Ken Schles - Oculus - 2011

Publisher description:
We infuse the world we encounter with meaning, with social and symbolic significance based on the value we place upon representations we share. This, perhaps, is the irony of our conceptualizations: We make and share images so that we may know the world. But what is the nature of our image representations and what do they offer? With Oculus, photographer Ken Schles brings to us an eloquent follow-up to his last photographic effort, A New History of Photography: The World Outside and the Pictures In Our Heads (White Press, 2009).

Through an integration of text and image, Schles extends his investigation into the connection between image and memory by exploring the agency and nature of the image itself. Images, Schles reminds us, inform our "ways of seeing" and "knowing" on an ongoing transactional basis. They are constructions that stimulate our memories which, in turn, conjure other images and other ideas-reinforcing or challenging what we think or know to be true. Schles connects us to these ideas through his use of the image and via short texts that reference ideas about images, memory and metaphors using light found in literature, philosophy, early writings on psychology and in ancient myth. In the confluence of theses sources we find timeless corollaries to deepen our understanding of what the image may offer.

Spurred on by private upheavals to reassess his understanding of the image and its connection to memory, Ken Schles offers to us in Oculus a haunting search for meaning that takes us outside the noise and quotidian confusion of popular culture. Oculus is a journey that points beyond the shadow-play of images. It is meditation on the nature of perception and existence in the gray light of this world.

Book by the author of the classic Invisible City (1988). Copy in excellent condition.