Reality is something that you rise above
We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are
'Rich' - Marillion

I've been meaning to blip this portacabin for a few days now - and today it looked smashing in the low bight sunlight, the corrugated iron really stood out in the sunlight.

Stills lecture #3 tonight - dicussing Lacanian theory and 'the gaze'. The speaker spoke of how we percieve photographs - saying that Lacan believed that we don't really see reality, we see an image of reality - that any picture that we lok at is twice removed from reality - we see an image of the picture, while the picture itself is an image of reality. We heard about the 'mirror stage' (stage as in performing not as in a stage of development) of children - how our idea of ourselves is shaped by the image we have of ourselves; inherently unreal as we can only see the front of ourselves when we look into a mirror; this is only part of us as a whole. The gaze is how an image 'looks back at us' - partly to do without perceptions of what we see - and thus our reactions can show us to ourselves. For example, a photograph of a person eating a banana could be as simple as that, but any other connotations brought to our minds would then show if our mind worked on a more *ahem* primal level. In my defense that particular shot was entirely posed suggestively.

This subject I think I need to do some reading on - my tutor's comments to my first assignment hinted about this kind of topic, so I think this lecture especially was rather valuable - and interesting.

Brought to mind the Marillion lyric above - the second line being a quote from the French poet Anais Nin.