So this isn’t actually about the image; or, it is, but what I did to it. Please read with me.

Psychologically, the point of impact is when someone first sees something. It happened to me when I first saw Christopher Marley’s Exquisite Creatures and saw blue butterflies arranged in a helix; it happened to me when I first set foot in Immensity; and it happens whenever I experience art in some nature for the first time: huge giant waves of feelings, an absolute reaction.

Very specifically, a reaction that is attenuated and moderated on the next exposure to the same work. Great artworks are ones that minimize that attenuation and make repeat viewings so powerful.

I’m in school for photography, taking an intro course in digital photography, because (believe it or not, I’ve been uneducated about this at all until the 23rd of September) nearly my entire catalog of work is outsider art.

There’s a critique coming up and my work will be judged by the entire class, and I don’t dare show it off ahead of class, so that the impact doesn’t get reduced, nothing gets attenuated. Except earlier tonight, I pulled this image from my assignment folio and showed it, knowing full well that it would lose all its impact.

This image doesn’t really adhere to many of the basic rules of photography: the leading lines go nowhere good, the thirds are absent, not a damn thing is straight. But I was trying to create a mood, and the visible ceiling on the right completely destroys that mood. So I showed this picture to my instructor, and said I would replace it with something better. He’s seen nothing else of the assignment folio.

I take the image back and try to tear it right down the middle, and he’s got an incredible look of shock, the same look a sweaty guy would make about any torn MTG card. Except my hands are too weak, I can’t tear the image. I crumple it up.

The kaleidoscope of feelings across this man’s face as an artist destroys her own work.

Hmm.