Transcending the Limited Camera: The Bright Reality Prior to "Point of View"
The event of the camera registering an image on a piece of film replicates the human idea of what it is to see: The light of the "outside" world enters through a small aperture and is registered on a light-sensitive material. Thus, both the camera and the human being are mechanisms for registering reality from a particular "point-of-view" in space-time. The camera - like the human being - is a "point-of-view machine." Thus, the process of making photographs, concepts and naming reflects the nature of the human event, of human experiencing.
The human individual in the midst of reality is like a camera in a room - perceiving everything from a fixed "point of view." But what does the room really look like? The room can be viewed from every possible "point of view" in space-time - not merely from any particular "point of view," or even a finite collection of "points of view." Therefore, no "point of view" can reveal the room, or reality itself, because every "point of view" is limited and essentially self-referring.
Reality itself always already exists. Reality itself is what exists PRIOR to "point of view," before any individual "point of view" constructs its version of presumed "reality."
"Point of view" is the essence of ego-life: The apparently individual being presumes that he or she is a particularized "point," or an organized "point of view," in space-time. And that "point" is "made" by contracting from the condition of totality - and, indeed, by contracting from even every mode, form, or condition of conditional existence. Therefore, the camera is a precise mechanical equivalent of the ego - because it, too, functions as fixed "point of view."
-Franklin Jones
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