Dear Ivan,

We need life curators to survive. We trust them to pre-process raw data to information to meaning, so we can spend less energy having to do it ourselves. And we fulfill this role for others, too. It’s a simple and effective survival system which saves time and energy, and scales. We give our trust to others because we need to, and because it works.

Life is indeed a dream. All other times, we’re wading through the molasses of reality, with never a full sense of the complete context surrounding us. But then again, it would be intolerable to be fully aware all the time. It would be impossible to process. We’d be stifled by the thought of every catastrophic butterfly effect we’d set in motion. We’d be rendered still, immobilised for fear of future history.

Our minds unfreeze us by refusing to see  realities that we know are there but take up too much processing time to continually foreground. We learn to estimate the boundaries within which we operate, and our awareness of overlapping contexts, our ability to think inside a different one and our willingness to do so, defines us.

We could conclude that we’re in a dream inside this reality. Like a kaleidoscope we apply a personal great filter to everything we see. We force meaning onto reality with great ease, changing and colouring it along the way, shaping ourselves subconsciously over a lifetime, continually adding to or subtracting from the weight we carry, giving us wings or chaining us to the ground.

No reality will stand between us and what we want to see.

/// #image_by_image is an ongoing conversation between photographers Ivan Sigal and Anton Kusters. @ivansigal @antonkusters on Instagram ///