What I Like About Photographs

What I like about photographs is that they command me. Especially in the middle of the night. They tell me to put a pot of water in the center of my kitchen floor and make the light rare. Make it dark. Photograph the way the water looks in darkness. Sloshing around and still. Make your footsteps visible in the surface of the water in the pot. Adjust the variables (aperture, shutter speed, ISO) until the water has its sensuous sway and say as a thickness of darkness, as an island of dark and light in the general darkness of the room. Let it wag and waggle like a dark tongue and  lap up the light rays it beams at your camera. Then go out and shoot into the darkness of the backyard. Know that you can only lay down the scene in darkness, in digital grain. Then go inside and lighten what you have shot using the light in the honeycomb of the laptop. Expose the hive of the night. Art-i-fic-ial-ly. See how much seeing is artifice, how much artifice there is in seeing. Hate and love. Hate and love this. The endlessness of this. Motes and grain. Subtraction is more interesting than addition. Subtraction will get you more.