I’ve got a new piece at 3 Quarks Daily:
It’s about photos I’ve taken atop tables where I’m eating a meal, mostly breakfast in recent years. The basic rule is that the bottom of the camera must be resting on the top of the table. As a practical matter, I cannot compose these shots with any care. Why not? Because I can’t get my eye down to the camera where I can look through the view-finder (DSLR) or look at the viewscreen (point-and-shoot).
That is to say, not only is there an element of chance in the process – I don’t quite know what image is being captured – but that the resulting image is from a POV that’s not available to me. It’s a world as observed by a creature whose eyes and between an inch and three inches above the surface on which it is standing. Hence the title of this post, “Making it strange on the tabletop.”
“Making is strange” is an old slogan of the modernist avant-garde, with “making it new” as a variant. It’s a doctrine of aesthetic alienation, though alienation is a positive rather than a negative sense. The idea is to bring you closer to the world, to make you more observant, but giving you perspectives you’ve never had, and hence cannot have become habituated too.
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