‘WAS HERE’ (The story of an abandoned series)

A few weeks ago I was invited to write a piece for the excellent photo-website fototazo.com about one of my images (which can be seen above). Below is the article which has now just been published there. My many thanks go to Tom Griggs fototazo's creator and curator. Follow the link at the end of this post to explore fototazo  further.

‘WAS HERE’.  (The story of an abandoned series) 

It was the end of the first week after Bin Laden was killed by Navy Seals and this issue of Time Magazine was out on the news-stands everywhere and I found it both unsettling and powerfully symbolic to see his face juxtaposed openly against a backdrop of everyday American vernacular. Since moving to America in 08 I have discovered that the fear of Terrorism and Bin Laden seems to have become so much part of the American psyche, that over the years following the tragedy of 9/11, weather we would like to admit it or not, Bin Laden has become part of the group consciousness of the nation as a whole - standing as the ultimate universal archetype of evil and the biggest, most insidious threat to national and personal security. Now seeing this face crossed out in blood red ink on the cover of this latest edition of Time Magazine, this private and individual terror that so many people carried around within them every day had suddenly been externalized and it could be now seen almost everywhere I turned, mirroring in the same way that his presence was felt internally before hand. It was like a great national exorcism had taken place.

It was after seeing this issue of Time Magazine that I then had the idea that I wanted to photograph its cover whenever I encountered it, naming the series ‘Was Here’. The project would be an attempt to explore and acknowledge this dark power (and the diffusion of it) had over so many individual’s outlook and ideals. Unfortunately though, my work and school schedule was so busy at that particular time that I just did not have the chance to get out to record this image in the exhaustive manner I intended and the week the magazine was out sadly passed me by without me making a single photograph.

Luckily I did have a long road trip planned at the end of the following week which I envisioned would give me a second chance to work on it. My Mother and Brother would be coming to the USA from England to visit me and my wife and we were going to meet them in New York City where we would then rent a car and drive back to Kansas, where we live and I decided it would be here I would be given this second opportunity, but this time I would be able to explore it on a much wider geographical scale. The Magazine was no longer on the news-stands, but I had bought myself a copy and my idea was to photograph it in as many places as I possibly could both in NYC and on the long drive back to Kansas.

This particular photograph is one of the first images I made for this series and which ended up being the most successful photograph, I think, that came from. It was made on the plane somewhere between Kansas and New York City.

This project, which was actually abandoned later on the trip for various reasons, was a departure from the usual way that I work and it was partly because of this that the project ultimately failed. Usually I am not one to externally alter or set up any of my photographs, preferring to record images as I find them - to instead walk around, stand back or get close to whatever my subject may be in order to get the viewpoint which resonates as true to my personal vision as possible, always in search of a balance or harmony between self and subject with the end of hopefully transcending both. This photographs stands in contradiction to this usual way that I work and I found as time went on, that it became increasingly more difficult for me to make pictures in this way without them looking horribly contrived.

The project was also abandoned of other reasons too. I discovered, whilst shooting, that it was perhaps - after 10 years, just still too soon to be dealing with this as a subject matter somehow and I became more and more uncomfortable taking the magazine out of my satchel to set up photographs with this face in it, in spite of the presence of its big red cross and I began to draw some unwanted attention, disapproving looks and unwanted questions and also some knee jerk reactions which were at times aggressively charged. In these situations explaining what it was I was doing did not seem to help in any way either. I found this especially while I was at Ground Zero itself and also outside NYC in some of the small towns. This image above now remains as the only image from the project which I feel has truly worked.  

The original article and Fototazo.com can be found here: 

http://www.fototazo.com/2011/12/image-simon-kossoff.html

American Idol (part one of an on-going project)

Since arriving in the USA I have been working separately on three on-going photo projects which explore the notion of the American Idol. Until recently these individual bodies of work have been very much independent from one another, yet over time all of them have grown and developed very much in parallel and my method of working on them has been very similar in nature. Recently, whilst editing these series for possible publication at Get The Picture, the photo/collective I am a member of, I realized that these three photo series could actually sit well together as three separate chapters of the same long term project. This idea is not entirely a new one for me either as it was first touched upon last year in my interview with Sam Dickey at Amerikana Magazine, but it has taken till now to fully realize it's union and possible potential. Below is an extract from that interview:

"One project you’ve been working on has to do with images of US presidents. Can you discuss this project and what, if anything, you’ve learned about the American Presidency in the course of it?

Well, I terms of passing an exam, I’m afraid I have not learned that much. In fact a lot of what I have learnt about the Presidency has come through listening to the people I’ve met here – an oral history. This project, which is still in its early stages, is really an extension of two other series I am also working on about Elvis Presley and Jesus Christ and comes from a similar place. This project has felt a bit like I am photographing a kind of sediment – a history that has filtered down through time and settled here in the present - all these powerful leaders who at one time stood for so much have now washed up on the shores of the here and now, so to speak - their images have anyway, and then these images become culturally recycled in one form or another, whether it is in advertising, a T-shirt design, a record sleeve, a public monument, or just surface in the clutter of a thrift store. The presidents have become symbols - powerful historical markers and it has been interesting to see how and where they reappear. Right now I am keeping my eyes open and simply recording these appearances and trying to be aware of the context I discover them in, in a hope it will inform me somehow of who they were and what they stood for. It’s really a psychic history lesson I’m giving myself. This is why I like thrift stores so much. It is where all these great once new ideas, fads and fashions, heroes, villains and icons eventually all seem to end up. Walking around American thrift stores is like viewing a kaleidoscope of American culture past all under one roof - It gives me a strange kind of perspective which I understand, but find difficult to put into words."

The photographs in this post come from part one this series, under the working title of  "The King of Kings & I". later I will discuss this project further with images from part two.

The full Amerikana interview can be viewed here: 

http://simonkossoff.blogspot.com/2010/09/resident-alien-photography-of-simon.html

Internal Landscapes (II)

Hutchinson, KS

Jefferson, MO

For a while now I have had a fascination with internal and artificial landscapes. It is a theme which has threaded it's way through much of the work I have made in the USA and whenever I am lucky enough to see, or be in one, I always feel strongly compelled to photograph them. These images are a continuation of this occasional series. I am interested in the illusion and the fantasy these places attempt to create and sometimes (in terms of my Cage series) their grim reality too. I love the theatre and suspension of disbelief which goes with standing in a themed museum for example, but what I have always found is these artificial landscapes seem to jar heavily with my own dreams, ideals and experiences and they are always, ultimately, strange, floored and sadly human. Artificial and internal landscapes often force me to consider my own real life experience of landscapes which I have stood or lived in and questions what I have done with them myself, psychically. I think we are all filled with a lifetime - a history of landscapes, which have themselves, in turn, become a part of who we are as individuals. They become part of our own mental geography, full of archetypes, symbols and markers - integrating themselves inside, with special and personal significance. I always find it interesting and amazing, for example, when a landscape I have recently (or not recently) experienced suddenly becomes the location of a dream I have had. Why has this particular landscape or place been chosen to play out the drama of this dreams events at this time? It is something I find endlessly fascinating.. Text adapted from a previous post.

 

St Louis, MO 

  

Jefferson City, MO Part one of this post can be found here: http://simonkossoff.blogspot.com/2011/01/wemego-ks-oz-museum-behind-curtain.html A Flickr slideshow of my Cage series can be seen here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/simonpaulkossoff/sets/72157624733834338/show/