July 2005
- 1
Valuation
If you conceive of photography as a process of reproduction, then clearly it lacks creativity and thus artistic interest. The famous proclamation “from today painting is dead” was never true, although the status and career of photography as art has not been strong. In 2005 world class galleries are only just acknowledging photography in an established way, as a legitimate component of their white walls. Photography is characteristically a much quicker medium than painting, and…
- 6
Experience
A photograph shows its subject by means of showing what experience is like; in that sense it provides an ‘experience of experience’, and it defines this as the significance of depiction. (Veronica’s Revenge, Janus 1988: 90) In painting the subject is arguably the dominant factor, whereas in photography it is the object. In the first case, the passive object is subjected to the sustained creative activity of the subject, while in the second the light rays reflected…
- 10
Ephemeral
How magical it is when we first discover photography as a child, when we appreciate in the simplest way, that we have somehow captured and memorialised the pet cat, the birthday party, the view from the window or the springtime tulip. We know those moments are transitory, even with the different appreciation of time characteristic of childhood. How delightful then to freeze those moments forever, using photography as an extension and amplification of our phenomenological…
- 17
On Being English
I dislike xenophobia and generally speaking, don’t see anything especially great about Britain – which is, like it or not, normally construed in terms of English rather than Scottish, Welsh or Irish cultures. OK, we used to control 2/3 of the world, despite the extraordinary discrepancy between that fact and the tiny size of our little Atlantic island, and although we’re not a super-power we maintain a strong position in global politics and economics. But…
- 21
Time
One of the most joyful aspects of photography is the way it captures moments of time in a shutter-snapping instant. No hours or days of labour with brush and paints, no prolonged struggle with rock, wood and chisel. Photographic art is liberating, an exercise of the mind in relation to a transitory environment because the spirit and hand is freed from material tasks. You can thus focus on perception itself, as a mental phenomena. To…
- 25
Tribal
Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology. Where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death…
- 29
Light
From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star (Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida 1993: 80). Einstein used it in his famous equation about relativity, and it’s one of the vital components of life. It features in some *kinds of meditation, by accessing dimensions…