MASKING / SEPIA

Masking. Consumer electronics mask the extreme inequality at work in their production, or in capitalism generally. Organic labels distract us from the fact that meat was factory farmed, not produced locally, or is unhealthy. The lying bastards. We find it comforting to believe that plausible denials and media spin are necessary, that practices without some kind of defense given or gentle excuses made would be untenable. That the duplicity is necessary, or at least strategic. That it has some reason.

Sepia tones suggest something old. The lost world, the past is a foreign country. To see sepia, we see the inaccessibility of what has been but no longer is. Regular color photos have a less nostalgic feeling; color camera phone images continue to feel like the world we live in now. Like black and white, sepia feels different. Yet sepia tones can be produced by many means other than age. Sepia lies?

Sepia seems to mask some thing that is real, but to which we have no access. Sepia suggests that there might be some lost referent. The years that degrade a photo to sepia tones have also visited dramatic changes on the thing photographed. Yet it is not these years but sepia itself that suggests to us some lost thing behind the mask.

The vocabulary of masking draws on western secular traditions (that come from Christianity, among other places) that see other religious and magical practices as fundamentally hollow. In this vocabulary, to cover with a mask is to hide, to worship is to misplace reverence, to believe is to misunderstand, and articles of faith are limits on free thought. For such thinking, masks stand between the viewer (e.g. ethnographer) and the one who ought to be viewed (native). It is from this point of view that masks seem to hide the face, rather than reveal, translate, extend, multiply, or transform the face. Batman’s mask does not hide his real face, it is his real face.

Sepia tones imply that what we see represents some absent thing that we cannot see properly, and to which we have little access at all. This is different from generic questions of representation (e.g. how a commercial represents a product) because sepia is not the content of a sepia toned image. It is a stylization that implies the existence, quite unlike our own, of a place, dimension, period, or thing. Sepia often does not stand between our view and the object we look to, but to the extent we treat it this way, the objects and properties it implies attain a reality that is not just sufficient for deception or necessary to manage popular impressions. It produces a reality from a special effect.