No day but today.

Pictures for this posting are in Gallery Eleven.

As the trip wears on, the tempers and relationships of the group seems to be wearing a bit thin at times. Perhaps we are just finally beyond the pleasantries that come from workings so closely with a new group of people and are to the point where we can really be ourselves and express how we truly feel. Or, perhaps we really are starting to get on each other’s nerves, either way the ice is getting thinner.

This morning we awoke to a wonderful rainstorm that had been washing the city for most of the night. For the first time in over a week I was getting my rain fix. It has only rained twice now since we have gotten to Europe. Once in Paris and now here. The weather as a whole has not been incredibly hot though anything above sixty degrees starts to get hot to me. The humidity has been great. I am one of the rare people who loves a humid environment, and my skin has been soaking up the moisture. I only wish we were closer to the coast so I could dip my feet into the ocean and reconnect with a large body of water, something my spiritual self craves. I have not seen the ocean, or any significant body of water, in over four years and I am having a difficult time of it.

Today we spent the entire day in class, with our theory class in the morning and studio in the afternoon. This is really the first whole day of classes that we have had. I know that tomorrow we are going to go on another walking tour (or two) so it was nice to just be in the classroom today. In fact, we even got to make some images using Print Out Paper, and if I can find a way to easily do it, I’ll post them here.

The theory class has mostly been addressing the Renaissance and how the changes that happened during the Renaissance changed the way we see the world and even how we all interact with it. The instructor has put forth the idea that the camera obscura model of vision (the whole way of seeing after the Renaissance) created “the gaze” and from that Imperialism. I won’t go into great detail (I’ll save that for the ten page paper I have to write when we get back to Denver) but I just don’t buy it.

Here is what I know: Prior to the Renaissance, there was very little to no realistic depiction in art. Figures were painted and sculpted with idealized expressions and with no realistic depiction of space and relation to each other. Often figures were larger in a painting not by proximity but by importance. The Medieval way of seeing didn’t really allow for the proper expression of perspective or the more realistic depiction of the figures in the works of art. Then during the Renaissance, things changed.

Many contribute the change to the use of the camera obscura (a type of “camera” that allowed artists to project images onto walls of a darkened room and gain a sense of three dimensional space represented in only two dimensions) and the ability to get incredible detail and hypothesize that artists of the time were more or less tracing their paintings from real images. There is a lot of debate on this issue but from what I have seen, I think that it is probably fairly accurate. The ultimate result of which, was a movement in art that featured realistic depictions of people, places and perspective that had never been seen before. In my opinion, this new way of seeing (the camera obscura model of vision) significantly advanced our struggle with differentiating real from imagined.

Previously, it would be very easy to distinguish between a painting and reality, the two looked totally different. However, after the Renaissance, those differences began to diminish. Later in the 1800s when the photographic process was finally developed, this separation became even less clear. Later still when motion picture was invented, people really had difficulty telling real from fake. When the Lumeiére brother’s film “Train Pulling Into a Station” first showed to audiences, they ducked thinking that they were going to be run over by the train pulling towards the camera. Each of these advances were met with similar reactions. Each movement towards reality further blurs the line between reality and imagination, fact and fiction.

I also understand how this creation of a inanimate object furthers the development of “the gaze.” The more we are able to look upon a representation of an object without it looking back, the more we are able to objectify it. We are so inundated with images of celebrities that we forget that they are in fact real people with lives like our own. Actors that play the same character for a significant amount of time on a television show are often confused with their characters, people forget that they are acting. We confuse reality with imagination all the time.

This blurred line is present in every aspect of our lives. The news seamlessly blends into advertisements for films and products that use the same marketing techniques to convince us of their importance. We move in and out of multi-media landscapes and rarely question their accuracy, or their social responsibility. The question the becomes, where does this all come from? Is it a natural attraction that humans have for the evolution of technology or, is it part of an organized effort to continue power over others? Is it nature or nurture?

It is difficult for us to imagine now the pre-Renaissance person viewed the world. It is almost impossible for me even in the cradle of modern western civilization to imagine a time without cars, television, cell phones and McDonalds. Yesterday, we walked through the Boboli Gardens behind the Pitti Palace and I began to understand how it might have been like, but I was still laden with cameras and digital equipment. I could no longer hear the sound of cars or the invasions of the twenty first century but I still wore the markers around my neck like a leash tying me to the outside world. At noon, a number of bell towers across the city began to ring and for a moment, that is all I could hear. When those ended, I was left with the sound of air and the birds, nothing more. I was alone, and surrounded by nothing but nature, and still, could not clear my mind of the outside world just waiting to get in.

We strolled through rose gardens that carried the scent of the blooms in the air. Through groves of trees that blocked most of the light from above, by fountains and natural arches that stretched across paths cut through the green. The gardens were not all perfectly manicured creations of man, some were allowed to grow and express their own sense of natural wonder. I sat for almost an hour and wrote, inspired by the gardens and the sights before me and realized that I had been having difficulty writing my stories because I hadn’t ever visited anything close to the places I wanted to invent, like the sights I was seeing before me. I had finally found my inspiration to write in the understanding that in order to write, one must do. I was able to write and take amazing photographs in perhaps the most pristine location in all of Florence. Here the bridge between the present and past was the thinnest it could be. And still, I knew that just beyond the walls of this paradise was the modern city, and could not be escaped.

Leaving the gardens and stepping back into the modern age, reminded me that I don’t live in the Renaissance world; that our lives are far different from those that planned the gardens now behind me and, try as I may, I can never live in or be a part of that world. So now I sit here before my computer and attempt to ponder the impact of paintings created five hundred years ago. I try to make assumptions on how those people viewed the world, a totally futile exercise. There are things we can know for sure, but most is just conjecture. The filter of time has done its job and what is left is only glimpses of what life was like. Writings, paintings and other works by those who thought they had the answers. Remnants of men who looked back even further in time to the ancients for their inspiration have survived and from them we try and put together history.

Is it reliable, presumably. However, imagine for a second, future historians who will one day look back onto our civilization and using what is left of our writings and histories they will attempt to make judgments on how we saw the world and how our actions brought bout the future consequences. What would we look like to them? Through our objects: photographs, films, literature, television, radio, newspapers and magazines, they would fix their gaze on us as we have fixed our gaze upon those who have come before us, and the cycle of objectification will continue in perpetuity.