Visual titles and comments

I saw Taryn Simon's work at Tate Mod last year. In her work A Living Man Declared Dead and other Chapters displays of faces were juxtapositioned with photographs of other objects that related to the people in the portraits in one way or another. The function of these comments becomes similar to that of a title.

Photographing film

Schapiron and the way that we normally encounter a strip of film stills

In a resent visit to Stockholm I went to Fotografiska museet. I saw the work of Steve Schapiron, he was the American photographer who worked alongside the moving image camera men at Taxi-driver and Godfather sets to take stills of the action. These stills are now celebrated within the moving image world as a still image photographer Schapiron could capture the atmosphere and the action from a different angle then the moving image camera, he could hover just outside the mise on scene to capture an in-between of reality and stage. Also possible because of the notion of photography as an honest and truth-telling medium in contrast to film as a fictional one.

a dossier new english definition

Dossier, I relate it to some sort of collection of body fluids slightly spiced up with a few breadcrumbs and other forms of fluff wiped up from the bathroom floor and the bit where the mattress sits on the bed-frame and the balls of black often collected on the base of the hairbrush pins. Basically a jar with a collection of human residue from the last few moths. A bit like the skin that a snake sheds as it goes from small to larger.

The mother

Melanie Manchot

My mother and my mother's mother

Melanie Manchot visited on last weeks guest lecture program and I thoroughly enjoyed watching her talk again. She showed some of her earlier work and I am fascinated about how open she is on her talks. As a contrast to the Otolith Group who's work is currently shown at Fabrica and they seem a lot more reserved and private. 

Manchot showed images that she took of her mother and I remembered hearing Ester Teichman talk about taking nude picture of her mother. I am wondering what those two projects have i common, if anything. What does the mother represent and how can that be shown in photographs? Melanie put her mother in the foreground of sublime landscapes while Esther Teichmann had her mother pose in-front of backdrops. 

Ester Teichmann

Possible journey of the gaze

A mirror with an incling

Unknown artist

Daguerreotypes have been called a mirror with a memory. In that case this is a mirror with a fading or maybe even a secret memory.

Photography, a present without a future

Wing Walker Todd

Aaron Siskind Terrors and pleasures of levitation

Falling Man

Capa's Falling Man

The Snapshot of falling/failing/death versus the rigidity of the daguerreotype.

Rephotographing Atget photos and text by Christopher Rauschenberg Eugene Atget documented Paris from 1888 until his death in 1927. Like many people, I consider him to have been the greatest photographer of all time. Atget straightforwardly documented the city with photographs that give you the feeling that all the transitory things that people do and are have washed away, leaving only their transcendent accomplishments. On a 1989 trip to Paris, I suddenly found myself face to face with a spiral-topped gatepost that I knew very well from a beautiful photograph by Atget (the photograph on the left). I rephotographed his gatepost from memory (the photograph on the right) and wondered how many other Atget subjects might still be holding their poses. There, among the things and places that Atget had admired, I resolved to return and do a rephotographic exploration to discover if the haunting and beautiful Paris of Atget’s vision still existed. Eight years later, in 1997 and 1998, I made three trips to Paris and rephotographed 500 of the scenes that Atget photographed. 24 of those image pairs are shown here in Lens Culture, with my image on the right and Atget’s image on the left. As I was rephotographing Atget images, I kept seeing places that he hadn’t photographed but that seemed to me to be also rich with the feeling of his work. I photographed hundreds of those places where I felt Atget’s spirit. Included here are just six of them. I don’t claim to have been channeling Atget, or that Atget would have photographed those places were he to see them. I was walking around Paris “in Atget’s shoes” and this is where they took me. Having photographed all of these scenes, it is clear to me that the Paris of Atget’s vision is still there and available to eyes that look for it. In central Paris, most of the scenes that Atget photographed are still there, and still posing. You can see the effects of acid rain on them; you can see the effects of graffiti; most of all, you can see that the magical streets of Paris are now thickly covered with parked cars. However, among all the other Parises that co-exist so thickly in one amazing city, Atget’s Paris is still definitely and hauntingly there. --Christopher Rauschenberg

Death

the condition of an artist in a postmodern time

If there is no truth, only interpretations of reality, how do I situate myself? It is increasingly felt that there are not answers and too often also, felt like there is no reality or several different or one true reality but with myself outside of it. I can not define what is real and I can not define myself I do not know if I am real and that what I do is real.
And quite often I know that it isn't real or at least a very abstract version of something real. A file on a computer seems far too abstract to be taken seriously.

The realest thing is the past, the past was real, I can remember it I was there, so it happened. I can not say the same thing about the present, at least not until it has past, then I can know, (not with certainty but as a guess) that it happened. I am still not sure.

Projecton of the grown up onto the young

Untitled (Boy in Old Man’s Mask with Doll)
c. 1960

Ralph Eugene Meatyard

http://photoi.tumblr.com/

Re-examing relations

John Stezaker

The relationships between the small and the large make a new reality, a new truth.

Uncomfortable stillness

From Any Warhol's Kiss.

A moment that you could return to

Is there a moment that you wish that you could return to? If you could have a moment again what would it be? It could be any moment, might have been yesterday, or many years ago. Why do you want to return there? Would it be possible to relive or is it gone forever? What do you think?

sounds, spoken poetry

 When I recorded Alison, I asked her to read quite a few poems. Some Andrew Motion as well as some quotes by Artaud and also some of Bas Jan Ader's mother's poems that she wrote after his disappearance. Here are some of these, more will be edited and uploaded shortly.

Better Life

All things must die

Artaud on suicide

Addition:
 
Field of Mirrors

Bas Jan Ader's Mother

An Oasis with one week left till submission

Few songs have got the ability to make your eyes shut at the fist note and pierce through a thick layer of musts for a moment of calm.

Leonard Cohen – Chelsea Hotel #2


update: a few more songs that do just that

Leonard Cohen – Love Calls You By Your Name

Leonard Cohen – A Singer Must Die

What to do next..

I thought I would flag up my parallel blog where I am writing about what I am doing for professional practice. It can be found at http://propraktik.blogspot.co.uk/

Stop motion from filmstills

As short stop-motion from stills extracted from the 16 mm film.

In frustration

The worst thing about failing is the fear of failing. The thought that three months, or maybe I could even say years, work will have been in vain. All of those hours spent thinking, writing, reading, reasoning, gluing, cutting, photographing, editing, discussing would have not tended up in a product. A thing which has a value and a meaning.

Being creative is an ever lasting roller-coaster of ups and downs (or perhaps that is just my life, with or without creativity). I left Maidstone last thursday feeling like I had worked out a solution, all of those hours had finally paid off and I had the resolution to my project. I was going to display the work in a way that felt meaningful to me and I felt that I was on my way to making the kind of work that I find interesting when visiting galleries. Images packed with a depth of history and I felt strongly that the work was relevant and that it could give me a voice. So what has changed in four days? Files have gone from digital form to printed form, dragged through a critique. Far from being useful it feels like the experience has thrown me of path back into the “resolving” phase which is very slippery and close to failing. Because what if you can't resolve it in time what if your final major piece isn't finished by the approaching deadline. And it is these kinds of fear that tempts me to giving up, because what is fun about fearing to fail? And the fear isn't made up, it is real and perhaps sprung out of my hight expectations.

So what was wrong?

The amount of images there were too many, too different, too varying and hard to read. Basically committing every crime in the photographers manual of doing something right. So a lot of work to do there.

Also, the framing that I had in mind was not right as another type of framing was suggested along with a trip to Tate modern to study framing (despite that I had been to a framing shop on Friday to look at framing options).

On top of this it seemed that the title I had in mind was too complex.

This was the feedback I received from the tutors in the crit and one might wonder why I care when I originally felt that I was on to a good solution with the work.

Art is personal and … So what. Get on with it!

Some ideas for titles that might create a narrative:

I wish I could visit you, but you are dead

I wish I hadn't given you the idea that you could rape me

I wish I had never left my home because now I can't find one

I wish I had a place that I could call home

I wish I could know everything there is to know in the whole world

I wish I was better at everything that I do

I wish that I could do all of those things I dreamt of doing

I wish that you would see me when I cry, but you never see my tears

I wish that you could hear me when I dream, but you never have time to listen

I wish that you were still my best friend

Why do I feel like my life is slipping through my fingers?

Into this space life will come

I have started thinking about the display of my final project. I think I have nailed what images and sizes I want to I got thinking about the curation of it. I regard them as a triptych, two diptychs and a single image. The idea is that there is a relationship between the "series" in the project and that those images tell a story which then is a part of a bigger story.