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12 June 2010.
After a severe bout of 'flu which laid me low for almost a fortnight I sought recuperation in the shade of the wooded slopes of Petřín hill, in which theatrical effects of light create small enclosed worlds and strike plants momentarily incandescent. Under trees' bower the sun's movement across the sky brings about mutable lighting, complicated further by the variable apertures arising from the movement above of the tree leaves in breaths of air. Spotlighting against a dark backcloth, such as in the first photograph, arises when the incline of hill aligns itself with sun's rays, long shadows letting in but few shafts of light. Plants reach and twist and turn, responding to rotations in the heavens, circadian rhythms finding echo in the pulsating patches of dappled light. In their growth forms the grasses feel out space with their exploratory limbs, moving with gestures characteristic to species, diurnally animated.
Vypich, Bělohorská, 30 May 2010.
On a path crossing from bus stop to tram stop, the clouds in the sky switching from light on dark to dark on light, like a positive to a negative.
Charles University Botanical Gardens, 21 May 2010.
The corrosive marks here seem like vermicular outgrowths, or undulating marine plant forms, or finger smears cultured in a petrie dish. A long time has passed from cause to effect: a slow-motion development. The cause obscure, independent readings of the effect propose themselves. In this traversal of time there is transformation, just as in photographs there is a development from what is photographed into something else.
15 May 2010.
Street puddles at their edges record traces of passing by, they are temporary junctures. Return after a while to a puddle and the splashes around its rim speak of different hazards met, other feet, other wheels. Under the circling sun a puddle evaporates, in-creeping, dwindling mirror, to eventually leave no more witness to this passing. Puddles sometimes have alluring depth, sometimes beguiling luminescent surface sheen. The inky puddle here - all that is left of a heavy shower under the heat of the returning sun - reflects an ephemeral fragment of windowed facade.
15 May 2010.
Taking a photograph of a "found picture" is a performative action, declaring these to be marks that make a picture. But it is a performative action that is motivated by the potential of fragments to fuse into analogy and refer by likeness: here to the left is a sailing boat - now see the wind and sea spray - what brought about the smudged out bold white line? - and so on. The canvas as field for projections, the start of imaginative flight. (Earlier I quoted Leonardo's famous notebook entry about how looking at walls can arouse the mind to invention.)
Rather than generating one's own marks, it is an appropriation of vestiges of language, diagrams, drawings. This complicates the way such an image is to be viewed, bound as it is with other intention. Framing such an image is subject to both chance (what one finds is not by seeking a particular thing, but by taking what one gets) and personal preoccupations (the memory of other images, the impotent will to make one's own).
There is a reversal in the modi operandi of graffiti itemized by Krauss in the paragraph quoted previously. Suspension of action in favour of representation: taking light imprints from what is already there, as one might rubbings from tree bark, and framing it, remote from the site of the original marks. No incursion of space, no use of another's surface for inscription. Conversion of the traces of a past event into the present tense of the performative, both in my action of declaring this another picture, found by framing, and also in the (imagined) return of the presence of the original mark-maker in trying to reconstruct intention: why were these marks originally made?
The marks are reanimated when torn from context and declared to be something else.
"For graffiti is a medium of marking that has precise, and unmistakable, characteristics. First, it is performative, suspending representation in favor of action: I mark you, I cancel you, I dirty you. Second, it is violent: always an invasion of a space that is not the marker's own, it takes illegitimate advantage of the surface of inscription, violating it, mauling it, scarring it. Third, it converts the present tense of the performative into the past tense of the index: it is the trace of an event, torn away from the presence of the marker."
Cy was here; Cy's up, ArtForum, Rosalind Krauss.
Staré Město, 15 May 2010.
Along city streets there are many unintended marks or marks unmoored from their intention, marks that are traces of gestures or actions where the nature of the mark made is incidental or secondary. Marks made for one purpose (such as territorial markings) that can be appropriated for another (including purposelessness). There are those marks left underneath posters now ripped away, secondary marks arising from or carriers of primary marks, painted over graffiti or scratched out (here there is the violence done to others' defacements), and the partially rubbed out. What once signified is now erased, eroded or removed, origins now obscured or forgotten. In all this mark-making there is an accumulation of layers, burial under sedimentation and a loss of significance beyond a witness to there having been a past. That which is past inheres in place. The sense in place of it having been passed through.
Upon declaring a frame, the marks act graphically and a new significance may be played out. Some day the traces will have completely disappeared. It is this evanescence that inheres in photographs.
15 May 2010.
By pairing images there is an impulse to compare. It encourages re-looking and the apprehension of particularity. Pairing can happen within an image in the form of mirror symmetry – reflections off water or mirror or glass, two objects of the same type, twins (when taking the drain-pipes I had in mind Arbus' Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967) - or by the bringing together of two separate images, which may or may not share an overtly common element (and then the pairing becomes a puzzle piquing curiosity, creating a force field of suggestiveness, a surrealist juxtaposition, energy created by their mutual interrogation).
In its record of all details noticed and unnoticed, photography is well suited to teasing out meaning from the juxtaposition of a pair of images simply related to each other by having been taken of the same object or place. This might involve changes in time or lighting (including the hour or season – think of the pear tree in Péter Nádas' Own Death (2006), for example), changes of viewpoint, different framings of the same subject, two parts or details of a whole, returns to sites after time has seen subjective changes as well as objective (changes in how one sees things outside reflecting how there have been changes within oneself). Of particular interest to me is the case of two halves of a symmetric pair of objects, or a twin pair of subjects, each differently marked over time, thereby embedding the trail of the past in its traces on the present state. This raises questions of how and why things worked out differently for the two from their similar starting points: what events occurred to mark this one this way, that one that?
The juxtaposition of images – one and two - could be extrapolated to a sequence – one, two, ..., etc. - and a series of film stills result. (This by the way brings to mind the more complex questions of positioning of images in photomontage that are explored for example by David Hockney. Here I am restricting attention to the linear arrangement of framed images.)
By stopping at two images there is interaction rather than progression: the pair of images inform each other – movement is to and fro from one to the other, reflection brings about reflection. This creates a pendular, contemplative mode of attention. In a series of three images is embedded the implicit movement of progression, unless there is a pair of strongly related images placed around a third (like in altarpiece triptychs), which also brings about the stasis of mirror symmetry – such a triptych is more a central image and a pair around it than three images in succession.
Mirror symmetry does not always produce stasis – think of mise en abyme, or of Narcissus and the lure of the reflected image, suggestive of another world, through the looking glass.
15 May 2010.A couple of months ago I was somewhat at a loss upon reaching the point when it became over a year since the photographs were taken that I have been trawling through and selecting to put up here. A photograph which previously could be described as having been taken last May on such-and-such a day now has to be identified by year too. This occasion of the year swallowing its own tail gave me pause to consider what this accumulation of images might mean to the stray visitor. (For me, the convenience of chronology is to help me locate the originals when I want to make a print. The question of grouping and classification of images, and of archiving, is one that I have hitherto ducked out of, but one that exercises me ever more greatly as I watch in despair the haphazard fate of images piled disorderly in a heap by time's linear ordering. The question is of course a notorious one, riffed upon marvellously in Geoff Dyer's The Ongoing Moment.) The ordering of images by date taken obscures the fact that underlying them extend branches of ideas partially formed and developments of themes, and indeed for many of them that they are leaves on such branches is their very raison d'être.
Over the months I have vacillated between objective titles for images, giving place or subject alone, and more suggestive titles alluding to ideas or associations that, for me, infuse the image. The former course favours the viewer's free interpretation, the latter course can provide a starting point or anchor for elaborating a meaning in the image.
Ideas of course are two-a-penny, it is their concrete realization that is elusive. Further, beyond this comes intrinsically material expression, not reducible to ideas in other terms, not admitting translation. Of course most of the time - well yes, all - such attempts at material realization are failures. This goes with the turf. Indeed, most of the images you see here might better be regarded as formal exercises, soundings of the scope of the medium, intermediate. This is not to denigrate them, more to emphasize the long-term nature of developing a language for expression and the means for creativity. (An aspect of my method of selecting images has been to try to choose some picture from each day I took photographs, in this lying a residual sense of taking photographs being like making a diary, a record of days past. It is inevitable that some longeurs result.)
Many of the images refer overtly to problems of depiction and schemata from drawing and painting, to frames and apertures, to reinterpreted fragments, transmutation of marks into signs, reversion of signs into marks, the relation of traces left to marks made, looking into and looking at. Often, framing an image one sees a suggestion of other images seen. (One might say always. Towards the end of Godard's Eloge de l'Amour the narrator ruminates, “I see a landscape new to me, but it is new to me because I am thinking of another, former landscape that I know, and with which I compare this landscape.”) This remembering is a starting point for one's own seeing.
Emila Medková, Untitled
This was the beginning of an appreciative acquaintance with this photographer's work (precipitated further by the delight in seeing in her work so many eroded and marked walls - fields for conjuring images, sites of signs, eroded language, palimpsests). Further, after longer looking at this image, and relating it to others by Medková, the initial striking coincidence of subject changed into the perception of difference, a perception become more finely attuned to the particularities of personality (like visage or gait unmistakeable once known). Past image-making informs present, and meaning arises from how an image builds on those that have been made already. I later returned to taking images of weather-worn tarmac in Strahov Garden, appropriating these graphic marks as elements of triptychs that might to an imaginative eye conjure remembrances of drawings, perhaps of garden trees, or waves, or...
Returning to my former “anxiety of originality”, it is in such overlaps of interest with other people's work that communication becomes possible and modifications of one's own ideas are produced in the light of such prefigurations. In this way I might, for instance, still discover a differently realized version of themes underlying say Lee Friedlander's Letters from the People under the different conditions of my sensibility and the operations of chance and circumstance.
Much of photography is thinking about photography. For this reason I am always interested in reading words about images, and often it helps me in my responsiveness to other people's work, to understand what leads to certain images - what tributaries they have, which sea they lead towards. So I thought I might try here to articulate some of my own ideas, alongside the images. It is perhaps both appropriate and necessary that these thoughts remain fragmentary, maybe incoherent, probably much nonsense, to be discarded as soon as made, from which to move on. But in this the exercise may serve a purpose.
Ostrovní, Staré Město, 15 May.
Staré Město, 15 May.
Parléřova, 15 May.
12 May.
From the genus Calamagrostis? (small-reed), Schönbornská zahrada, 12 May.
Schönbornská zahrada, 12 May.
Vlašská, 12 May.
13 June 2010.
