Wandering In Still Life
March 3 – April 2, 2005
The whole secret to the study of life lies in learning to use one’s eyes. – George Sand
The Photographs, herein, were made between the early 1980’s through the early 2000’s. They are from anywhere and everywhere in the world: reflection of my continual interest in wandering and discovering the fictions that the lens creates of our lives. These are the silly falsehoods from reality – taradiddles. For me, serendipity, coincidence, and chance are more interesting than any preconceived construct of our human encounters.
Throughout the twenty years or so in which these photographs were made, I had moved myself away from my own creative documentary practice to take on assignments for editorial and corporate publications as well as becoming an educator. The notion of pursuing a project or a body of work for the purpose of exhibition, for which I felt most at ease as a creative person, was in conflict with the pressures of having to perform to someone else’s expectations. This is not an unusual conflict, though it is rarely resolved to the satisfaction of the artist. Thus, when making pictures for myself, I made a decision to give up the conventional paradigms of the artist and any others that apply to the various hats a photographer might wear. I would be free from all constraints. The photographs are those that were made on the fly – spontaneous; shot to and from the assignment and in route to that place where one kills time on the job. They come from the back streets, from the spoils of working travel – the sites of a crowded life.
In these pictures there is no preconception, no expectation, often as not, they are the last frames shot to finish the roll. Though they are made out of years of practice in the course of wandering and looking. I saved these pictures because I liked them, but threw them in a plastic box to hold them for I knew not what. When I happened in down time to examine my plastic box full of transparency, it struck me that the moving drama of the ordinary life was an arrangement to be held in time by the still-making shutter of the camera. It is a realization of the fact: the camera stops the animate and makes it inanimate. So simple, what connected these images from the flux and flow of everything that the camera can record is that everything on the film becomes the still life, a two dimensional object.
The period when these photographs were made was beginning of the construct of post-modernism, deconstruction and what we now call post-historical times. There is no reality in the image itself, only that which the viewer brings in their examination of them. They are all a fiction because they are out of context, and compositions now of stillness.
One must be ever mindful of the many masks an image might hold. It is always a relic of the past though, we cannot divorce the illusion of the photograph from that something in the real world that we think we know.
I see what I mean – I think.
