READING BOOKS

Text at the very basic level can also be a visual signal. I found a similarity between the action of reading words and reading images. Once I have learned an English word, I can translate its meaning without any effort. But when I read English words that I am not familiar with, the words become signs that I try to understand with my imagination. That encourages me to keep researching the cognitive ability of humans. Anjali Hans and Emmanuel Hans wrote in their paper Kinesics, Haptics and Proxemics: Aspects of Non -Verbal Communication that:

“The Non-verbal communication (NVC) is conveying of emotions, feelings, and messages through actions and expressions rather than words…Nonverbal communication is the process of communication through sending and receiving wordless (mostly visual) cues between people. It is sometimes mistakenly referred to as body language (kinesics), but nonverbal communication encompasses much more, such as use of touch (haptic) and distance (proxemics)...” (Abstract).

    The act of seeing and understanding is very different. Seeing is the “hardware” part of vision, it includes the process by which light enters our eyes and fires a signal to a neurotransmitter, which then propagates the signal to the brain. Understanding can be considered the “software” part of vision. It includes pattern recognition and associated higher-level reasoning. We are not always conscious about the process of seeing and understanding, especially when we encounter non-verbal communication. Awareness of these underlying processes is very important, especially when we are continually bombarded by visual images from all kinds of media today. We are in a world in which most people do not have enough patience to read words because they can obtain information more directly and efficiently through imagery. The evolution of social media, from Facebook to Twitter and now Instagram, shows that people rely more and more on images to learn about and understand the world. In 2014, the second year of my graduate program, I started to make a series of works that used books as visual symbols of word information.

     In this series of work, Reading Books, I used a 4X5 large format camera focusing on the non-bound side of two closed books that were stacked vertically. By doing so I offered my viewer an opportunity to read the book as a textured visual symbol via the format of images. Photography as non-verbal communication can easily be overinterpreted. I appreciate this tendency as it regards artworks. A book can be read by the words on its pages, but in this work I showed that a book can also be read as an object itself. Photography limits the ability of the human eye to see in different perspectives and to define the borders of their visual field. In this work, I allow images to have significant information distortion and the minimum possible documentary value. By doing so, I am trying to deliberately present the possibility that the images might be taking the role of words.