Adam Graham Photography

There are certain fundamental questions that everyone explores in their own way at some point in their lives. Currently my question is, what is Being? What is that common characteristic that everything that exists shares? We live our lives every day acting as though we have an answer to this question, but it often goes unexamined. Photography has become my means for the examination of Being. Photography, however inadequate for full explication of an idea, acts like a spotlight, highlighting a particular object for further examination. Through photography the common can become spectacular, demanding reflection. In my visual exploration of the question of Being, I have turned to photographing beach rocks. I find them to be a fitting subject because rocks, as material, change naturally at such a slow rate. Because rocks do not grow and decay, on an intuitive level they appear as close to simple existence as can be found.

Day to day interaction is based almost entirely on assumptions. When we interact with the world around us, we assume that things will work the way that they always have. We go to sleep at night assuming that the sun will rise in the morning. We sit down assuming that the chair will support us. These things are not unbreakable laws, just inductions based on experience. Living would be impossible without them. Similarly, interacting with one another is based on assumptions. When I use a word in conversation, I assume that you have a similar meaning attached to that word. Without these assumptions, we could not go about our daily lives. If we never examine these assumptions, however, we simply stumble through life, just skimming the surface. One of the richest concepts that we use continually without much thought is the idea of Being. My first exposure to the confusion of trying to express the complexity of existence linguistically came during junior high French classes. Learning a second language makes you think about all the things that you take for granted in your first. Trying to learn how to use être and avoir gave me my first taste of the complexity of the verb ‘to be’. Think about how many times through the day that you use it and then try to define it without using one of its forms as the definition. Through my high school years, I was greeted each morning by the school motto ‘esse quam videri’, ‘to be rather than to seem’. It wasn’t until my philosophy studies in university, though, that I was ever urged to really examine what we mean when we say that something ‘is’.

My primary method for this exploration has changed from the language of academic papers to the visual language of photography. In many ways this feels like a fundamental way to treat a fundamental concept. Heidegger referred to our assumed, intuitive way of treating Being as an ‘ontical’ understanding. I find it fitting that this term is so close to the word ‘optical’. For most of us, our interaction with the world is based on the information we take in visually. Sixty to eighty percent of the sensory information that we process each day is visual. The majority of our intuitive knowledge then, comes from the faculty of sight. Objects which we usually quickly process visually are fixed in time for longer reflection through photography.

Taking a picture of something is an affirmation. It is a statement of the importance of the existence of the thing. It alters the object’s mode of interaction with the world and it then becomes an object for reflection. For example, a hammer in its usual relation to the environment is as a tool for hammering. When it is needed, it is picked up and used, and then forgotten about until it becomes useful again. If a photograph is made of the hammer, though, it becomes an object of reflection. Rather than just picking up the hammer and using it, the image forces us to think about what hammers are used for, what their existence consists of and means. It is because of this photographic alteration that rocks are a particularly good subject for an exploration of the idea of existence.

On an intuitive level, rocks seem to be almost pure Being. They simply are. They appear nearly immutable. They don’t grow and decay. They don’t change with the seasons. It is often only violent outside action that causes them to change. Rock appears as almost entirely raw material. There is an endless variety in the uses that we have given to rock from the roads we drive on to the windows in our homes. Rock, like the verb ‘to be’, is encountered in all kinds of unconscious ways without often causing reflection. Because of this ubiquity, rock, when our relation to it is altered by the photograph, can raise many questions and point us in many useful directions when it comes to a question of existence.

When rock is altered from an object for use to an object for reflection by the photograph, the first questions it raises are ‘What is existence on a most basic level? What does it mean to be, in the way that rocks appear to us? What are the similarities in our frail human existence and the seeming immutable existence that rocks exhibit?’ Beach rocks in particular raise the question of existence in an environment. What around us affects us and what do we affect? At the beach rock shapes the movement of the ocean but is also shaped by it. This leads to a further question: how does time impact existence? There are different types of change shown in rocks at the beach. The rhythmic tides can quickly change the shape of the rocks at the beach by shifting and piling them, sucking them out and pushing them in. The tide also slowly changes the rocks, smoothing and rounding them as they are pulled into and over one another for years. Is our existence similarly changed by both the short and long term tides of time? Similarly, the questions that these photographs raise will change as time goes on. They are a first step, a means to create reflection, both for the photographer and the viewer.