Les Saccades (Χρυσούλα)

At the centre of my sense of being, as I'm sure there is with most people, there is a word which resonates, vibrates and oscillates within them for no sensible reason. It might be a word that belongs to a person you haven't yet met, or it might be onomatopoeic, sonorous or even just a hum, an aum or om. 

Whatever (to quote Whiteley) IT is, its truest meaning can only be an unspoken or unread one. The entire bloody thing just comes to life within a gentle, misunderstood moment. Or, a neutrino which might usually pass through the entire earth, galaxy or universe without interacting with any other particles on a sub-atomic level, might accidentally hit you, mid-thought and alter your world for the better for ever. 

And so to Les Saccades.

To get to Saccades you just need a little neuroscience backgrounder ~

"Saccades are rapid jumps that bring images of points of interest to the fovea. Generally, saccades are voluntary, though they usually do not require conscious intervention. The principal trigger for a saccade is retinal position error—a discrepancy between the projection of a desired point of focus onto the retina and the best place for bringing that point into focus, the fovea. The series of scans that you make when you look at an image is called a saccadic scanpath."

So, if you look at an object then suddenly look at another object, in the act of doing this as you perhaps spin your gaze keep your eyes opened, the light from everything in-between the two objects is still taken in by your eyes, but not taken in by your wonderfully compact and processing brain. Instinctively, that chaff of saccadic inputs is discarded by millions of years and epochs of evolution.

Briefly, catching these little fuckers is why my images look largely unlike anything other photographers before me have taken, unless it's their fuck up. Many very good photographers who see themselves as masters of the craft have joked the same joke to me that Yeah, I took a photo of the Opera House just like that by mistake and deleted it, which is fine if your experience of taking the photos could be done by a well-placed security camera without human passion and involvement. 

Don't get me wrong, I like looking at perfectly perfect perfect photos too, but if they're replicable, then they're not me. I have to create in the moment, concentrate until I wear out and am spent, flaccid, and utterly fucked. I get really tired after a couple of hours, completely drained. I keep my eye on the eye-piece and invent, twist, shout, zone out to the point that the world moves on and I stay transfixed in search of capturing Les Saccades. The things I cannot see, but can only ever long for, imagine and perhaps in a moment, capture briefly as an idea for a neutrino-second, then,  see its freedom move through me and beyond on its journey.