January 2007
- 7
Jazz Photography
Is it possible to say what jazz is? It’s not impossible, but it is difficult. It was the punk rock of its time with a similarly though less violently shocking impact, and was all about change. Like punk it doesn’t really exist now as a sociological phenomenon, but like punk it has some discernible characteristics. It’s a culture and a model for innovation, resting on the quality of improvisation which is a form of…
- 11
Metaphors We Live By (Mountain Photography)
“The human conceptual system is metaphorically structured and defined” Metaphors We Live By Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 6 Like it or not, predictably or not, photography is constantly implicated in a constant discourse about appearance and reality. It’s been going on for decades, the philosophy even longer, giving it an admittedly tired first impression. ‘Been there, done that, this is 2007 and we have better things to think about’. I don’t entirely agree. I think the debate…
- 22
Jazz Creativity
I recently met and photographed Mr Johnny Roadhouse, who used to be an important figure on the UK jazz music scene. He was, amongst many other things, a musician with the BBC for 35 years. He seems not such an important jazz figure as pianist Stan Tracey, featured in a superb BBC documentary a few years ago, but was nonetheless a well known sax player a few decades ago. The time, you know, when jazz…
- 27
Narrative Photography
The photograph is an incomplete utterance, a message that depends on some external matrix of conditions and presuppositions for its readibility Allan Sekula, On The Invention Of Photographic Meaning, in Thinking Photography, Burgin 1982: 85 Photographically, one of the most interesting facets of my recent Photography MA concerned narrative construction. In art photography, which is where my influences used to lie, you create or find a great picture that stands on its own aesthetic terms. I love…