It’s not a story, it’s a thing

A word painting is me describing a thing. Take San Francisco City Hall, the way I see it right now from my apartment: a gray dome with golden accents, blending into the faded blue of the sky and a little gray from the fog, because it’s foggy. Columns and windows, a portico, some stuff on the roof that shines. Greenish-blue windows along the perimeter that face my way. I could put the five-hundred-millimeter on it and keep going, little by little.

A thing like that has no beginning and no end. It just is there. All I can do is walk around it with my attention and say what it lands on—and attention keeps switching, so another angle, another light, another mood is another description. None of them is City Hall. Each is my experience of it, and if I lay down enough of them, what assembles in you is not the building. It is what I paid attention to. You start to see something like what I see.

Most communication is not this. Most communication is “I don’t have time—compress it for me”: pick the one relevance that matters, compress along it into a message, and the rest drops on the floor. That’s fine when time is short, but it serializes experience into a story it never was. When we stand somewhere together I don’t have to do it—I can just point. Language has no pointing. The closest it has is a name, and “City Hall” hands you your City Hall, not mine: the identity arrives, the experience doesn’t. A word painting is pointing rebuilt out of words—look at this, now this, now this—until experience reconstitutes on your side instead of a message arriving.

A photograph is the same act in a single exposure. I photograph what I attend to, so my photographs are traces of my attention. I remember in structure, not in words.

It’s not a story, it’s a thing.