The dark lands of my please forgets..

My partner suggested I write about photography and my creative process, but instead I have been sitting around for a month trying to get over some private crazy horror story I’ve generated out of nowhere about writing anything at all. A horror which I wasn't even aware was still there, lurking in the dark lands of my please forgets, until the suggestion to write was made to me. Again..

 

At the best of times I find writing a difficult and draining exercise. This is not just because I am quite a bad dyslexic, but because trying to find the right way to use words to accurately describe thoughts, feelings and ideas, is really difficult. And, when it also involves having to express private abstract thought pathways, using photography as a creative medium, then yes, it is very draining too. With this said, I have, over time learned how to carefully, with expertise, avoid most opportunities to write about my work, but I have been finding out recently, after several glorious years without hardly a word scribed, that I now do not think I can personally move forward as a photographer unless I start writing about my relationship to photography and start getting comfortable doing it.

 

 

Once upon a time I would have said something like this: Photography is the only creative medium I have found where I can express myself more clearly and coherently over any other and therefore anything I could possibly write in words about it is going to be somehow less than looking at the work itself, on its own. In the past this immediate inability to find these words would have led me to think that maybe my pictures might not have been enough on their own. The fact that someone needed to ask me about them would have also sent me into a debilitating tailspin of self doubt about my ability as a photographer and later my credibility as a human being. This was once upon a time though and If truth be told, I don't even think this was ever really my truth. What it really was, was my first and original excuse to not have to write about my work. 

 

 

 

I think it would be safe to assume that for most of us, our first actual contact with writing about our photographs came in the early stages of our photo journey, when we found ourselves, for one reason or another, needing to have to write an artist's statement. These generally came from an outside agent, as a request. The prospect of writing one of these statements generally filled us with dread and demanded of us that we dig deep to do it. They took a long time to write too and when it was done we tinkered with it endlessly and forever afterwards..

 

 

 

Of course it is difficult to write an artist’s statement and no one ever said it was going to be easy. They are still difficult to write. Writing about photography on any level gets difficult quickly. Photography is about perception and perception is about the state of being or the process of becoming aware of something through the senses. This is difficult writing terrain to navigate at the best of times, for anyone and the path through it is almost always one which descends steeply, into the subjective marshwoods of identity and memory and across treacherous terrains of truth and untruth. It will also ask who is it that looks through the viewfinder and who it is that is reflected back at us when we look at a print. The photographs are the psychic breadcrumbs we have left behind us on our journey, which lead us back to the seat of that supernatural self and heart of the camera operator. Over and out...

It gave a name to the ghost in the machine..

This introduction (below) to the photographic artists of Galerie VU appeared in the Autumn issue of Private: International Review of Photographers 2009. I remember reading this text at the time of its publication and I remember how much I felt it resonated with me and how much it seemed to vocalize my own, as yet, unspoken approach to photography in words I did not, up until that point, have. Like a revelation, it gave voice suddenly to the silent, but powerful motivations behind the making of my own pictures and brought a conscious awareness of my emotional and psychological presence at the time of the exposure and the possible impact it could have on the scene I was photographing. It gave a method to the madness of my unconscious process and a clarity to why one image worked for me and another did not. It gave a name to the ghost in the machine and it’s name was my own. It illuminated just how much photography and the self (or sense of it) are actually woven together intricately and inform one another. Most of all though, it highlighted and established, for me, a continued working practice, one which attempts to harmonize my inner life with the outer world, with a camera and in a photograph.

Private: International Review of Photographers Autumn 2009.

Mental Geography.

For more than 10 years, Galerie VU’ has been promoting photographers of various ages, nationalities and inspirations. This issue of PRIVATE magazine, which is dedicated to them, proves it. The portfolios presented here, as diverse as they are, have a common denominator: the notion of “mental geography”. Place’s, spaces and territories are considered, according to a double prospect - that of the artist and that of the world - in their relationship to the spirit.

 

 

The mental space is, first of all, a place that exists only in the mind of the photographer. The place – a building, a city, a region or a country – speaks then above all about the artist. The latter tries less to render an account of a geographical reality than to offer a voluntarily biased and incomplete representation, where he or she projects his or her sensibility, memories and imagination, personal mythologies or artistic and literary references. The place, by its strength of attraction or aversion, is invested by the artist who makes it the theater of his or her psychic functioning. These works, necessarily subjective, sometimes enigmatic, always very open, build geographies that eventually break through any territoriality, any local tie and any border, to find their coherence in a game of sensitive or intellectual correspondence, which connect the images between them.

 

 

However, the notion of mental space also evokes the place which, by its nature or characteristics, is a creation of specific psychic states. The place exerts then a mental influence on the individual as observed by the photographer. The most evident are the places of power or authority – a classroom for example – where one has to submit to a hierarchy and to assimilate conventions and values. But certain spaces, apparently more harmless, show themselves as oppressive. Following the example of these numerous, contemporary, anonymous, functional and normative non-places as public transportation, private housing estates or group housing. The artist seizes upon this daily alienation. When he or she underlines it, it is not to report it in a direct and documentary way. It is not to explain it. It is rather to make fun of it or make it a kind of symbol. But the artist also criticizes it or attacks it frontally. He or she then arouses reactions and behaviors that challenge standards and allow everyone to reaffirm one’s identity, integrity and freedom.

 

 The Photographers whose work appeared in this issue were; Anders Petersen, Anne-Lise Broyer, Denis Darzacq, Hitcham Benohound, Jean-Christian Bourcart, Jeffrey Silverthorne, JH Enstrom, John Davies, Lars Tunbjork, Laurence Leblanc, Lea Crespi, Mathieu Pernot, Michael Ackerman, Nicolas Comment. 

 

I can feel the mountain reaching upwards..

Greetings. It’s been 7 years since I last made a post here, before it was abandoned along with the rest of my life at that time. This was 2013. This blog's previous posts covered my first explorations along the highways and byways of the United States and the numerous photo projects it inspired, both personal and collective. Many of the posts were concerned with being a new immigrant, the recession, returning to school, marriage, working as an EMT and of course traveling and photography. Now, 7 years later, all of these things are gone, except for photography, I never stopped taking pictures.

With the resurrection of this blog I hope to not start afresh so much, but begin with bridging the time between this post and the last and attempt to assemble into some form of coherent narrative, a pathway through these lost years. At the same time I will be trying to make sense of this journey myself, for the first time, in the form of sharing key photographs made along the way. With these pictures I would like to include a commentary, which may well be an exercise in personal process for me too. Perhaps I will give the photographs context and unpack the circumstances which were surrounding its making and why I lifted my camera to make the picture in the first place. Other stuff too, personal and diaristic. These details are, as yet to be determined and I may do something else entirely, but I hear it helps to focus one's intentions by stating them first.

Of course when I say lost years, I do not mean entirely so. Over this period it’s true my online presence was indeed minimal and I had been, until last year, without a phone for the entire 7 year period. This was my choice and I have never been completely offline for more than a week or so anyway. There were many times though, I was completely unreachable, without a single other person knowing what my location was. It is an eerie feeling to realize one's solitary place in a wild and unfamiliar world that you know nothing about and is completely indifferent to your presence in it. And that strange stillness too, out in the darkness, beyond the light of the campfire, that shifting sense of scale and self. It is like I can feel the mountain reaching upwards and losing its balance. I can feel the ten thousand year yawn of the canyon close by and I can feel how the silence is thickened with the shadows of their presence. How much of the world is actually there and how much is the flickering movie of my mind projecting its phantoms upon it? It’s a beautiful and terrifying thing to behold and it can make a person take stock and pay attention fast. It is also a rare feeling to experience these days too, and to be truly out-of-touch is, for me, a privilege and I have been grateful to enjoy pockets of it between here and there.