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.
