Monday 15 December 2008

Tokihiro Sato





Tokihiro Sato uses a mirror or torch to create photographs 'Photo Respirations' that trace time through light, a counterpart to Hiroshi Sugimoto's concerns. Interesting for me, when I was researching initial ideas I was looking at signalling using mirrors and the sun, thinking 'this can't make a photograph', but from depth of exploration comes discovery....images from here

Wednesday 10 December 2008

Judging a book by its cover



This is perhaps how the front cover of the book will look, although, of course, I can't really envisage how the design will be as a physical object. Also still need to purge myself of over-ambitious expectations of both the book and the photographs it contains, thinking of it makes my stomach churn right now! Just had a hunt for, and can't currently find, a book that my grandfather made about a summer climbing trip to Skye. It is painstakingly handwritten with detailed pen and ink sketches of the routes on the mountains. A kind of Wainwright tribute, it is an intense and personal vanity project, presumably never intended for anything other than his own pride. Vanity publishing seems like a negative term but my grandfather's book is wonderful, despite or because of it its intended audience of one, or perhaps some of his climbing club friends. I've tried to bring this idea through in the way that I've presented my work in the book, and I suppose in the very notion of getting it hand-bound. The photographs are subjective experiences of light, and therefore I've presented them as a subjective book. I've also tried to bring in the relationship that printing had to the development of religion, and therefore the assimilation of ancient sun cults into Christian doctrine. Of course, most people will just think the cover is a nice colour and wonder why some of the pictures are blurry! And so they should...

Monday 8 December 2008

Festival of Light





At the Oldham Interfaith Festival of Light on Friday photographing for my day (or should that be night?) job. The evening was a celebration of light festivals in different religions, (from the top) Hindi dancers celebrating Diwali, the Christian Nativity, and Islamic Nasheed. Think I missed the Buddhist section of the programme but the pagans definitely weren't representing, despite all of the above arguably being sublimations of the solstice. Two things that I am thinking of here- firstly the different ways I could have developed my project. I've not really blogged about the book design and getting it printed and off to the binder, because, unlike childbirth there is no massive rush of hormones that instantly makes you forget the means to the end; all I can see of it at the moment is mistakes and tortured misjudgements. I could have done something very straight forward like the above; and let sequence and design ascribe meaning. I feel like I have far too much meaning with my book, like how they say a first novel always tries to bring in every experience of the writer's life to date massacring clarity in the process. Secondly, how much is easier is it to shoot digital? It takes a one hundredth of the time to get it to a point where it can be sent out into the world. I'm amongst millions having this dialogue still in my head, and there are fundamental reasons why I chose to shoot my project on film. Yet I can't help but think that I am a pretentious Luddite with this, thinking that shooting film makes me and the photograph more serious and worthy when ultimately the medium is not the message, the subject is. And to give a subject the value it deserves requires it to be disseminated as widely as possible, and to recognise that you can't control people's response to it once it is gone.