Far from the dispassionate observing eye, I am part of the scene I photograph and equally the subject of other people’s observations. Sometimes, my presence provokes their curiosity, at other times, their hostility.
Tag: Photography
Five Days Gone, by Laura Cumming
Five Days Gone: The Mystery of My Mother’s Disappearance as a Child, by Laura Cumming When Elizabeth Cumming was 60 years old, she discovered that, as a young child, she had been kidnapped. In 1929, when she was only three years old, someone had lured her from the beach at Chapel St. Leonards, the Lincolnshire…
The Photographer as Remembrancer
I take my grandmother’s story as a parable of photographic practice. It prompts me to ask of the photographer: does memory really ever fade? Or is that just the excuse we give as we engage in erasure by selection?
The Birdman
I wanted the man to understand that I’m not just another callous photographer, that I care about animals and abhor cruelty. Who would do such a thing? I asked. He pointed at me. You did this. You and your camera.
Two Kinds of Seeing
As a photographer, I pride myself on my keen powers of observation, especially when I’m out wandering in the streets. Seeing is supposed to be my thing. How is it, then, that I could be so bad at it?
Diane Arbus in Quarrels by Eve Joseph
Joseph hints at a gentler way of describing Arbus’s practice and, by extension, Joseph’s broadest poetic intention. She asks: “How do we talk to one another from the sanctuary of our own solitudes?”
The Ideal Palace
In an essay called “The Ideal Palace” John Berger tells about a creation by Ferdinand Cheval, a “peasant” country postman who, in his spare time, spent 33 years and some 93,000 hours building a massive monument from stones.
Degrees Of Separation
Whether six degrees or three, separation is still separation. Sometimes I feel separation when there are no degrees.
Sentimentality
Everybody loves a photograph of a smiling baby. Everybody loves a photograph of a kitten playing with a ball of wool. Everybody loves a photograph of a sunset streaking its colours across the sky. Sentimentality has its place, I guess.
Pathetic Fallacy
One could easily accuse the outlying fog of spying on my inner state, or worse, of manufacturing it by drifting into my ears and eyes and nostrils and gaping mouth, and supplanting my accustomed mental chaos with a vague stillness.
The Discovery of Nehru
In Geoff Dyer’s Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, there is a piece called “Jacques Henri Lartigue and the Discovery of India.” It opens with a Lartigue photo “Cap d’Antibes, August 1953”—a woman in a bathing suit…
Bedroom Eyes
This photograph raises too many questions for me to let it alone. Given that I discovered it as an insert in a book about romance, my initial supposition is that the book was intended as a gift to the woman’s lover; she was using the photograph to indicate that she came as part of the package.
The Selfie Stick
I read an article (I can’t remember where) that suggested the selfie stick is no longer simply a fad; it’s gone to the next level and has become a cultural phenomenon, whatever that means. I think what the author was getting at is that its presence in our daily activities is symptomatic of deeper cultural rumblings. It captures something of the zeitgeist.
Synaesthesia and The Ongoing Moment
Geoff Dyer’s The Ongoing Moment is a continuous cover-to-cover meditation upon the art of photography. I say “continuous cover-to-cover” because the book has no breaks, no arbitrary chapter divisions. Instead, it’s a series of riffs that follow one another in an associative way. He writes about Stieglitz and his relationship with his wife, Georgia O’Keefe…
Love-locks Wreck Ponts des Arts
On Sunday evening a portion of the “Love-locks” bridge (Pont des Arts) in Paris collapsed. This is the pedestrian bridge that crosses the Seine connecting the Louvre museum to the St. Germain area.