Give the medium its texture..

Resident Alien. Part 6.

 

I remember an interview with Brian Eno once where he was talking about how the charm of each new technology will be remembered by the limitations inherent in it and it will be these flaws which will give that technology its own unique signature. For example; vinyl by its crackles and scratches, film by its grain, tapes by their background hiss, video by its colour bars and digital by its glitching artifacts. These imperfections which we spend our time today trying to iron-out or side-step are actually the very essence of a medium and, in retrospect, will be seen as part of the unique beauty that came from working with it. These limitations will give the medium its texture which will lend itself to a project's final realization. This texture will then become the baseline reading we associate with an authentic experience of it.

I was excited to be shooting with my new digital Leica (a D-Lux 3) and without the burden of film, processing or expense I was led away by my own enthusiasm with my camera set to program. I only needed to point, compose and shoot and this felt liberating and pure. I had been photographing for over a year this way and when I sat down to edit the work I really did not know what I was doing. I damaged many of my original image files by saving horrifically edited images over the top of them. Even when I did later learn some things, I actually decided to keep the same camera settings with the rationale of staying consistent, telling myself jpegs were the equivalent to working in 35mm anyway and I’d change the settings to something else when my Greencard arrived. 

Doing this has in fact now bound this work together as a single entity and sacrificing some resolution for consistency over time has worked for it. With the projects clear parameters, it spanned 4 years and my entire immigration process. While the US department of homeland security investigated me, I investigated the US with my camera. The photos I made were my attempt to establish a context for myself psychically in my new country of residence while the government attempted to determine my presence legally. Although none of these actual facts about the collection are directly depicted in any single photo, they are nevertheless, for me, an integral part of its psychological profile, the secret narrative below everything, its code..

With a primary jpeg colour palette and the vision field compressed by the even light of flash, I composed pictures using bright or clear forms on the camera's small LCD screen which was held mostly at arm's length. This was a first for me and I framed the world already flattened and rendered by technology, rather than through a viewfinder where it was my own perception and the theatre of “reality” playing out inside the frame. Subject and composition were my only concern now and with seemingly unlimited memory I could afford to indulge any photo-notion that arose along the way and I consider this whole period between 2008-2012 as a joy-filled photographic experiment. Today, when I view this collection it reminds me of an epic graphic novel that has been cut up into all its individual panels then mixed together and it was now my job to reassemble it into a coherence that is still yet to be determined.

My own internal wall of waiting mental maybe’s..

Resident Alien. Part 5.

Follow up to previous post.

A few days ago my friend Don Hudson sent me this photo that he took of my apartment wall in Overland Park, Kansas, on June 14th 2013. It shows the Resident Alien book edit at that time with all the “keepers" set in partial sequence from left to right, with the “maybes” which also included other floating considerations, pinned up on the wall to the right (out of frame). 

Looking at this photo today, I can immediately discard 10 of them from the “keepers” wall without question and send a further 10 photos back to the “maybes” wall for future ponderings. Since my revisit to this series earlier this year and after seeing Don's photo for the first time just the other day, it has been interesting to notice how a few of these pairs have actually remained stable across time and have emerged again, together and intact 10 years later, when all previous knowledge of the sequence had apparently been forgotten without record.

I suppose I did live with this edit on my wall for a year and over that time they were almost certainly imprinted on my memory and stored in my unconscious as my own internal wall of waiting mental maybe’s. There is also no escaping the fact that certain images really do want to be placed next to certain other images, like both images can only be complete in their meaning when they are viewed together. Even after employing certain disruptive sequencing techniques, which have leaned heavily upon chance (more details on this later), has thrown a couple of these pairs back into the same arrangements. These pairs of photographs were made years apart and separated by hundreds of miles before finally finding their way next to one another up on the wall, again and today. They are fixed elements on a photographic periodic table of obsessive long-form procrastination..

Key: Red = Discarded. Green = Maybes. Pink = Pairs.