Rangefound

Rangefound: I take pictures with a rangefinder camera, where two distinct visual planes (one from the camera’s viewfinder window and one from the rangefinder window) are brought together in the eyepiece to create a single focused image, captured by the click of the shutter and frozen in time as a photographic moment. And I view this mechanical process reflective of my own internal photographic methodology in that, mentally, two distinct planes – reality and perception – are joined together in rangefinder fashion into a focused union that creates my image; the midpoint meeting of what may exist as so-called “fact” in the world and what my perception is of it (looks like, smells, feels like, etc.) as determined through framing, angle, lens, and time. Rangefound in many ways is the photographic result what I have discovered so far, my acquired visual knowledge at the meeting of these two planes; the image accumulation of what I have found on this range of life that has mentally resonated into focus, rangefinder-like, between the hovering worlds of truth and myth, fact and fantasy, reality and perception which ultimately creates its own interpretive veracity. The photos I have taken in rangefound are not merely visual souvenirs from a journey’s completion, only evidence of where I have been up to a point. And they raise the question: which is truer in the optical mind, the “real world” or my images of it? This is what I must answer and why I continue to photograph.