Zabriskie point: The mere idea of viewing
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Zabriskie point in Death Valley is famous for the title of the 1970 movie directed by Antonioni. I took these pictures long time ago, before the advent of digital photography. What struck me at the time when I visited the site was the emptiness of the grandiose landscape, echoed by the emptiness of the bench facing it. [The very notion of a bench “facing it” foreshadows the following reflection].
As in John Cage’s successive abstractions and conceptual generalizations of music performance, we can think of defining a minimal landscape viewing experience or, even further removed: a minimal viewing setup devoid of any human experience.
That minimal setup might be a bench facing the scene to be viewed. The bench merely is a geometric reference frame for the placement of a hypothetical viewer. So, viewing can be reduced to its essence, people entirely removed.
But this abstract idea of viewing is a sole construct in your head, as you look at these pictures of a bench “facing” the landscape. You are the one who tacitly interprets the bench as a gravity-defying receptacle for the resting pose of a human, with characteristic hinge points in hips and knees.
[Mirror neurons are doing the job; in this case they are working on a meta level, by recognizing the mirroring that would take place if the bench were occupied by a person]
So the pictures when distributed, say, on Mars would be stripped of their meaning; the bench, seen by another sentient with different anatomy, would be a totally abstract sculpture, devoid of a “face.”
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Oh wow, this one moved a lot of things to me (inside of me). Like the human seeing the earth from the space. The first time I visited this place (the Death Valley) I wrote down that I felt I was walking somewhere in Mars, maybe this bench is an astronaut dress.
The pictures are amazing! What a huge photographer you are!
Thanks for these posts, Joachim!
As usual!
I only now just saw your comment. Thanks!