In this case, the camera actually becomes both the connecting factor between the mediums of perception, as well as it might act as a protheses to compensate for the handicapped sight. That is to say, when sight is not limited to the eye or vision, but actually is complemented by all other senses in their profundity. With depth of sight, I actually do mean what Akinbode Akinbiyi means when he talks about listening carefully. Thus in what one might call photographic stream of consciousness, one tends to recognise the depth of sight. Especially taking into consideration the way Africa, especially, is portrayed in terms of photography mostly by Western photographers, this handicap of sight, the dearth of depth of sight becomes more evident. Despite the fact the sense of sight has been thrusted to be the avant-garde of all the sensing, one can’t help but feel, paradoxically, a certain degree of amputation of that sense of sight at the same time. Indeed one can say that despite the over-availability of photographic tools like cameras on our phones, as well as digital means of capturing, sharing images, and reproducing images, we have more and more forgotten how to see. Therefore not every photograph will be a capture of streams of consciousness. It goes without saying that in an era of hypervisibility, and with the inflation of photography, not every image shot is a photograph, and not every photograph taken makes one a photographer. So can photography be a means of capturing those streams of consciousness ? Which is to say can a photograph shot tell us something about that state of mind, that which provoked those senses to awake and led to the shot ? Can that single shot tell us something about the conceptual and practical processes of development to that single image ? And then the beholder encounters the image, does that stream of consciousness that started with the artist flow over ? Thinking is as much an active and a passive process, and what becomes important is how that which is seen, heard, smelled, felt, tasted or perceived in another way triggers the inner eye to see or inner voice to utter thereby setting this stream of consciousness in motion. The moment something catches the attention of the photographer, the many associations that are made conceptually and aesthetically, the many references that are invokes and situations convoked lead to the shot. The moment of a snapshot could be an extended moment of capturing of this stream of consciousness. So if one can refer to the literary technique of writing called stream of consciousness as ‘thinking in words’, how could we imagine the artistic practice of photographic stream of consciousness as ‘thinking in images’ ? The art piece as an expression of an interior monologue or the artist’s sensory reactions to external events. There are many flows one can think of that come together in this piece - the continuous flow of thoughts from the artists to each other, the flow of thoughts to the listeners, and the flow of thoughtsīetween two Africans that could stand in for the flow of energies between the motherland and the diaspora.Īt any rate, it is this notion of the portrayal of an artist’s viewpoint through the artistic expression of thought processes that I am interested in. the continuous flow of a person’s thoughts and conscious reactions to events. A conversation befitting its title that is reminiscent of what William James in his Principles of Psychology (1890) called stream of consciousness, i.e. What begins with a mesmerising and quasi liturgic piano solo by Abdullah Ibrahim in the first minute, and consecutively followed by a characteristic melodic mathematical solo by Max Roach before both musicians converge after 2:45min for the rest of the piece is less a tete-a-tete, and rather something like a soul-to-soul conversation. In the 21:01 electrifying minutes of Abdullah Ibrahim and Max Roache’s opening piece for the eponymous album Streams of Consciousness (1977), one is spellbound and enthralled by the sheer intensity, entrancement and alchemy delivered to the listener in the form of the sonic.
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