ThisQuietReverie posted:

A practical but non-academic interest in perceptual expectancy. To me, photography is engaging because when you reallly break it down we have the capability to pluck out a single moment from all the continuous moments that create time, preserve it and present it to other humans who did not or could not observe it.

Someone smart once told me "your eye is not your own". What he meant was that any piece of art I encounter was influenced by the artist's own experiences and everyone before who influenced him. He wasn't saying that everybody is ripping off everyone else, but that someone prior has already defined your sense of aesthetics as observer or creator. I've always liked that and it has led to collecting (even if only mentally) and noticing things I find interesting.

So we have the capacity to freeze time unrelenting and the ability to affect other people through our decisions of what to show or not show and how we present our little square slices of frozen time. Time! I marvel.

As for the second photo, that is part of the actual box for a doll named "Saucy". Saucy makes horrific demon faces at you when you rotate her arm 360 degrees. The photo is in black and white so the unnecessary information has been stripped away. I leaned the box back a bit to give me some DOF. The girl on the box is depicted as squealing in delight but we rely so heavily on total visual language that when you obfuscate the mouth of a wide eyed human, joy becomes terror. Parlor tricks.

As I've expended too many words above explaining, context is everything.

Scrub forward to about the one minute mark for some nightmare fuel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdNMYGBER6k