June 2005
- 2
Walking
There’s an interesting book called Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Rebecca Solnit 2001), in which the author investigates the various forms and meanings of this activity, usually taken for granted but having implicit cultural and psychological depths. One of the chapters is called The Mind at Three Miles an Hour, suggesting the meditative or anti-rat race quality of walking as opposed to commuting, working, watching TV etc – the activities that fill up a normal…
- 5
Stillness And Movement
One of the most beautiful and exciting dynamics I know about is the contrast and relationship between stillness and movement. In the Chinese text the Tao Te Ching, you read that ‘nothing is done and nothing is left undone’, which is a reference to the meditative principle called wu wei, that means non-doing which is paradoxically the most potent kind of action possible. The total action of the universe comes to a stop, the stillness…
- 8
Photoblog Categories
Photoblog culture and development is in my opinion one of the most interesting features of the internet. First there was the home page, then the blog, and then the photoblog. Major sites like fotonet and flickr may impact on this culture, especially the latter which has implemented community-building strategies with a slick interface, and is hugely popular. They recently changed their Flash presentation for XHTML, which also improves the download/display time – a major problem…
- 10
Phenomenology
One of the first art photo books I ever surveyed was a work featuring Andre Kertesz, in my local library when I was a teenager. He was a contemporary of Henri Cartier-Bresson, but has a significantly lesser reputation. But some of his photos are the equal of Cartier-Bresson; I particularly enjoyed scenes of snow-covered parks and streets, which were my introduction to the stark, graphic beauty that can be achieved with photography. There’s a section in…
- 15
Time/Phenomenology
I’ve seen it described in logarithmic terms, how with advancing years time appears to accelerate. As a child summer holidays seem to last forever, and we remember them fondly as idyllic moments. As an adult we map and order our lives not in relation to weeks, or seasons, but in relation to multiple years and a future we instinctively realise will slow down as it speeds up, where we will experience diminished energy like a…
- 19
Problems
There has to be a dramatic mediation of the conceptual element in art. Without this mediation you have only concepts on the one hand and pictures on the other. Images become a decorative completion of an already fully evolved thought. They are just illustrations. So they are boring, there is no drama. This remark is made by Jeff Wall, in Jeff Wall (2002, p 104). The intrigue of many, possibly all of his photos rests substantially…
- 22
Mundane
Living in a dreary Northern England city, I sometimes struggle to find interesting content. Especially when the weather is leaden grey, as it often is. I look at people’s internet photo sites, and wish I lived somewhere vibrant and interesting like they do: San Francisco, the Californian beach, or even London. The latter is astonishingly rich in cultural and architectural delights and millions of people from all around the world visit for exactly that reason,…
- 27
Camera Obscura
There’s an interesting book called Camera Obscura Of Ideology (Kofman 1999), in which the writer considers how the photographic device was used as a metaphor by Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. Kofman offers an extended reflection on the mechanical function of the camera obscura as a kind of copy machine, rendering a mirror-image. In the opening chapter on Marx, she provides a reading of inversion as a necessary part of the ideological process. Ideology represents…