Voyeur or Adventurer?

Brock Faces the Camera

I'd thought myself an adventurous guy but listening to Peter Bogdanovich's interview of Hitchcock last night is making me rethink myself. 

In the interview, Hitchcock admitted he was a voyeur, like his character Jeffrey in Rear Windows, whose "subjective" experience was the movie's main plot. A photojournalist confined to his two-room Greenwich apartment after he broke  his leg trying to take an action shot at an auto race, he could only move himself from bed to wheelchair, from wheelchair to bed. He occupied himself doing what he did best: observing. John Michael Hayes wrote the screenplay but it was apparently Hitchcock who wanted the subplots about the neighbors that Jeff could observe through their wide-open windows. Their stories not only stretched the plot into the 112-minute movie but gave it substance. It was Hitchcock's genius—putting together a movie with the various elements that somehow created the complete gestalt of a storytelling experience. 

I thought myself adventurous five years or so ago because of my interest in the Macintosh and its thrilling software. I wanted in on what I saw as an exciting trend in modern American lifestyle. I had been shooting photos of my trips to Europe since 2001 but I forgot it took my sister several years to convince me to leave my travel books and actually make the trips. While not bedridden like Jeff, I have always spent an inordinate amount of time in introspection and analysis. The highlights of my days are insights, images, pieces of information or thoughts that seem to light up my otherwise morbid brain. I live for those lights.

An adventurer I am not if by adventurer we mean someone who physically takes himself to various and new environments to physically experience various and new sensations. I am an adventurer only in the sense of being curious about new technology, new ways of thinking, new ways of experiencing life. My adventure is largely of and in the mind.

So yes, I think I am an adventurous guy if an inveterate observer of the human psyche (especially my own) and our subjective experience of the external world with its many-storied marvels and mysteries. The still and video cameras are extensions of my mind, tools to further the mind's exploits, to push it as technology tends to push it into ever expanding Brave New Worlds. The Internet and the millions of computers and servers hooked to it are after all extensions, as my computer is an extension of my mind, of the thoughts, ideas and imagination of the world's peoples joined together in its net. And that's the field of my adventure, the incomparably vast world of the mind.

Let the show begin!

Posted via email from Duende Arts