Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
After lunch, I ran across the road to get a few things for supper and as I stepped through the entrance to the mall, I noticed an older man lying on the floor stretched out on his side. In particular, I noted his blue mask which gave an odd splash of colour to an otherwise…
The skipping rope was made of green and pink plastic and had tassels at either end. It was long, the kind of skipping rope girls used in the playground at recess.
There’s something poignant about those green apples all crowded against the dirty window. Who knows where they’ve come from. Some bear wounds. Some yellow in the light.
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 more I tread the same ground with my camera, the more I come to recognize that an unwitting theme of my work is disappearance.
Synecdoche is a simplicity that doesn’t lie.
For the time being, the images I make are the product of my true vision, and mine alone, but inevitably they will ascend to the pantheon of cliché as do all images, for like all truth the truth of my vision is provisional. It is not my entitlement, but a momentary privilege.
I wish photographs were like memories. They would start out as well-focused images with crisp edges and clearly defined details. But with the passage of time, the images would lose their clarity, edges would soften …
In September of 2017, my wife, Tamiko, and I joined the Linton family in the Republic of Ireland for a cycling adventure to help raise funds for the Sanfilippo Children’s Research Foundation.
A strange literalism has infected our world. We have blinded ourselves to the distinction between a thing and the representation, between a person and the image. This has produced perhaps the most egregious erasure of all—the erasure of a numinous surplus that inheres in all beings. Thus the seemingly innocuous act of tearing a poster from a board becomes an act of violence.
I hear only the sloop of my paddle through the water; the fog has silenced everything else. I’m headed to an island. I don’t know if the island has an official name, but I’ve taken to calling it Bird Island because, when I went there one afternoon earlier in the week, I found it occupied by a flock of Canada geese. Or is that a gaggle?
Turn away from famous sculptures and buildings. Turn away from brides in all their consumer-driven finery. Turn away from the terror and delight that draws us to scenes cordoned off by police tape. Instead, seek out the ordinary. Celebrate the mundane. Reveal beauty in the quotidian.
Along with thousands of my colleagues, I pound the pavement, responding only to those scenes which hold precisely the features that confirm my view of what makes a good photograph, repeating the process until I have ground my bias into a cheap cliché.
For me, as a street photographer, shooting a homeless person is an ambivalent act. It plays along a line of tension between the need to document lived conditions and the need to protect our most vulnerable citizens from exploitation. As our missionary forebears demonstrated, it’s often difficult to tell the difference between compassion and colonization.
Carrying a camera to a museum, I feel a kinship to the curators who develop the exhibits. How do we classify a vase or a bust or a coin? By geography? Historical period? Influences? Provenance? Materials? How does it speak to us? What do we discover about ourselves when we examine it? And how do we think ourselves into the future? Something similar happens with my photographs.