Too Much For Words

An image stops you. It grabs on, slowing the liquid speed of sight to a gelatinous pace. What causes this slowness is uncertain, but the image is particular. It can be described as indigestible because something in it blocks your intake system. It trips you up. Whatever this something is, it doesn’t exist in the hundreds of other images you see everyday. This rare, sticky, trippy, hard to swallow picture seems to have a freedom from explanation. It puts in play something more than its apparent subject. It’s uncertain what this is. It could be a discrete part of the image: a visual detail, the light, the exposure or it maybe the life the photograph has lived, being moved and stored and damaged that make it a puzzle to be figured out. This is a non verbal level of meaning, and no spoken or written explanations are not able to envelop the attraction a picture generates. Images become mysterious, and exciting when they stop doing their jobs, or when whatever their job was becomes unclear. The image defamiliarized gives itself a second chance to be looked at and a chance to mean something new. The image interrupted, without language floats, in a sea of potential networks and connections remaining obstinate in the face of questions.