Climate change, plastic in the ocean, pollution in the sky, pictures everywhere, but be careful: think about what you see. This text addresses the issue. I wrote it several years ago for the Historical Art Institute, in Zurich and it speaks for my own discoveries as an observer of what is happening to our planet, to the oceans, to the forests, to the rivers, to the truth.             

When I was young I dreamed of becoming an architect. Somewhere along the way I had also begun to take photographs. The photographs were always in black and white, always represented the structure and the space that I wanted to create. The impulse behind digital photography allows one to take pictures of what one wants to see. Analog is ruthless. You take pictures of what you see. Digital is closer to writing, and to politics, one can explore the flow of memories, look for the “real” shape of last night’s dream, and the desired shape of the argument one wants to make about the state of the world. Analog is absolute. This is what the world is made of, these stones, these bricks of light and dark, these suggestions of where the colors might be. Color is an affair of the brain. Your blue is not my blue. Your politics are not my politics. But architecture shapes the world through which we move. My wall is your wall too. My brutal landscape is your brutal landscape too. Susan Sontag has written that for her, photography is a constant return to what has been.

I would like to suggest another possibility: Suppose photography were an advance. Suppose light could be accumulated, one square of light leading to the next and then to another, stepping stones of light across the shadows until finally, there was enough, a constant progress in the images until what is in shadows is left behind, and ahead of you, everything else slowly becomes visible. Suppose we really saw what we were looking at. Only then would we know how bad things really were and what to do next.