras are still precision machines. As optical clocks, today your shot is coded with with time, date, even GPS. At the center of RealStill is time. It’s what all the elements of RealStill speak to.

Photography finishes things by irrevocably fixing them in time. RealStill see this as photographic objectivity. The actual and forgotten, with reality hard up against it, by someone in it, doesn’t leave much wiggle room for art-speak. And with time all things are revealed, or as Seneca said “Time discovers truth.”

Every portrait ever made is of a goner. Irrecoverable. Things, and landscapes last longer, but even land moves imperceptibly to its demise, while there is always the possibility of swift transformation via earthquake, tsunami, asteroid or development.

Irremediable, hopeless and detached while it refers. A picture might be a perfect reference, but even if your familiar with the subject, there’s also detachment. The connection appears so perfect without hiding the fact that what’s depicted is, or was, elsewhere. Presence/absence, heightened when what’s absent from the photograph is now permanently absent in the world, preservation by prediction

Only time softens the feeling of loss. That loss, because the arrow of time only moves forward in a finite realm, remains irrecoverable except for the photograph. Events are irreversible, things are irreplaceable, photography is a further confirmation of this by looking so much like something that we know is either no longer there or elsewhere.

It’s always the timing of the shot, lost times, time of day, season, year, good times, bad times and a three time loser. And understand this, that a deep connection to the natural cycles of the planet we inhabit makes the camera an astronomical instrument, as you follow light provided by sources far away. Capture is at the speed of light, processed at the speed of electricity, photography’s hit is quick and current.

By producing this lost time involuntarily, our appreciation of the (this breathing) moment is sharpened.

Photography doesn’t lessen reality, but it is just a piece of it, and this is the limit of the still. Those limits will extend some through time-lapse and ultra-long exposures, mechanics built into the most basic camera machines. The glimpsing of images is universal, if the glimpser has lived in the place, been with the people there, the neuronal hit – a match to their own cognitive maps, is “real” enough, that sometimes these images are even avoided as too real. But the pleasure of the image, its universal logic will also decide its place in memory, for those outside the image or similar circumstances. That’s why, amongst other reasons, RealStill won’t hinder the reality, the pleasure and sadness of the image. Many who shoot aim to be catholic with each attempt at a remembrance, always knowing that a strike is rare. But when it occurs it’s called one shot “says it all.” 

As a professional I photograph things to drive them out of mind, and, curiously, into the mind of strangers.

Singular, irreducible, at that level, there’s not a lot of room for the conceptual view, certainly not the jargon of subjective delusion masquerading as substantive thought in entertainment or art, which seem part of the same “model” for so long now.

I don’t know if it’s new, it usually is when I start it, but if I didn’t bring it out in public for over thirty years, don’t confuse RealStill for what it’s not or what photography has become. Imagine Cindy Sherman did everything she has done but without showing her work to anyone. “Good work, but so many have done this.”

Neurons fire in the occipital lobe, meaning is determined in a glimpse.

RealStill’s sole directive is existence. The existent, in a slight caricature of itself, is for a moment familiar and estranged.

PREDICTIVE MOMENT

What the site savors lies outside the link of photography, websites, and all the junk. One is the  – the predictive moment, which is not the moment of capture on film, but the moment in the future when the scene’s demise is confirmed through its physical disappearance. When you return you fully expect to see it gone. And it is. Confirmation and a shot that could be the last, and possibly, the only, is the photographic payoff. It’s the whole presence/absence thing that photography is built to produce so well, but has become so forgotten.

Worth might grow as what’s rendered disappears, even culminating in the only known photograph. This end of the business is not art, but loss. In RealStill you’ll see a lot of gone, about to go and what’s left. Your sense of the about to disappear becomes acute, after 40 years of this. A whole host of terrible wisdoms, not even mentioned here, has endowed RealStill with the knowledge of multiple vision quests, The world, you wouldn’t believe what goes on there.

On an anatomical level, behind RealStill is a highly developed occipital lobe, and optical cones and rods that are sensitively charged in ways that sense impending doom, by seeing in the dark and sensing light.

Loss implies something more than disappearance including what was taken. There’s something at stake here, maybe not for you, but the loss in the lower half in our cities has been a way of life since the birth of the Rust Belt, and its subsequent gentrification.

RealStill has seen the results of both severe economic decline and unbridled development in our cities and between our cities.

DYING AT HOME

Haven’t really had choices there.

I sense something soon to be gone, and probably try to see it as how I would want to see it in the future when it is gone. Like dying at home never has the idea of home been examined so carefully. My conclusions? I would rather return to an empty brownfield than a tax-abated over-valued ugly rehabbed or freshly built neighborhood.

Limited resources makes one shoot out a back door, that has been industrial, ethnic, working class, urban, amongst many things. Like a novelist, i shoot what i know, if for no other reason than, it’s free. My connection is there to juice the shot and to maybe make it both memorable and accurate. My known involvement is private and unimportant as to heather anyone knows that or not. And, like a writer with only pen and paper, the idea of capturing what i know is doable. Just put in the time. And often it’s a lot of time, not hit and run.

I, too, enjoy anonymity, as well as participation. And from the inside there is also something at stake. When the scene fades there is loss. The scene is what’s vital.

Truth is more real than fiction, and it is very rare. Native is the language of is, not like.

RealStill offers a theatre of present events staged for a future memory. And with a photograph I can drive something out of my mind, as a real picture. By dealing with physical truths, there’s no need for nonsense.

And what’s history, after all, but the theatre of past events, intended to be memorable in some way as to not be forgotten. Always remembering it’s is always someone’s idea of what should not be forgotten.

Source-going as a starting point, sometimes the source is right down one’s alley.

The server’s function for this site is that of a memory machine, RealStill’s epitaph is truth in memory done today. What cameras capture is often ignored in their time – social iniquity, impending problems, historic times, are often revered after the fact, for being true. This is the nature of a presence/absence machine. Pictures can function as a reminder of all things, in time. It’s a watch chained to place. It can help set the record straight and be pleasurable, and for RealStill, meaningful, all while being mistaken for art.

MAGIC KINGDOM

In the saga of the two cities within the country, for instance New York and Cleveland, and the two cities within each city in the country, RealStill never ignores the absolute principle we have come to always ignore, class. But i honestly don’t think it’s been done this way, that is, setting up shop on the low and dirty end, recognizing its social history, but commemorating the lower half’s response to its situation – strong extended family ties, strong friendships, no pretense, proximity to the elemental and physical facts of life, nativity, the freedom of the bankrupt, decayed city, the list of affirmative responses is vast. RealStill knows how to redeem a bad situation. All the injustice is there, but often it’s more the appreciation of the scene, its endemic qualities and freedoms.

I had shot both the forgotten and forgotten lands where i lived, so I knew where to go when forgotten. And this is where RealStill ended up. The Internet arises and i have an untapped archive of the history of our industrial cities beginning in the seventies and is still ongoing. Not to forget the forgotten. Seems futile to me.

NO LIFE STYLE

It’s an obvious fact we are contained by our selves, no matter how connected to what matters outside us. Except for sensory perception, which delivers the outside world directly into our minds. In light of that, i’d rather be self-activated than self-involved.

For substantive thought, RealStill recommends something less arguable, an actual world. Don’t believe it? Check the operator’s level of sincerity first, it’s starting point and intentions.

No school, no model, no baloney. What i’m looking for is nothing from anybody.

Experience is not a model.

You can talk about art as real estate model all you want, but it will only deflate on its own.

The art colonies are populated by an invasive species, more evolved, but still with the old business model of colonialism, of course, reinvented, or repurposed, for the life of the mind, the art life-style, whatever all that means.

Please accept without any stupid connotations concerning truth and reality, that, if i were an artist, i would be a reality artist. RealStill pursues something art is indifferent to, or, at best, doesn’t get, that’s been proven. Thus reality and artist seem mutually exclusive.

Up front, I’m predisposed to a view that the city is a museum of itself and much of my thinking arises out of reciprocating contact with the world itself, not its many portrayals.

If i would bring something to the art world it would be opposed to it, at least that’s what the empirical evidence to date suggests.

Here’s a concept, the real is better, and more satisfying than art, and, consequently, is easily judged by its own empirical truth.

Awfully unreconstructed, i want to be that way, because it’s better than a make over. I have no interest in reinvention, reuse, repurposing, rehabbing and remakes, adaptive reuse, empowerment… We’re born and before we pass we have a relatively short time we can fill with something. Something we have the freedom to pursue. We don’t need to detail the price, risk or sacrifice, or any other reasons chaos is avoided, but, make no mistake, it requires give and take.

We’re all familiar with what official history documents by those, I’m not acquainted with, that do the remembering. Actual histories may become artesian as they get buried as a matter of course, but they don’t have to remain so. They can emerge as springs, or in my case, leachate, in, for example, a website.

History is the theatre of past events, and only some action in the present time allows admittance. We can still participate and experience, maybe the screen-idled don’t even believe that’s possible or even worthy, while others know full well, living is there for the taking. Many do and many don’t. We’re lucky like that in America.

Dealing only with physical truths is unconsciously a commentary on nonsense.

ROMANTIC

“Is not this the true romantic feeling – not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you.” Thomas Wolfe.

Then it’s romantic to be human. I would say a creature aware of its eventual demise, is, by nature a romantic creature, or a cruel one. All life and this world itself is finite, that’s damn obvious, but, lived that way, many find a greater obligation to truth, while others find their only obligation is to number one. Again, we have a choice, and our finiteness breeds both truth and deception.

I’ve always thought of it – romaticism – as an insult, not just another category of art, because i am not trained in art at all and its categories, and, connection to the outside world might breed empathy. RealStill is certainly not reacting to science or the rational, rather RealStill is actively incorporating science, logic, emotion, sense and chaos. There is much experienced here, none of it romantic, unless your blinded by your own comfort. The irrational is limited but allowed in, for what it can bring that is productive. In modern times, it’s become known as gonzo, and takes into consideration that actual reality is marked by randomness, chaos and simultaneity.

Shamanistic tendencies are limited, controlled, and are present. Perhaps we call that gonzo, somehow today, but its a sobre one. And it is experience, the quickly disappearing mode of learning and discovery, that permits access, and why those who sit in front of a screen, to be informed, mistakenly discount anything uncontrollable as “crazy” completely losing the cutting advantages of instincts, intuition and simple development of the senses as portals without screens and filters.

The obvious big contradiction here is that RealStill is solidly anti-screen, while relying on the screen for communication. This is true, but i also lived, prior to this weird invention, the internet, since 1989, by completing books and simply packing them away. No denying it, i am anti-screen, but not ant-reflective print, and, if i were purely a writer, it wouldn’t be a conflict at all. Screen culture is nothing, including the screen that screens my work. From the start, although it can be powerful emotionally, it’s vapor, entertainment and a manufactured moment.

The screen, centering the individual to the world, and, now, with technology, only that part of the world chosen by the almighty but powerless subject to be arranged in his or hers own way. The individual becomes the authority. Screens are where many spend most of their waking day in front of, at work and at home. Each individual expert is confident that they each possess the truth of things, since they have such unfettered contact with so much data and content, to the point that your actual lived experience of things is completely ignored for some form of virtual representation of the subject, and, experts who have devoted their life to certain things are on the same plane as anyone else.

Anti-screen is essentially being told about things places, events by people who have never come in contact with and know nothing at all about much outside of screen culture including free TV, cable TV, Internet, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and whatever other so-called social media interactions take place.

The very antipode to experience is the screen. RealStill is the aesthetics of experience where there are no sceens, sound effects or filters.

Anti-screen, heavily so, it is at the heart of so much misinformation, but as I stay over again it becomes the authority to the point it will absorb the truth even of someone’s life. In other words people spend retired day in front of a screen at work and then come home and spend much of their relaxation time in front of the screen again. Evolving over the course of many years particularly now where are machines can be guided to deliver only the information that we want. More than ever each individual endowed with their multiple individual rights becomes an authority on things places and people they have never come in contact with an know nothing at all about outside of screen culture including free TV, cable TV, Internet, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and whatever other so-called social media interactions take place.

The very antipode to experience is the screen.

It is called real, and i’m supposing, somehow, that’s not a category, but how life emerges – an egg is fertilized in a chaotic moment whose only guide is the most capable. The demands of the mission alone see to that. RealStill is constant and allows for nothing else but work, and can only say, don’t talk to me as if, somehow, i’m supposed to be as you, or, at the very least, care at all what you have to say, based on the fact, you have absolutely no experience in the things you think you know, and that i fully participate in on many levels, the most important being experience over long periods of time.

Truth? For many years RealStill almost equated it with light. Now, with so much gone, the equation is life, and a healthy concern for light.

Romantic is in your head. Here there’s not a need or place for it. What’s inna picture? Now, you’re telling me what’s inna picture.

ART-SPEAK/MEDIA

I guess in art-speak my work is a fusion of art, history, documentary and mostly experience into objects called photographs. Oh, the life of the mind. After the battle of the Little Bighorn, hundreds of white people claimed to be the only survivor of the “Last Stand” and today we have truthers and birthers, where the lie-as-truth denies the origins of the event itself.

The selfie has been original to the art world long before its current popularization along with art set-up photography, formerly the domain of advertising and low-budget story films. RealStill lacks self-consciousness. I guess, only because a selfless approach will get the job done. Passionately self-involved egos, the closed loop of mirrored selves – involvement with that would kill RealStill, by its own hand, for that it can take no longer.

The schmoozing, self-promotion campaign required today to make a work “successful” in the culture market, is alien and creepy, for many reasons, the most important, is to conserve what’s real and actually produce something and learn something, that the party/p.r. effort required for eminence, prevents one from accomplishing. There is no time for this. Fabricating memory for a missing world takes foresight, but that is nothing without the physical ability and discipline to capture it. RealStill never took a dime of anyone’s money and doesn’t ask for it. I’d rather work for it.

My feeling all along has been that RealStill is too documentary for art and too art for documentary. To be clear, untainted, not blended, and focused, not blurred. Contact with institutions like art or real estate is the ultimate schizoid joke that’s going to always be on me. And let’s throw a few other institutions in there too. The period of no relativity, particularly for art and real estate, is a bloated time of overvaluation, hyper-commodification, dubious financial “products”…we all know that, not 99 but 100% know it.But the Spectacle now has full control.

And when the sky has become the limit, things get weird, particularly for the lower half, or three quarters or whatever the case might be.

Is this what the “late capitalism” that critics so confidently talked about thirty years ago has wrought? You can bet on it, and many do, there’s always another golden age – in it’s own logic, over and over. People might understand better now, it’s never over, never too late, and there’s never too much to gain. Listen up introverted thought architects, we’ve progressed to the point where, by the time your critical masterpiece is done, your subject has flown the coup for another.

Even if the majority or great numbers see with all this technology and agree on the existence of the wildest social absurdities, the carnival continues. It’s as if it’s all received now as entertainment, and that’s a joke. RealStill doesn’t belabor this. RealStill, practically speaking, at best, is a record, that, in the future, will be the proof no one listened to, at the time.

The ever-growing gap, between my actual experience of things, even the ones that are mine, and things i’m told about, especially by people with no experience, is as thoroughly unbridgeable as it is absurdly imbecilic.

The artist and entertainer say, “know me, don’t forget me.” RealStill says. “know this, don’t forget this.” And, if you know yourself, let it be through the world, not your ego.

THE MIND

But we do have minds and we must keep them in tact, without them we are lost.

Long live the detante gyrus.

I learned the hard way, in the dementia wards, as, of all things, care-giver, and the life-long homes of old failing minds, the thing that takes precedent is the picture. Those losing the organized, directed mind, and its memory, are always surrounded with their pictures. In the face of physical/mental loss, when the chips are down for real, the thing that takes precedent are pictures, the “material” presence of lost episodic memory. Even if they themselves can no longer recognize, as in the case of Alzheimer’s and amnesia, they can be instructed. Many will end up trying, then giving up on how to learn again as the brain loses its ability, and, then, what is left? Is it important?

RealStill is only interested in the life of the mind on the level of neurons, as mine are fixed on the real.

Hippocampal involvement in receiving communication of novel events, places, particulars and experiences, makes sure the knowledge is not lost but saved in the episodic memory as new memory. Some researchers regard the hippocampus as part of a larger medial temporal lobe memory system responsible for general declarative memory characterized by memories that are easily communicated, in speech or writing, including memory for fact in addition to the memory of experienced events.

Neurogenesis, along with BDNF production in the hippocampus region, would, of course, be necessary to keep up with the memory demand, as well as, the general spirit-lifting it would take to accomplish the task.

In the seventies the discovery of place cells led to a theory that the hippocampus might act as a cognitive map or neural representation of the layout of the environment. Without a fully functional hippocampus, humans may not remember where they have been and how to get where they are going, getting lost is one of the most common symptoms of amnesia. Mammals, freely moving in an environment seemingly fire neuronal bursts of action potentials because the hippocampal neurons are equipped with place fields.

Is hyperthymesia the ability to remember everything or the ability not to forget?

RealStill’s concern with time and place is not only out and in the landscape, but also matched by the mental mapping and searching abilities in the our temporal lobe where processing and use of time and place information takes place.

The medial temporal lobe is the anatomical model for the site.

END

In the end RealStill knows what time it is. For instance now is the time of the overdog. RealStill is the present moment viewed over time.

The two-legged constantly talk about things we all agree, never should have happened even while occurring, or in the first place. The ability to use our culture to change things, is dependent on time and place, circumstance. Generally talk of what should never have been is in hindsight. RealStill, which constantly captures the present moment, is unconcerned.

If art and media, in its present configuration bars veracity and cares little for integrity, i’m still out.

Power spots aren’t comparable. The contact of high-caliber experiencing centered by the five senses – blood circulating, neurons firing, mind and body engaged – is taxing and uncomfortable to say the least, but enhances BDNF production and the growth and health of the hippocampus, while leaving be hind an object from all that effort.

“The lie of being true” or “If everything is permissible, there is no truth.” And lots more, it’s all been said already. RealStill, by source-going, ignores all that’s been said, there is work to do. Later, with whatever physical verification a photograph provides, RealStill, while still working, makes its statement in deed and truth. Go out and test the clichés and the born-with truths and all that’s accepted. The results may surprise you. All else is the continual hypostasizing we get caught up in. Actualization, testing your thoughts in reality, ends reified discourse quickly.

How authentic is RealStill? I’ve tried to avoid that word, but as proof of the sheer authenticity of this endeavor, there is no introduction by Luc Sante.

Source-going is one veritable process, further “verifications” would indicate falsehood at the starting point.

Cameras don’t necessarily lie, but their operators can. Check the operator and how it’s done for appraisals concerning intentions. These are Roman times, at least, here, in New York, but it was also the Romans who said, “Opere et Veritate.”

The need for the illusion of individual power and freedom increases, in what was once called mass society. Today 10 billion people exist, and they all want something. There’s not enough physical room for all the future desires so the invention of the real in its initial erection, is ongoing. How else will the 10 billion two-legged without tails, survive on a finite planet without the illusion of their unlimited opportunities or what’s called freedom. It’s universal knowledge that the math of individuality and desire does not compute unless we can expand the world of the mind. That way we can all believe of ourselves as empowered, like Cortez in 1516.

The view from above is one of an ant colony, differences far less discernible. Do we possess a swarm or herd mentality? RealStill suspects that the human ability for great adaption has bestowed all elements of nature upon us. With regards to herds and singularity, control lies in our awareness that both are peculiar to humans and serve a function.

Money is of great value since it is the only way to get truly free.

Go to the source.

It’s neither dead nor enshrined and has nothing to do with partying and socializing or sharing. RealStill is an electronic thing now and it still grows exponentially. Past, present and future is one way to slice time for your slant. RealStill’s experience of time is more uninterrupted, capturing often the same things over a long time.

The American pictures quest, where unconsciously, i contemplate, what is American, by being hyper-local? I would ask that you try not to think of it now with any preconceived notions, which, without experience, is nothing to begin with. When I speak of a pictures quest, it doesn’t necessarily mean isolation and depravation, although that’s how some of it may look to some. Certainly animals don’t come out of the night and speak to me of my true identity and destiny. It’s an objective vision quest, where an object, a photograph is brought back. That struggle to capture something, something material, and bring it back is the very definition of self-actualization, and, as such, instinctively, all the personal benefits of becoming more of the person you are, living as you are built to be, the advantages of definition and clarity, are picked up along the way, as well as, good blood circulation, heightened sensory receptiveness and a healthy curiosity. We’ll forget the bad things.

Unlike most of the audience, for RealStill, the pictures might be a reliving. That’s one of the reasons I avoid looking at them. I’m sick of them. It’s not just you are there because RealStill is there. RealStill is stuck there, and, similar to what’s depicted, can’t get out. This sticking to it produces a time-lapse on the subject, more persistence of vision, than story.

Nothing of originality left in the world of ideas? Try the world of events or even every day life, events there can be unprecedented. Everyone dies but an individual’s death is unprecedented. And don’t forget the novelty (originality) of being in time, Bergson’s creative evolution. Opinions are patterned incidents aren’t.

No school, no model, no baloney, said thrice now.

The camera is nothing but a tool. The old documentary machine tirelessly challenged the last thirty years by, of all things, an art world, as a deceiving machine. This discovery is nothing, it was always there. What needs to be discovered is that the picture’s abilities to reveal fantasy/reality, truth/lies or proof/manipulation lie solely in the hands of the operator.

Operators like, C. Owen Smithers and Charles Cushman, (Smith, too) – Americans in the city with a camera. RealStill’s concern for the city is not unprecedented, but each city has its history in its place and time and that is their own. Many, like Mr. Smithers spent all their time in life and photography in one city, their home.

I would highly recommend self-activating and going to the source and not mediating. That is, if truth is your aim, and growth is valued. If you want an art career, go to Yale.

To manufacture pictures where nothing separates the aim and source is RealStill’s mission, and practically speaking, producing something from the experience is a final objective. Putting the present to bed involves something saved, even if just an image, of, particularly some unfairness. Saving (the present), if only as an image, is preferable to losing it and doing nothing.

Dying at home, can’t say i’ve had much of a choice there. Early on it was clear that eventually i’d never escape, as planned, to that good life, or at least a better life. That’s why this electronic diegesis is also portrayed as a Magic Kingdom. Ghetto, slum, working-class, industrial, polluted, dirty or just dull – places whose overcoming is required to make it truly a livable home. Almost all immigrant, poor, crime-ridden, is my neighborhood, today, the place i found in a forced displacement.

In the film noir, Pitfall, there’s a scene and dialogue from Karl Kamb’s screenplay: When Tommy is awakened by a nightmare, he asks, “Daddy, what makes a dream?” Forbes comforts his son with the following words: “Mind is like a very wonderful camera….Evidently from the day we’re born the mind takes pictures and stores them away. Now and then one of those pictures comes loose in our sleep and that becomes a dream. So, the trick is to take only good pictures and have only good dreams.”

Does photography’s involvement with place, and, particularly, time, mean that a photographer can, too, in accordance with their subject, experience disappearance? I already know the answer to that. But with photographs, there’s always a possibility for future disclosures. Like most i looked to my profession to provide the legal means of advancement for a better life. Not finding it, even for a moment, i still live out the true meaning of my creed whether i like it or not, still stuck in the world i pledged to represent, it’s the wisdom-producing element of survival, that surely is lost, no matter if i bring this work out or not.

RealStill has many shots, all are selective. There’s a hierarchy, the very least of which is functioning, going, gone. RealStill has been there for the before, during and after, and that’s way before, unlike most who depict, RealStill is still from there, from where is depicted, and does it without the self-portraiture, the art world loves.

Declarative memory, memory stated, is best done by a camera, still. It’s potential for episodic (biographical within events in time) memory is significant. Like HSAM the camera makes us not forget the moment, unfiltered through time by outcome, survival, or emotions concerning that. The actual event in all its glory, stupidity or banality is locked. The downside to a human with a perfect memory is the reliving of all the bad, as well as, the good, unfiltered. And isn’t it funny so much of it is divided in good and bad. RealStill, isn’t afraid to remember the hard truths, it isn’t the camera that applies the emotion, but it is ourselves who bring it.

A hard truth, we are finite.

Not always dealing with playthings, in fact, many end things, often still alive, but about to go. Any soulful knowledge (“tragic wisdom”) gained will get recirculated. RealStill, a live wire, appreciates life the same way any creature would if it was aware of its limitations.

We’re lucky today, the world becomes more managed daily, but real times are still here for the taking. You can use its indifferent chaos and randomness, as something to plan on, by not forgetting what’s real by definition implies you have no control. After it’s all planned, set up and ready, all ya got is hope, becuse reality ultimately will call the shots. If you’re from there, you won’t have to go far and if you never made it out to there, try to make life, a reality and enjoy it. That’s what RealStill did.

Because it’s the only place worth my time. 

Ombra! principito e fine.