If photography is about seeing, what do we see? Why do we think that to see something is to know it?
‘I can see the sea!’ is the cry from the back seat. It is filled with anticipation. There is something about the ocean that provokes a strength of feeling: a rush of freedom in the force of the wind and the expanse of the water; a brooding sense of danger at the uncontrollable power. In the sea you have to surrender a small part of yourself to the water, it cannot be conquered completely.
This short film considers shifting perceptions of place and of reality. There is a distance between what we are given, what we see and what we know. Through ambiguous fragments the viewer can still see the sea through what they bring to the frame. Reality is constructed internally and subjectively through interaction. The sound combines with the visual, giving each person a different internal image and a different emotional response. Our attention is challenged through repetition. Here, imagination (and perhaps concentration) is the key to perceiving these echoes as a place, an object, to seeing the sea.
In among glimpses of the sea, as we might expect to see it, the viewer is presented with objects to interpret. They have been placed here consciously but what they mean is as fluid as the water. The photograph is a false knowledge of the world, it is an object that fades. Yet even after it has disappeared from view we can see it in our mind. The memory and emotion of experience remain as the images, in flux, repeat, slowly degrade, fragment and fade away.
