I have
been clearing out my inbox and wanted to collect here some of the elements which had
caught my imagination…
Fellow OCA student Anne Giddings had referred to a Welsh term “Y Filltir Sgwar” (The
Square Mile) which is described as the area with which one is most familiar
and concerned with.
From Anne’s website:
Alleyways
In this project I explored the idea that “…we know a patch of ground in a detail we
will never know anywhere again. In Welsh
it is called ‘y filltir sqwar and it exists in the Welsh psyche as one of a
series of cognitive maps around home and locale” (Pearson)
I believe that this intimately known area from
childhood has stayed with me and is resurfacing unbidden in my photographs. In
this work I visited this idea consciously, mapping one part of that cognitive
map from childhood onto my current surroundings.
The resulting work seems to reflect feelings of
disorientation and uncertainty as though in a shifting labyrinth, maybe there
is a sense of a need for transition from one place to another through or within
these liminal spaces.
I love
this idea (and that the Welsh have a term for it!) and it reminds me that I am
fairly dedicated to my own square mile around our place near Brick Lane. I really need to push myself to go further
afield to make videos.
This was
an interesting piece on the so-called ‘photo-taking-impairment effect’:
I have
definitely experienced memory haze with events and locations when I was almost
exclusively obsessed with picture taking but I also agree that sometimes
getting in really close and allowing some abstraction can solidify an object or
subject in my memory. The author of the article, Andrea Norrington, urges us
to: “Get in close, abstract, distort, look up, look in, look across, look down and
whatever you do, leave plenty for the imagination to play with…”
I was fascinated by an article from Loring Knoblauch:
It talks
about how digital photography, in its relatively short history, has moved from
direct technical substitution to being more tightly connected with other media.
“...the
larger effect is I think a result of a more subtle shift in artistic mindset,
from “I am a photographer using a camera to document X” to “I am an artist who
is using a computer/scanner/camera to mine an archive of found imagery, using
those images to build studio installations and sculptures, which I then
rephotograph multiple times and reprocess with a software algorithm” or some
such equally complicated combination of steps, processes, and intermingled,
mashed up ideas.”
Somehow it
reminded me a little of two slides I saw in a presentation this week about the
transition of magazines from print to digital.
The
speaker described the first slide as “Perfection” – what everyone
in publishing wants and expects to have:
The
second slide was entitled “Reality”:
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