Gus Aronson is a double major in Film and Photography at Bard College in NY. Gus is based around the bronx in NYC where he resides. Gus’ photographic projects are primarily concerned with the nature of photography itself, and more specifically his own relationship to the camera. He is concerned with how the camera acts as a intermediary force between himself and the world around him, changing not only how he sees the world but how he sees and interacts with people both close to him and strangers. In addition to his personal work, Gus has contributed to the Washington Post and Serious Eats Magazine.
At Bard, Gus has shot a number of narrative films for other students, as well as worked on his own narrative and experimental projects. Gus has also been hired to work on short films as in various positions including as the Director of Photography. Gus works closely with two filmmakers, Ralph Arlyck and Melody London.
We Wish We Knew Where We Were Going
A tool for documenting and recording, made possible by the flattening of space and time, Photography is the mechanism for archive. With the intention of archive or not, photography cannot escape the bounds of the medium itself – light and space. Through the capturing and creating of an image, may it be spontaneous or staged, photography is a record of a moment in time, and of the thoughts, feelings, and events that led to its production.
The philosopher Clive Bell, in his 1914 book simply titled “Art,” coined the term Significant Form, which he defines as the aspect that all art shares that expresses emotional content. The music critic Eduard Hanslick, talks about how the artist listens to the forms inherent to the medium in which they work to communicate an idea. The artist doesn’t infuse their own emotional content into a work, but rather listens to how a form, a color, a sounds, a beam of light speaks to them. It is the role of the artist to find, to collect, and to arrange forms that communicate ideas, much like how a writer uses words that are already infused with meaning, rather than creating their own new words that need to be deciphered.
“We Wish We Knew Where We Were Going” is a project about listening, about looking, and about asking questions to the world through images to see what the world has to say in return. Through this process, I’ve changed my notion, and hope to change others about how photography can not only reflect on the past, illuminating and understanding the moment in time it discusses and our past selves, but how it can be a roadmap for the future, a tool for healing, for therapy, for hope, and a tool to look outward, to allow foolishness and freeplay to let us try and see the world unaffected.
To view more of Gus Aronson’s work please visit their website.