this is my final piece i am handing in for reassessment of negotiated study PHVP3. it will comprise many of the techniques of my failed project but with a wider philosophical scope.
it is a retrospective of my encounters with practice and theory split into segments that refer to each other as well as other segments.
it is a story in pictures about how pictures weren't enough to tell my story. it will end with the conclusion that i want to be a writer not a photographer, but that photography was a the study that allowed me to reach this conclusion with my own unique set of writing tools, ie: photography.
This opening segment is about my introduction to photography. The first photograph (entitled “when I was happiest”) is from Paris when I was doing street photography in the spirit of Charles Baudelaire. This is before I challenged my notion of aesthetics and I was happy shooting ironic/telling images from the city. The second image, again, is from this period of initiation. I was heavily influenced by Elliot Erwitt’s sense of humor and visual attraction and so the title “me and elliot” reflects this. Bang bang shoot shoot is the line from ‘happiness is a warm gun’ simply as a reference to the subjects pointing. There are connotations possible with violence and god but these are unnecessary.
When I resolved to pursue photography at university, ending my course in music, I went to a little camera shop in Embankment, London and picked up an old canon AV1. This image is from that first roll I snapped around the area. This picture symbolized the change of courses for me and has been important to me ever since.
These are images from my second year. I would like to point out at this point that these are mostly not images from school work I was doing, rather they are one offs that I took as part of my personal work.
They are my reactions to what I saw as deliberate attempts by photographers to build around themselves a sense of mystery, as if they had access to something other people did not. This was a problem for me as I believed art was for the common man (Barton Fink syndrome) yet here I was being faced with, as I saw it, a vague-ness and pretentious-ness in some of the artists I was told were giants in their fields.
this first image, entitled “I hate Y.B.A/knowing Conner Sewers” is a literal statement followed by a play on the word ‘connoisseur’ which comes from the French word for ‘knowing’ and a further word play by splitting the word into ‘Conner’ (as in being conned) and ‘Sewer’ (as in modern art is a sewer)
The next photograph is part of as series I did in a recently burned down building that used to be a meth-amphetamine kitchen. I thought about Jeff Wall’s destroyed room, and conjectured that this room was in fact destroyed, so I shot it to resemble Wall’s. I wondered exactly why it mattered that Wall put so much effort into making his sets, of course this is an attempt to bring photograph closer to painting, but I also think this is a mistake. It is like the mistake feminism made in the 60’s by suggesting that women could be men just was well as men could. Fair point, but is that way to make genders equal or does it rarify the idea of ‘the male form’ as the natural mode of 'man'?
The last image here is one I took in a bookshop by TATE modern while I was waiting for a friend to see an exhibition of futurist art. This was the first book I opened and the first page I turned to. I was amused by it, but I was further amused by photographing a perfect rebuttal to it that said “THIS is the power in photography, that I can photograph your statement ironically” a few people too this image to be literal. It wasn’t. Although my feelings towards it changed when I failed this module and quickly came to think that I might have been wrong to rebuttal the statement. This highlights for me a tragedy in my character that I can very quickly become disheartened by something trivial.
I quickly became obsessed with words and images. It had been suggested in lectures
by Greg Lucas that photography is a terribly inefficient way to express something, as
compared with writing. I disagreed with this, as Kubrick said about 2001:
“I don't have the slightest doubt that to tell a story like this, you couldn't do it with
words. There are only 46 minutes of dialogue scenes in the film, and 113 of non‐
dialogue. There are certain areas of feeling and reality—or unreality or innermost
yearning, whatever you want to call it—which are notably inaccessible to words”
However my frustration with the photograph was peaked, and I realize now that we
cannot apply Kubrick’s idea of film to still photographs. This is why photographers
work in series. This is also why Duane Michals works with words. I think this was possibly my first attempt to reconcile words with images, and I was
happy that I could use this tool to contextualise an image exactly the way i wanted to.
This piece (entitled ‘in which I become verbose’ a throw to chapter titles in Winnie the Pooh, my favourite childhood book) is about exactly this attempt to constrain your audiences perception with words. And the following piece (entitled ‘the pig in the straw hat’) examines it’s failures.
"the problem is you see what you want to see/
the pig in the straw hat"
there was a period in which I thought I was becoming a photographer proper. I felt I was capable of the vague‐ness and photo‐awareness that I saw in practitioners. Looking back, these images are meaningless to me. So I don’t have much to say about them. The reason I include them is precisely because they are meaningless. I am using title‐ing to show this .
Nonsense from what I got into it (“plagiarism” left, “she was a pilot’s wife” right)
This period did not last long as this is when I started reading Queneau and Wietz. This is probably my first attempt at detornement, something that would become much more important in my work. The development of my theory was superimposing a drunk friend on Kandinsky.
So I had begun to feel like I was not cut out to be ‘in the loop’. The first two images are about this, the idea that art in inaccessible to everyone. I actually agree with this, in some ways, but the feeling of being outside something that comes from inside is a strange one. The first image I took on medium format, and the second was taken of me during the taking of the first.
“this is where you want to be” “this is you, looking through the bars”
The last image here, is about a disagreement with a lecturer. During a presentation I was told that I thought too much about theory and not enough about practice. This was true. So I allowed myself to lose faith in knowing art theory, in favour of taking images. I include this image because it is an amusing rebuttal to the ilk of an earlier image (hence the first title “twins”) In this piece it will represent my move into wanting to write over wanting to take pictures.
So what did I learn? Well, through a study of visual aesthetics I encountered the theory that would spark my interest in writing art theory, in the art manifesto (the politics of art) in revolution, in anarchy and love and connected‐ness more than what we are offered in the west. Fine, this isn’t exactly about photography is it? It is a story in pictures, about how pictures weren’t enough to tell my story. It ends with a photograph of a lover. The final point is that, although I have found what pleases way I can make a meaningful contribution, through a photographic examination of aesthetics, and my interest lies in how art is a force for betterment in the world, that all we really want is love. i dare say contentment is the enemy of invention/good art. shame really.
i couldn't say limerence with pictures, so i photograph it in words
