I was asked to write a short piece for the Pistol + Fur exhibition/publication that just finished in Middlesborough…It is a bit of a ramble responding to the content of the exhibition, and the state of throwaway online photography at the moment, but I like it. This is the first time I have ever done something like this, and I was very flattered to be asked to contribute something like this at all to what looks like a great show. Click ‘read more’ to check it out, and please tell me what you think - questions, insults, critiques, whatever. This is a learning curve for me.
The throwaway image is more important than it ever knows it will be in the modern climate of photography. We choose to use an outdated format, shoot on knackered old cameras we find in dusty shops, and we choose to take pictures of whatever we want – and this has never meant more. In the world where the professional photographer may have his entire body of work on a hard-drive somewhere, a string of zeros and ones rotting away together, we hold our negatives up to the light and see a more idealized vision of photography as a process to deal with the world, as we live it. The 35mm film holds a far more psychological process than any other format of photography, as something where we step away, and comprehend with awe all that is around us. The anomalous, idiosyncratic, banal and poignant all rub shoulders with each other on each roll we shoot, while the camera works as a profound processor for our thoughts and dreams. We now understand what is before us in a visual language, and a way of experiencing the world through simple vignettes, committed to the physical print, or negative, before our very eyes.
Susan Sontag’s ethos of ‘stop, take a photograph, and move on’ echoes between my ears as I’m writing this, and while this may not do it for you, I’m sure the feeling of forgetting your camera when you witness something intensely magical is something that will strike your heart with fear. Fear of witnessing something you needed committed to memory, fear of allowing joy and emotion slip by un-noticed, fear of not being able to take a step back, put the viewfinder before your eye, and jump out of existence for 1/60th of a second. It is only evidence of this need for this style of photography by the richness of images on the internet. We’re all buying up Pro accounts on Flickr to fill our ravenous and irrefutable need to share, and we’re all uploading images straight to Facebook off our iPhones, and we’ve all got a Tumblr where we reblog whatever was relevant that day, and if we haven’t got a device to hand – we’ll probably post about it on Twitter. Our appetite for new, relevant photography is ravenous, almost dangerous. We view and appreciate a photographer on their newest work, we judge them on what they blogged last week. It is when we take a step back, press pause and absorb these images as a group, as a collection, free from these bounds as New Contemporaries that the awe and wonder of each individual, shooting and curating their existence through frames of grainy, colourful wonder becomes apparent.
Who knows where this is going to take us, maybe we’re going to burn out, slow down and take each image as it is… I just went on Facebook and could see my friends having fun without me through a girl I don’t know’s Blackberry mobile uploads, in real time. I thought about what I need to see before me, and what it is about making images that rules so much of my existence. In many senses, we are free from so many of the bounds of the old-style photographer. We no longer need context to love a photo, we no longer need a title to love a photo, we don’t even need to know what we’re looking at anymore to feel a deep connection to it. A century ago, W.H. Auden realized that looking is all there is, where ‘the dogs go on with their doggy life, and the torturer’s horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree’. The 35mm snapshot is pure, we like it because we like it. In a climate where we are asked to draw meaning from everything, New Contemporaries presents a simple vision, of stunning visual stimulation and imagination-sparking content. These works are shown in as plain view as the sun flaring at your eyes, as you raise the ghostly sepia impression of your new batch of life-affirming images up to the light again.
