May 19, 2009
by thenetwerk®
This is the first of what what we hope will be many reviews and essays from our contributors about contemporary photography and photographers. John Donaldson has come on board recently. He is best known to many ex-Blackpool students as their critical-contextual studies tutor. But John has been no ordinary tutor – he is more of a performer and those he can reach he does inspire. He left Blackpool in 2008 to set up Meatyard Arts, make (more) music and write. His Meatyard Arts project will have its first, of many, exhibitions with photography from the UK at RENCONTRES D’ARLES 2009. He also records and tours with his band, Calvin Party.
a psycho – social forensic.
From the exotic other to the highly staged conceits aping film’s manner of display and ersatz drama, via the trawling through of the bizarre and the grotesque, it would appear that nothing has been spared the photographic gaze. At times this gaze has assumed a frenzied dalliance with extremes and the conceptually and/ or theoretically spurious in a quest for difference or gravitas. Of course a fascination with sex, death, transgression and celebrity guarantees, if not success, then at least a moment in the spotlight for any aspiring foto ‘artiste’.
There is though, a photographic continuum, an approach that transcends genre and time and is characterised less by that which is spectacular than that which is everyday and commonplace and is in the end the photographic. What I am referring to here is that practice that eschews the epic and the sensational for, after Szarkowski, photo subjects that ‘…are simply present: clearly realised, precisely fixed, themselves, in the service of no extraneous roles.’
I am indebted at this point to a recent quote by Stephen Shore, a rejoinder to those of an overly fabricated approach when he states that ‘to see something spectacular and recognize it as a photographic possibility is not making a very big leap. But to see something ordinary, something you’d see everyday and recognize it as a photo opportunity – that’s what I’m interested in.’
The interest then, is in what could be described as ‘vernacular photography’, but this is a poetic vernacular wherein the banal is charged with intelligence, the commonplace becomes magical and where the mundane shimmers in the eye of the spectator… lets say, the empathy of Strand, the deliberation of Pinkcombe and the curious eye of Eggleston.
Woods’s ‘Decline’ study operates in the same terrain, image making which unpicks the everyday and results in a re – imagining of what is simply before us, re vitalising the spectators engagement with the picture, in the detail and traces of fabric that most fail to see in the drone and saturation of the routine.
Read more of this post
