Humans have a strange fascination with death. The philosopher Immanuel Kant, who influenced Martin Heidegger, famously states that we cannot experience our own death because in order to do so we need to have subjective experience. And when we are no longer here, i.e., not alive, we cannot experience our own death. We can only experience the death of someone else, and this is where Martin Heidegger comes in with his idea that we will never own our own death. Or, we can only subjectively experience our own death but by the virtue of not being able to experience it fully it is what he calls the "utmost possibility of the impossibility". Philosophers are sometimes beyond understanding.

In this post, I explore this idea with a series of photographs. Simply put, I explore the idea of decay and our subjective but removed experience of it through a juxtaposition of "black" and "decay". The blackness and decay are both linked in the sense that when we think of death, we think of "blackness" or darkness. The black background is thus used in a sense to emphasize the decay of the leaves and material.

This idea is also a continuation of my own fascination with the notion of ostranenie or defamiliarization. By using a very narrow point of focus, I try to take an everyday object, i.e., a dead leaf, and focus on a very particular place to focus the viewer's eyes on somewhere they would not have necessarily looked. This re-focuses the viewer's mind on the everyday object but in a new light or in a new context. By doing this the familiar becomes unfamiliar and a site of unease. This unease can then be manifested as confusion, yet the object portrayed is something familiar that should not cause confusion.

The point of doing this is to "shake the foundations" of our everyday being in life to such a degree that we re-focus our minds to appreciate life anew. By confusing the viewer with the everyday, she might then return to everyday life with a new appreciation of what she never really paid attention to. That is, sometimes we enter a so-called "auto pilot mode" in which we do not spend time reflecting on the strangeness of our being-in-the-world. By entering the auto pilot mode, it is as if we extract ourselves from the world. But this is a necessary step. We need to enter this detached mode to re-enter life with a new appreciation for life.

Without writing too much and distracting you the viewer from this strange position, let me commence and let you decide for yourself how far removed you want to go. That is, you are in the driver's seat of how deeply you want to enter the strange and uncanny of the everyday. Walk with me on this abstract tour into the strange aesthetic of decay. The titles of the photographs are as if they were aphorisms. All the photographs were taken with my Nikon D300 and with either the Tamron Zoom/Macro lens or the Nikkor 50mm lens.

I hope you enjoy this weird journey.

Aesthetic Decay: On the Beauty of Decaying Matter

Meaning Folding in on Itself I

Meaning Folding in on Itself II

Meaning Folding in on Itself III

Meaning Folding in on Itself IV

The Breakdown of Understanding I

The Breakdown of Understanding II

Stream of Consciousness and Contours of the Uncanny I

Stream of Consciousness and Contours of the Uncanny II

Stream of Consciousness and Contours of the Uncanny III

Stream of Consciousness and Contours of the Uncanny IV

Stream of Consciousness and Contours of the Uncanny V

The Breakdown of Understanding III

Pure Nothingness I

Pure Nothingness II

Pure Nothingness III

Postscriptum, or A Breakdown of Meanings

The titles are not that forthcoming with meaning. Herewith is just some remarks on them if you are interested.

Meaning Folding in on Itself can be seen as the myriad of ways of understanding and experiencing life that weaves around itself. Without questioning it, there is a coherent whole, like the folds in fabric, but when you begin to pull on the individual threads, it all comes unraveling.

When there is a Breakdown of Understanding holes begin to emerge in our theories. One might wonder, were the holes always there, that we merely covered them up and now they are visible? Or, are they present due to the relentless questioning by a select few? Questioning the rigid will inevitably fill it with holes.

A Stream of Consciousness and Contours of the Uncanny merely symbolizes the above two, that is, when we simply think without questioning anything, everything runs "smoothly". The uncanny and its contours are not a problem until it is questioned and reflected upon.

Pure Nothingness is the black that surrounds the leaves. Can there ever be nothing, or is the black nothingness something?

I hope you enjoyed this post and I hope it made you reflect on the everydayness of life a bit. All of the musings are my own unless stated otherwise. The photographs are also my own, taken this afternoon with natural light. Happy photographing, and stay safe.