Long time...

My friend Mr Mohan asked me why I stopped, and the question has stayed with me. Why did I stop?

Today I am reconnecting with my own past, through the golden sunshine July morning. I am lying on my sofa with my baby sleeping across me. I am looking up at the images that my partner and I hung on our walls this weekend. Images of a Durer painting and an original drawing of musicians in movement; their wooden frames combine with my giant Cassida plant and I get a sense of

The truth is (hate this phrase - so overused on the telly) The truth is the truth is

Beauty, spirituality, understanding, our hearts, a quickening, despair at not understanding, my feeling of panic at not quite getting there, not quite understanding what it is I'm trying to get to, my fear as it all disappears - wasn't I reading philosophy once? wasn't I well versed in philosophical thought? couldn't I write eloquently before about my thoughts and experiences? but what for? To what end??

-breath-

The panic.

I look at these images about me and feel the past, both mine and history's, open up behind. An expanse opens and the sense of that which is bigger than me.

Only possible when the sun shines.

How easily I forget this. But how sad I am about that too (more panic).
I turn away as I am unable to stay with this feeling. I am unhappy with it. Not realised, not satisfied.

Seeing Swifts

Common sense and a sense of humour are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing.

William James

14 July 2014

Watching swifts far above me, against a hazy blue sky. It is early morning and this blue sky is a sign of a beautiful day to come.

Swifts, tumbling, soaring. Their flight is elating. They fly so high that they come in and out of my range of vision, sometimes they're there, sometimes they're not. Tiny tumbling black spots in my eye. When they're closer I can see the crescent arc of their wings.

When they're gone my eyes are searching and the tiny shapes of stuff on my eye and the imaginary residue of stuff in my eye and on my brain become visible in the searching, against a blue sky. Barely discernible shapes and fuzzy motions that I may or may not have invented. Tiny shapes moving in my eyes, tumbling and elating in their freedom and flight, and the flight of the swifts blur with my own looking – all that activity. Swifts of and in my eyes, my flight with them.

There's nothing passive about seeing.

Bornholm

I just went on a short trip to Bornholm, Denmark.
It was the first time I've had in a long while to reconnect with photography and nature.
I came away wondering what a critical photography practice of mine would look like...

Critical - i.e. that problematises, that raises questions, that delimits (as I understand it).

And, after reading Spheres of Action: Art and Politics (ed. Alliez and Osborne), I am re-reminded of the importance of history and materialism, and am wondering how it would be possible to reconcile image making (photography) with this aim.

Here's an assortment of images that are doing different things, but I wouldn't say they were critical. That's the problem, and I suspect the only way such a thing might be possible would be through some heterogeneous element(s).

Tree Nipples

 

Northey Island

I had the good fortune to visit a small island in an estuary recently, somewhere in Essex (for a dear friend's birthday). The memory that particularly stands out is waiting for the tide water to go down, in the pitch black, as if I am standing in the middle of the estuary, while geese chat to each other across the way - their strange noises all around me.

seaweed series

Cornish Landscape III

When I left Newlyn Art Gallery I wondered down to the Harbour. With all my questions buzzing around, I found myself trying to square up the act of framing shots and finding interest and/or satisfaction in creating images, with this problematic of art as politics, art as social activator. Do pretty pictures affirm the status quo? Can I make images that can contribute to a green politics?

Mostly, the images need to lead themselves. I can worry over the larger paradigm that will show itself positively or negatively anyway. The framing I'm always drawn to is the composite of shapes and elements... Struggling to articulate what those composites are attempting to do...

And it is clear to me as I walk down the pier, that it is not any old landscape that makes me want to photograph it. I am drawn to the places where industry provides its clear and decisive objects, where industry and human activity have fallen into a state of disrepair, where the natural is breaking it down.

 

 

 In this way, there is a material, social aspect to the work.

 

 Smells: sea, shell fish, oil, cold. Sounds: gulls crying and wheezing, chugging of small boat motors, cars in the distance, some welding further up the quay, two men chatting as they head on to one of the boats.