August 2005
- 3
Love, Proust, Etc
I was in the room, or rather I was not in the room since she was not aware of my presence…of myself…there was present only the witness, the observer with a hat and a travelling coat, the stranger who does not belong to the house, the photographer who has called to take a photograph of places which one will never see again. The process that mechanically occurred in my eyes when I caught sight of…
- 11
Instant Moment
I always found Cartier-Bresson’s idea of the photographic ‘decisive moment’ wonderfully suggestive. It’s most obviously relevant in relation to journalistic work, implying the moment when a piece of editorial is amplified and encapsulated with an appropriate image. But more than that, for me it means an implicit aesthetic that you discover by a receptive sensitivity rather than invasive technique. I find it delicately related to two oriental sources: the divination method of the I Ching,…
- 15
Sociological Photography
Our age is the age of criticism, to which everything must be subjected. The sacredness of religion, and the authority of legislation, are by many regarded as grounds of exemption from the examination of this tribunal. But, if they are exempted, they become the subjects of just suspicion, and cannot lay claim to sincere respect, which reason accords only to that which has stood the test of a free and public examination – Kant: The…
- 22
Gazing
I first became interested in the psychological gaze during my teens. I’d found an esoteric yoga book in the library, which discussed optical cloud busting. If you focussed intently on clouds, it said, you could disperse them because the eyes project subtle energy: also why you can sense someone’s gaze on the back of your neck. Cloud busting may be nonsense; I’m not sure. I am receptive to extra-ordinary phenomena, as discussed in Lyall Watson’s…
- 26
Obscura, Niger, Niveus
I get very annoyed with Roland Barthes book, Camera Lucida. ‘Obscura’ is a more relevant term than his ‘lucida’ when he goes rambling on with his strange intellectual excess. Quite often he ties you up with contrived language that appears intelligent, but when you look more closely you realise it either makes no sense or could be expressed in less fanciful and more direct terms. I get tired and exasperated with rhetorical games in academia,…
- 30
Field
As a boy, we used to go for walks across agricultural countryside leading to a woodland area called Canada Heights. I remember sharp-aired autumns with chestnuts and wild mushrooms, admired but never picked, and what we called the boing tree.