medi(t)ating

i like how a picture of a camera
is a picture of the eyelid open.

i like how taking a picture is the act of closing one's eyes.

reduce, re(f)use, recycle

It has been said, a thousand times, that a photograph can say a thousand words. What then? So can an angry laundress! It is much better that a photograph should say fewer words plainly, and those the ones intended.

A photograph like that can save a thousand words.

- David Charles, Commercial & Industrial Photography for the student, the laboratory, the commercial studio & for the industrial workshop 1959

ReConstructions (a begining) [written for/after mary mattingly]

( Farway places seem the closest as remote ideas the ones I hold in my heart. I have been left, lost, cheated & lied to but I have never, ever been betrayed by my own fantasies. In fact some of them have even become ardent realities. )

What do memories mean to a nation that has none ? History is constructed with when the bullet’s outside the barrel & shutter is snapped shut. We edit our definitions with every image pasted in the album or placed in textbooks. The real is demonstrated in facts, the lens is a science & the camera a sword.

( The pictures of me on the first day of school lasted a year into the first grade, for father was taken before graduation & mother opted not to draw the camera. Mine is a childhood forgotten & seldom recorded. I remember naught before this moment. )

Our task is not to make you believe what we believe so much as to make you see exactly what we see. We fight for the right to be represented as to be seen & heard is as to breath. Yet the soldier in Capa’s picture, did he actually fall ? Facts have become unstable & all constructions de . . .

( I want to build myself a new life but I’m afraid to find the words their meanings. )

So we shant speak for truth anymore, & we could never speak for you. Ours is a new state of desire & a government of infinite questioning. Our propaganda will not deliver to you the word as our sentences are made up of yrs & yrs & yrs. We had a dream tomorrow night of the great fires of yesterday.

( This vision is the real of imagination, rumination & literature. I speak of when only when told. For then does not exist only this moment in now. )

We want to talk to you. To hear yr words & breath yr thoughts. We are not here to tell you anymore. We seek only to listen & re record the images & bullets yr own eyes have seen. For histories do not repeat themselves so much as undulate & intertwine. A new text is forming from deep within the mines.

( The time is now. The place is here. The I is we. )

something : things to gaze upon

photographs i made a few years ago

unknowing is the beginning of the accumulation of knowledge

a photograph is about a particular event at a particular time
a contact sheet is about chronology.
one (particular) photographic event leading into another.
the rest is history. the stuff around. the stuff beyond.

the photograph is comparable to a tale told at the dinner table.
a record of the day's events.
the record of days (of) events becomes history - in()between the frames.
much too weighty for jovial dinner-time conversation.

histories scream but are seldom heard.
books & scholars sifting through dust
the mire of what once was, chiseled out of water.
the lens silences that which can not be re presented.
silence are facts dying.

yet we must intervene
photographers are practitioners of history - albeit anecdotally
how does a brief sketch become a haunting vision ?
when a contact sheet reveals more than its author intended
when the machine sees more than the eye.

how am i to decide what's true -
i'm even unsure
whether the soldier
in Capa's image actually fell.

( the space between a document & an image
the place in which our conversation must start. )

con(ned)text

photographs are only about the look of things
( how does this look & to whom )
appearance is a surface we battle with consistently
( by battle i mean accept )

if we could ennact our assumptions
( we might begin to understand )
by understand i mean nt
( nt a wor[l]d of appearances )

( how does this look & to whom )
questions are photographs are phragments
( the surface of reality )
is the slipperiest of slopes

( words precede & follow photographs )
with out them we are left asking
( questions are a desire )
must every desire must be phulfilled

( how does this look & to whom )
what of photography is desire
( to look upon a thing )
to learn something new about some thing

is to see to know
( could we call this a document )
what does construct mean
( in a wor[l]d ripe with illusion )

i polish this surface
( with every photograph never uttered )
i scour this surface
( with every object written in emulsion )

in/action

there can never be anything inherently wrong with an image, only how it is used.

magritte the phor phather

Magritte intuited photography* to a greater degree than most of the medium's masters. imagine this painting surrounded by 16 photobooth pictures of the Surrealists (Dali, Magritte & Max Ernst amoung them) in shirt & tie with their eyes closed. Published in La Revolution surrealiste, 12 (15 December 1929) the whole piece is entitled (for those of us fortunante enough to not speak french) : I Do Not See the [Woman] Hidden in the Forest.

there is some thing(s) (always) in the refusal.
the repetition of the closed eyes. the ease of the process. the height of the gesture.
we do not know what we are supposed to be looking at.
the naked & bashfull woman or the blinded men that surround her.
who is the subject of this portrait : the artist or the muse ?
( the relationship a phool's phrase )
has he gone blind from his own creation or the thought there of.
there is something impotent & powerless in this painting.
( a fact most photographers deny )
do we see that which we represent ? or do they transmute themselves. . .
is there a 'they' of which to speak or merely more 'me' than we have room for ( ? )

another picture ( a latter thought ) :


here we learn more through Magritte's spontaneous photographic refusal. the muse & the artist become one in this self portrait. the mastibatory narcissim of ages : an admission of being an open book th(r)ough turned back. a picture ( ultimatly ) taken for his own bemusement. yet, he has thought hard of representation & the real that photography can nt deny. what does a picture like this supposed to mean !? we learn : we are able to understand more through puzzles & fragments than a completely stated portrait. he teaches us that we learn nothing about a person by looking at their cold objectified face, no matter how expressive they can be. the truth lies in momentary decisions & (seemingly) arbitrary props. the lens flattens that which the human has made round. we can see more in our mistakes than in our rehearsed takes.

thanks magritte for sticking to painting but disseminating yr truth through all the arts.

*usually when i use the word 'photography' i am refering specifically to the 'study of light' as i have come to understand it.

this is my photograph this is my thought

:

i am making a photograph
i am making a photograph
i am making a photograph

[ ]

a piegon perches in the underground
a pigeon perches in the underground

[ one day ]


a pigeon perches in the underground

[ next day ]

a pigeon perches


[ days & days ]

the pigeon perches still

[ ]

s/he is making a photograph
s/he is unmoving
s/he does nt wait
s/he does nt know

[ s/he is making a photograph ]

a photograph is never made
[ a photograph is in its making ]

a painting is the time spent
[ buying paint
strech ing canvas ]

actions & decisions
errands & illusions

a painting is looking at painting
[ a history a fool's phrase ]

a painting is a photograph

[ there is no history
there is only making
there is only now ]


a poem is an unuttered thought

a photograph is a poem

a photograph is a now

a now is all the thens
[ collapsed from before to after ]

:

the day a blog is born is a very good day

:: i will attempt to piece together the fragments that make up my loose understandings of all things representational. i will then attempt to sew together letters & words & punctuation to communicate these understandings to you - a generous public ::

( A POLEMICAL BEGINING )
amateur representationalists of the world unite : you have nothing to lose but any interest in mass media

! take to yr cameras ! yr darkened rooms & cinematic memories. . .
let us, if you will please, grab hold of the modes of production.
how to counter our vapid image saturated society ?
do nothing but make pictures, instinctually if perhaps blindly.
the medium for the revolution's sake begets : death to seamless commercial aesthetics ! throw away yr spot tone & pro lighting kits & understand that truly beautiful photographs exists all around, just waiting to be realized & 'clicked'.

photographs are made in the time that takes to make them
photographs are in the making - so why do we constantly attempt to hide the seams of our means of production ? ( this is step one : embracing yr 'mistakes' )

the medium is inextricably linked with the commercial world – it’s true. yet the art world acts as if jeff wall's mimicking of advertising (& proliferation of modernism) is THE solution. devoid of dust & digital noise his light boxes hit our consciousness with a thunderous $$$. a lightening bolt struck earth, but it looked so much like the Coke-a-Cola ad that proceeded, i paid it no heed. we must learn to turn away from the already existing, so that we may return to representation with renewed veracity. we need not adopt the language of advertising & celebrity culture to make ourselves more understood. i suggest a return to the primitive, the explanatory (grain, pixels, chemical stains, oh my !) ,a conversation about a conversation can be the most satisfying conversation of all.

show me some thing new, show me some thing that does not want to sell & I will show you an original photograph.