…the lenses on my antique stereo Kodak and those on my face were about the same age. 

Being from Detroit, some of the best music of my generation came from artists nurtured in Motown. My family had a grand piece of furniture that housed a combination AM/FM radio and LP player. Symphonic sounds softly blended into one musical composition, comprised of outputs from a left and right speaker.

It works the same for stereo photography and everyday vision.

Artists re-claim older technologies even as newer, more capable devices become available. To infuse new narratives into old bones. Re-tracing steps. Re-thinking pictures. Re-considering the body as a myth making machine. Making my own stereo view pictures, staring cross-eyed at side by side frames felt like gazing into deep dimension. 

This was until 2017, when the image in my right eye failed. Not so much failed as glitched, like a tear in the matrix. My eyes were gradually losing an aspect central to stereo vision. Alignment. We expect our eyes to perform, whether on sunshine days or under duress, in rainstorms, or at twilight without sleep, when squinting at fine print documents, or tapping out phone poems.

I wake up, rub dew from my eyes. Focus. Misalignment. A bit of debris I suppose. Close and re-open. Blink, and blink again. Eye drops. Blink. First the left, then right, comparing notes. I close them both and look toward the table lamp. I notice a small circular eclipse of darkness within the brilliance. Opening my eyes again, it becomes more apparent.

A small bump in the lower corner of the view. Turn left. Same. Recognition. I reach for more eye drops.

Early onset AMD. That is what the inter-webs call it. Age related. I’m related to a lot of people. Now I’m related to an age. It’s not a malfunction of the cornea, but closer to the brain, where inputs are inverted into deep perceptions. I read more on the topic, change my diet, ingest supplements, wear polarized lenses, postpone the DMV, take notice of the labor to see.

Parallels between the age of my antique Kodak and of the lenses on my face. Both my eyes and the glasses I have worn since a teenager. Severe AMD can obstruct the point of focus that allows us to recognize faces. This scares me. It would require more dependence on side eye, peripheral vision.

The artist’s obsession is to ask deeper. I go in reverse and become less diligent to “correct” photos, to bring them into alignment. I come to terms with infidelity. Death of field embraced. The more I do, each image becomes wholly it’s own terrain. Illusion, as optical computation, takes backseat to ailment and deterioration, the reality under the surface of all things.