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105 01 July 2004

Front Passing

Six months seems an apposite point for reflection, of how i continue to relish the risk of failure and that "Photography with a hammer" has become my modus operandi. Away from the comforting texture of embroidery, slip or rag this work is as concrete as i can imagine, with only occasional words standing between the work and the viewer.

Visually i could visit a circus, a favella - the zoo; become a photographic parachutist entertaining by mirroring the life of others. Instead stripped of significance my meanderings have no signposted "reading" no comfortable box of categories.

The measure of poetry can be part explained as descriptions which "If we came back as ghosts, in order to recognize and relish the parts of life we had insufficiently noticed and hardly valued when alive"[1]. Can there be a visual eqiuivalent to this corpus of experience (knowledge?), pictures of the mundane an unextraordinary unfolding description of life-time.

My digital inclusions can of course be weighed critically, the days of abscence are not so easily explained, neither by weather nor circumstance, rain seemed an easy excuse and tiredeness can weigh heavily. But the interregnums remain largely inexplicable, silent pauses in the days which are not truly reflected in the tempo of the work.

I now see that these photographs, in a style concret(e), share antecedents with music and poetry in a cultural niche of bird song, the slop of tidal swell, digital phones and sirens. Similar rebellions against a continuity of earlier practice, as Nietzche remarked "we must learn to think unhistorically". While in fact i think of Mallarme and his drawers of poetic fragments, of Xavier Dumeste's "Journey around my bedroom" and with humility, of Cioran; i think their is nothing really new, no real progress just the rediscovery of obscure works which offer solace in similarity.

Digital synthesis, sampling and splicing may be the newest elements in a cultural landscape where plasma screens replace printed reproductions in our bars and malls but the zeitgeist is also one where i frequently hear digital photographers referring to themselves as "painters".

[1] http://www.neh.gov/whoweare/vendler/lecture.html