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Monday, 15 May 2006
Anti-photography.
Non-photography is floating around and it is something that hits like a chorus. Many debates over smoky Sunday dining tables - my talk weak with hunger - have resulted in clenched fists and flung paper. A keen friend loves to Lomo. He searches events with his Russian automat, finger beaded with sweat, tension-strained-tensions, a tendon out of place.
Often, during these evenings, he attempts to persuade me to drop my rejection of cameras. I dislike them, I feel awkward taking pictures, they obscure an internal recognition a connection. I cannot write of something I have photographed. He claims our difference is the result of memory; his faltering, mine acute, if not entirely transient. In my head, odd little moments resonate, flight times dissipate.
For me, looking at other people's holiday snaps holds itself as numbing as listening to other people's dreams. And yet everyone takes them, as expert. There must be more amateur photographers than painters, poets and sculptors put together. And they function as dreary documenters, just as weblogs function as amateur Kafkas, manic Blanchots, reticent & shy B.S.Johnsons. The blanketing of standards, the sense of DIY mocks an elite both positively and negatively.
There is no sense of time in a bad photograph.
But of course, the antithesis of this is the reason of a good photograph, it transcends inks and the rectangular borders, moves away from geographies and pulls unapparent relationships into shot. Therefore, unhesitantly, I love the Lomo pictures of my friend. Not of all of the photographs, because not all of them work, not all of them do the work. But the ones that succeed are processes of survival, relationships created and exposed in trays.
I hate to photograph because I, like the majority of photographers, am no good.
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