Reality has been cropped out

Photography by Wayland William Whitney

What does that mean, Reality has been cropped out?

When you think about it, there are many different layers and levels of “reality” and it is being cropped, by us or for us all the time. 

We humans are unconsciously cropping reality all the time. Our eyes are only capable of discerning a very narrow band of radiation that we experience as light and our ears an equally narrow band of frequencies we experience as sound. Other animals can see or sense wavelengths of light and hear frequencies of sound that we cannot. There are many forms of electromagnetic radiation all around us to which we are oblivious; our senses have cropped them out.

That football game you are watching on TV is a very skinny slice of reality being presented to you by the network. By focusing on the game on the field, everything else going on in that city/country/the rest of the world is being cropped out. Similarly, a journalist reporting on a particular story is cropping out everything that is extraneous to the story they want to tell. 

Time has cropped reality. The Boston Waterworks Museum is showing us a slice of 19th century reality and New York City’s Intrepid Museum, a slice of the 20th. Reality has been further cropped by the displays in the museums. The Waterworks Museum presents us with a clean, static, quiet view of their engines and pumps, not the cacophonous, dirty, stinky reality of the time. The war machine that is the Intrepid Museum does the same.

My job as a photographer is to present to the viewer the reality of what I see through my lens. 

If you are interested in purchasing a print, the button under each photo will take you to https://wcubedphoto.square.site/ 

There you will see a thumbnail of the photo, and in the "Select an option" section be able to tell the professional photo lab whether you want just the print, or if you want them to mount it too.

Thank you very much for your interest and support. 

Wayland (Bud) Whitney, February 2023

wcubedphotography@gmail.com