CLOUD STUDIES
We live in an era when (and, more ominously, where) our powers of manipulation and simulation threaten to erase us. What we have invented in the so-called real world is now capable of producing un-peopled simulations more real than real. This is not a harmless achievement.
You cannot trust these pictures, for example. Did I put in some clouds that were not there? (I did not.) Did I reshape clouds or distort them for effect? (I did not.) Was the actual arrangement of clouds just as I depict it here? (Yes it was.) Can I give you more than my word on any of this? (I cannot.)
Mere replication is not art, but neither is an excess of manipulation. The line is fine and never drawn quite clearly enough to silence all debate.
The sky I saw was not black and neither were the mountains or the trees. I made them so. I did this to reveal things not easily discerned under a million dots of color.
Every day we sit beneath a great canopy, like a giant circus tent. We do not know the canopy. Our heads are down, our eyes distracted by the clowns and the acrobats and the dancing ponies, performing. We think the tent does not perform. We offer it no applause. Like the sky, it cares not. It is patient. It works with great slowness and dignity and enduring purpose, enclosing us and the clowns and the acrobats and the dancing ponies. It is strange how little attention we pay to that which is all-encompassing. A tiny movement of no consequence can occupy every sense, while the grand show passes overhead, unnoticed.
Where we look makes our lives. What I saw in the sky was erased before I wrote these words. Now you have only the words...and these pictures. The rest is irretrievably lost.
But I did, for a moment, look.
Chuck Sale
Copyright © Chuck Sale Photography