Saccades, rapid movements of the eye between fixation points, are the fastest movement the body can make. They are both voluntary and involuntary. The rapid eye movements that occur during an important phase of sleep are also saccades.
An image is read, just as a text is, with voluntary and involuntary movements of the eyes, fixing and tracking, filling the gaps with sensory memory, expectations and beliefs to create an illusion of continuity and wholeness. We ride the surface of experience, jumping between fragments and call it consciousness.
Alexander Brattell’s photographs are a personal animism, a psychological reportage that forms a continuous thread through his career as an artist, commercial photographer and lecturer. His pictures document the sensation of seeing, fixing moments of heightened awareness in a search for resonance beyond subject matter.
