Remains To Be Seen (image slideshow)

Some notes on a work in process.

This slideshow contains all the photographic images which will make up the final project which I have titled: 'Remains to be Seen'. Presently I am also in the process of editing a small collection of personal 'snap-shots' and carefully selecting some poetry and other writings I have made, which I recently discovered on some floppy disks and in some loose leaf folders, which have laid neglected since I left England three years ago (but were written apx 7 years ago). It's exciting (and also painful) to discover these texts, but I am hoping that the edit of this work will be a relatively objective one, because so much time has passed since the words were written and also read and I am hoping perspective will be on my side. Eventually, when these texts are finally edited, scanned and then sequenced with these images, I would like to include them in what will be my first book of photographs and writings together. A kind of new years resolution, for me..

Happy New Year!

Overland Park (Postcard from Home)

I wish everyone a wonderful, inspiring and creative new year, full of amazing, unexpected and beautiful experiences - may they continue into the next.

Thank you all so much for your support, enthusiasm and continuous inspiration.

It is a wonderful world.

I wish you all my very best.

Cheers - with love

Simon X

Remains To Be Seen

For a while now I have been working on a personal project called 'Never / Together' which I have now recently re-titled 'Remains To Be Seen'. It has involved a direct exploration and an awareness of what photographer Harvey Benge referred to in his wonderful Photo-book 'Vital Signs' as the "I-ness in Other-ness". It is a recognition that when photographing we bring our entire personal histories with us when making pictures and that we see not only with our eyes, but with our minds also. For me this project has been a kind of ghost hunt.

 

This difficult new series of what are actually psychological landscapes constitutes a search for an understanding of one particular aspect of my own personal photographic vision and some of it's roots.

The images which make up this series are almost now complete and it rests uncomfortably as an incomplete document of psychic markers gathered here in the present, yet separated by 7 years and thousands of miles. My intention is, when finally edited, is to make a book which will both include these images and also a selected scattering of recently discovered poems and personal snapshots, which were brought with me to America and some other documents which were written at the time of the events it explores.

In my memory

Your image

Hangs in my heart

Like a beautiful

And timeless

Oil painting.

It is lit by candles

In a dark room

To which I have

The only key.

My expression

Is drawn

And flickers

In the low light

Of my fond

Recollections.

Yet the shadows

It casts distort

And make strange

Your features.

Sometimes.

A truth all the same

That I dare not describe

For fear of tainting

Your spirit which is

Captured in this portrait,

Which unlike you

Was beautifully

Executed.

More images from this series can be seen in previous posts on this blog or search 'Never / Together' here:

http://simonkossoff.blogspot.com/2010/08/never-together.html

http://simonkossoff.blogspot.com/2010/09/never-together-ii.html