Reality and existence

Then he [Edward Weston] said: "You're getting too complicated; you're taking pictures that people won't understand easily. " My feeling about Edward is that he was the end of the great period of photographing objects for their external, beautiful qualities. He was not involved in the internal, which is more philosophical. I think Whitehead said: "Not only is the world more mysterious and queer than you think it is, but it's queerer than you can think it is." Well, the externals just simply don't tell you this mystery. You see, there's a strange paradox. People usually think that when they go inward, they become introspective or they become mystical. I'm not mystical and I'm not introspective. What I felt was that my mind could have an "eye" which could go farther than my physical eye. I didn't have to respond to what I perceived in terms of the external qualities of things. There is no life without change. All right, you try to make pictures that evoke the sense, not only of the external, but of this thing that you feel inside, a thing that your eye can't see directly but your mind knows it's so. This, to me, is not introspective, this is real. The last few years I've defined reality and existence, but some people wonder what reality and existence have got to do with photography - it's purely philosophical. I don't think so at all. It is philosophical, of course - everything to me is philosophical, if you want to treat it that way. People we call philosophers are just the ones that go more deeply into things. Reality, to me, became enormously important because reality and existence had always been equated - I'd been taught to equate them - and I think people do equate them. In other words, if a thing is real, it exists. Of course it exists, but there's an independent significance between the two that is just as important and this is the only original idea or concept that I've ever had. I know people think about it and talk about it loosely, but I haven't heard anyone come out and say it. Existence, though technically of reality, has an independent significance because it is really the unknown. Your faith and your reason tell you that there must be some source for what is real to you, but what's real to you is only of your senses, brain and mind. All those things that exist out there are not real to you at all till they are sense-perceived and once sense-perceived and remembered, you have ideas about them, beliefs about them and that's what reality is all about. So, the point is, you develop your realities, you don't develop your existence at all, because that's taken care of by the supreme being, you don't have to worry about that. Reality is an on-going process that can be developed and developed and developed.
Wynn Bullock

Dialogue with Photography, Paul Hill & Thomas Cooper

You can see some of his works here.