CONFUSATIONS

"Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into."
                                                                  -Wallace Stevens

I arrived in Portland OR. Walter Benjamin, who was an urban dweller with holes in his shoes, wrote that it is difficult to get lost in a city. But there are so many ways to get lost! Looking north felt like I was facing south, east seemed to be where west should be!

Recently, after photographing the amazing forest that grows in midst of this city, I began walking downtown, which naturally brought me to looking into store windows, surfaces seen through even while reflecting the world around them, a bricolage of substance and illusion. Unlike mirrors, they are not portals, or occasions for narcissism, but present possibilities for reorganizing one's seeing into various dimensions and depths.

After photographing one reflection, I showed it to a friend, who found it “confusing.” Thus, I decided to gather photographs as “Confusations”—a neologism I parsed into: “confiscation” (“taking a picture”), “sensation,” (as in Debord’s spectacle), and “fuse” (how the brain fuses memories to mediate a world). A picture within a picture,as a world within itself. [images are links]

 

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Joel Weishaus
Summer 2007