Statement
I have had a lifelong interest in perception, reality and the human mind's compulsion to find patterns and derive meaning in the world around us. This interest has lately expressed itself in an ongoing series of mountain streambed photographs, collected mainly in Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona.
Creeks and streams turn out to be an excellent starting place for thinking about the way that seemingly random arrangements of stimuli can be perceived as non-random and meaningful by the human mind. Standing creekside in the forest with my camera hanging out over the flow, I am often distracted by what sounds like distant voices or snatches of music. But inevitably, it is only the sound of water that I'm hearing as it falls along the rocks further up or down the creek.
Of course, we hear the brook babbling or singing because the mind wants and needs to recognize things it knows. And so it takes what is available, in this case, the stream of notes and tones created by the flowing water, finds audio shapes it seems to know and thrusts it upon our attention.
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I trip over the same phenomenon while looking at many of my streambed photos. Sometimes, the recognizable shape that emerges from the chaos is hard to escape, as in "avianaura," where a golden raptor appears in mid-flight in the lower half of the image. In other cases, the overall image is unrecognizable, but within it lurk faces of people, animals and unworldly creatures.
I suspect that what you see in these images tells you more about your own mind than it does about the watery stream that produced them. The things you see most easily are perhaps the things you most want to see, or most fear to see.
But I'll leave such speculation to psychoanalysts. That the effect of these images is pleasing and often surprising is more than enough and it motivates me to click on down the creeks in hopes of capturing more amazing illusions.
Steven Kosek
Silver City, New Mexico
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