But, what does it mean?
I'm interested when photography falls off the literal radar into the subjective. Part of looking at photography requires something to meditate on. But, I suspect, it's here that the common (in fact not so common as we commonly might think) audience jumps ship. Particularly reflective of this 'jumping ship' is a recent comment on a blog by Tim Atherton regarding Fumimasa Hosokawa's conceptual project, where,
"...the artist researches public records going back 100 years to find obituaries of people who died on the streets in and around Tokyo in accidents, fights or from illness. Hosokawa visited the locations--determined from the descriptions and addresses in the obituaries--and photographed the sites in black and white in an "official-looking" documentary style."
Denizen's comment says:
"Can you tell me what's the connection between the fact that somebody happened to die in these surroundings a hundred years ago and a b&w picture taken today when even the oldest trees are unlikely to have been around at that time?"
At what point does the conceptual become so remote that it loses touch? Judge for yourself among some of my favourites below.
Nadja Groux says, regarding her pictures:
"...in my work the birth canal relates to the birth of oneself. The bruise and scars on the body are a metaphor of the difficulty of this process and show the element of madness in an apparent peaceful environment of floral wallpapers."
Roni Horn's images of the Thames cause us to reflect on the darker side of the river:
"The Thames attracts a very high number of suicides, many from other countries, and a significant number of so-called deaths by misadventure and death by extremely violent means - lots of dismemberment and so on."
Invisible structures by Xavier Ribas
"At first glance, these images make us think of a wild space, natural, undefined, as if without motif. However, this disorganised and entropic space is, in fact, a historical site, the site (niche) of a buried city beneath the rainforest floor...The memory that is represented in these images is not the monument, but a projection, a threshold, a memory 'which is not yet', or that is as yet 'unthought', as in a state of 'inversion' (Robert Smithson). Or, a memory which, simply, does not let itself be thought, as if the rainforest was not only the direct consequence of the desolation and the crumbling of a civilisation, but also the necesary strategy for the preservation of its fragments: we could say that it hides itself, that it buries itself and that it eludes us."
Reflections on Frankenstein, The Arctic Circle, and The History of Science, an exhibition of a new three-part series of large-scale photographs by Catherine Wagner that examines the synthesis of science, nature, and humanity in contemporary society and is inspired by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
Final notes:
Maybe photography has run out of space, forcing photographers to dig deeper, to squeeze every ounce of use from it, or, perhaps photography is a useless story telling medium, with nothing like the fluidity of film, where gaps must be filled by metaphorical linkages.
Submitted by Philip Cartland on 29 May 2007 - 8:31pm.Going backwards
I was looking at some vernacular photography some of which was so charming I began to feel a great loss. Where is the wonder and humor among the endless reams of obsessively 'placed' large format portraits and images of dumpy places, derelict buildings, vacant wastelands - the intentionally 'odd' or inexplicable or downright boring, stuff?
Perhaps its about temperament; I'm by nature a reductionist, who must get rid of all the clutter (coming from a cluttered mind no doubt), back to basics, who needs the sanity of the natural and the poetically 'real', who doesn't like the bombardment of modern culture and all it shiny junk, precision and flashy attention seeking - who wishes to seek the zen simplicity, the old, the rare.
The two images above came from the small book, "photo trouvee" with snaps collected by Michel Frizot and Cedric de Veigy. Its easy not to notice the cat in the second one.
The image below is one of my own, of my father at a agricultural show in Kenya. Humorous as it may be it also has a very sad streak, of course you wouldn't know from the image, but when I was 15 and away at boarding school, a car he was working on fell off its supporting jack (there were no safety blocks), onto his chest and he died.
Too much?
"As the resultant all-consuming Pandemonium of sound and images sweeps across the globe, and the signal-to-noise ratio plummets, it has become more and more difficult for any one voice to be heard above the collective din" - David Levi Strauss, 'Between the eyes'
In this mp3 inteview with Martin Parr:
Submitted by Philip Cartland on 20 May 2007 - 8:49am."The more people using and taking photographs the more the whole photography culture benefits... We're all photographers now...it's, it's.. how can it be anything but fantastic news to anybody."
Relations and Inbetween... the Third Image, Peter Beard
From Peter Beard's 'End of the Game'.
There's some pretty hard hitting connections with the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya during the 1950's early 60's. in this spread of Beard's book. In the far mid right is a portrait of Dedan Kimathi who 'lead' the Mau Mau in the mountainous Aberdare forest and was finally captured and executed. The Trial of Jomo Kenyatta (pictured to the left of carcass), conducted by the British, implicated Kenyatta as the political motivation behind what were brutal tactics of the Mau Mau. Presumably the dead Zebra covered with flies is something of a symbol representing the horror of this period in Kenya's history? Is it a criticism of Kenyatta. Note Karen Blixens (Isaac Dinesen) profile beside that of Tutankhamen and a tribeman, the old East African coin, the elephant, Ahmed, on the left had tusks so big, I've heard it said, that it had to walk up a hill backwards! An xray of the bullet that ended Ahmed's life is at the bottom left.
