(This was originally written sometime during the last weeks of 2010)
Worries and fears
Whilst watching films late at night I’ve had a thought thats been niggling at my subconscious for sometime.
I will be moving to tokyo late next year. I will be grieving the absence of Christmas in all its suet-laden glory. More over I will be working and living in a foreign country in a way like no other before. The more I think about my work; the photos I enlarge and the sculptures I make the less ‘Japan’ feels important or even relevant. I think this is a good thing.
Perhaps this thought late has come to me late, an understanding everyone else is only too readily aware of; the perils and pitfalls of any kind of culture-envy. its perhaps my time spent teaching at UCL a university that was founded on the principle of non-denomination, no religious exclusivity, characteristics that are absent in with many institutions of learning – cultural diversity, difference and inclusiveness.
Having slept quite a lot over Christmas I am now of the opinion this extra sleep has been because of my on going fascination with dreaming*. Replaying future instances, test-driving future occurrences, playing out my own mission-laden journey through the guise of trust, envy, fear, betrayal, insecurity and anxiety all within a foreign country, though this doesn’t seem to have been that important. English always seems to be dominant in the dream.
Journeys and observations through sensitive and tempered landscape
What are Hellvelyn and 33 really about?
Photography is not especially important. it is just a tool to engineer dreaming of one sort or another or to put it another way the image is someone’s elses. initially its the photographers finally exposed on printed paper. when on a wall you look at it putting yourself in place of the photographer and you then take on the role of ‘spectator’ except everything else has been stripped away; context, what is outside of the frame even the motivating factor that defined the photograph in the first place. photography is exploitative in every way, an empathy test – capillary dilation of the so called ‘blush response’. fluctuation of the pupil. involuntary dilation of the iris –
Capturing a landscape such as the cumbrian lake district is always party nostalgic.
The poet Wordsworth describes the land and its animals as if human characters unremarkable and unaffected by their barren surroundings. The ‘rambling’ poetry and random encounters he describes are played out across land that becomes a figure in its own right, not anthropomorphised but actual; a person, a character.
Timothy Morton on the other hand describes the strange and familiar, the images that evoke same-ness in our understanding of them as ‘strange strangers’ perhaps these hills and mountain-sides become strange strangers**, solitary figures that scramble over slate and grass. With a city as in 33 the people take on the characteristic of the place and the role is reversed.
Hellvelyn describes a walk up a hill where a group of friends celebrate one of them soon to be married. The walk breaks off from Patterdale and rises to Striding Edge culminating in a final scramble to the peak of Hellvelyn itself. The camera, strangely becomes completely judgemental as if being taken on a walk itself. shots off at a distance became soft and blistered. images directly infront were sharp and harsh. distant bodies are picked out as black pin-pricks and specks on the horizon. bodies close-up soften and radiate warmth.
33 is more literal. the city is treated like a rural landscape and patterns and detail rise to the surface. Taken in and around an urban setting the photos wander and meander much like a wordsworth poem, the figures a backdrop for the city itself.
The inclusiveness of these figures – places and people – and how a rolling hill in one part of the world can evoke a memory through experience of a zebra-crossing in another fascinates me. Photography is generous that way. It allows for that kind of leap. Its naturally ecological in its being. Its inclusively, not least through the very light which incidentally has travelled much like the camera itself, means we potentially identify with imagery far and wide. We place ourselves in the midst of its frame of action. Our own blush response, our empathic eye affords these connections where at any other moment such a connection would be physically impossible.
* Read the essay “Dreaming Tongues”. (just Google it)
* a term coined by Timothy Morton to describe the uncanny visitor being it something or someone else that evokes unwitting change. You cant help but invite them/it into your world even though your better judgement says otherwise. The Strange Stranger refers to Deleuze’s Arrivant
