Lewis Koch

I've spent much time gathering together old images, ones from my past, a departed world. I've recycled them, varying their associations, but the process has almost always been a way of rejecting my new world, pampering feelings of loss.

Here, that is London, I see no exoticism or I refuse to see it, only cars and fumes and paved roads and rubbish stuck in corners, and people, well, like me - I've never had much interest in self-portraits. I walk down the road and I feel blind.

So I've been looking at defining exoticism as a way to put less value on it, I've read stuff about Graciela Iturbide, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, I've dug around and read some intellectual papers on the topic of exoticism and photography - a topic well covered since the 1920's. I've discovered many other photographers similarly prompted to defy the exotic whether by technical means, irony, or choice of subject. Most of the successful ones, though, have somehow retained that part of exoticism that is not about possession or escapism, that maintains a platform for meditation, that retains the seductive appeal and, finally that can be applied anywhere to any subject.

The prize of all my researches is Lewis Koch who many of you will know from his Touchless Automatic Wonder, but it is his Notes from the Stone-Paved Path: Meditations on North India, that really hit home for me.

Photo by Lewis Kock

Here's a blurb:

"The significance of Koch's superbly printed images lie in precisely not reproducing the tourist mentality toward that over-exoticized land, India, as found in much color photography by both Indian and Outsider alike. Dayanita Singh, a prominent Indian photographer, has bemoaned the fact that some of her own work caters to Western eyes. And reviewers have pointed out that Robert Arnett's recent book India Unveiled still treats us (in his text) with the Eurocentric myth of the Aryan invasion of India in 2500 B.C. and (in his photographs) with hot, vivid color we Westerners usually associate with India. But Koch's self-conscious personal documentary aesthetic eschews color; shot in black and white, they ignore the stereotypical exotic National Geographic subjects. Instead, this photographer, working within the "snapshot aesthetic" of street photography (whose purity he "ruins" with his textual asides), frames the seemingly banal, the lucky finds, the neglected, and the accidental occurrence. It is almost as if we are seeing India through an Indian flaneur's eyes. This is hard to do given the daunting accretion of texts and documents, fantasies, legends, jokes by indigenous and foreign peoples concerning that vast land. Koch reminds us of this by pairing some of those diverse textual fragments with his images." ~ Lewis Koch Gallery - More interesting stuff said about him in the link.

Photo by Lewis Kock

But you'll find what appears (I say appears because I've seen some images of the same series that aren't included) to be the whole book Notes from the Stone-Paved Path: Meditations on North India here (note the images can be enlarged, see the left hand column), the Jewel of this post!

Submitted by Philip Cartland on 27 December 2007 - 11:18am.