2: i hate Y.B.A

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.