
Jem Southam Interview: The Pastoral Moth
“The premise and nature of each work, and its eventual architecture, develop as the work is progressing, and again I am led in this by my relationship with the particular site”.
“The premise and nature of each work, and its eventual architecture, develop as the work is progressing, and again I am led in this by my relationship with the particular site”.
“It is this sand-blasted speculation or rather en-spectralization, the ghosting and subsequent miasma of capitalism as it exists in the economy of images that we regard as relative at the very least-namely the aptitude to regard photography if not truth, certainly as plausibly disagreeable in a shared system of acknowledged solutions for knowledge-based communication”
“They become meditative plates in which the living continue with all their baggage to be stopped and given a reflexive moment in which to breath out”.
“The current political narrative that paints immigrants as invaders has been a part of our national conversation for a long time. I want people to be reminded that there is a long and deep history of immigration that forms the basis of our country’s strength.”
“The “focus” is very eclectic as are my tastes. They are always changing and have been enlarging these past years. The collection has been very contemporary-based from the start and that is still true”. -GCB
“As the project jumps backwards and forwards in time, and geographically, from one city to the next, the sequence returns again and again to Los Angeles”
“Visually and technically for photography, the season is something of a conundrum, it is firstly a phenomenon that catches our impassioned attentions but it is also incredibly loathsome to be captured on film…”
“There are downsides of course to these multiple identities. You can find yourself developing a bit of a split professional personality and it can make it difficult at times to know where to best direct your energies. Other people struggle with your split loyalties as well.”
“Lips is just one of his titles that works between the space of desire, appropriation, the body and what I will loosely label as the ethereal space between memory, nostalgia and history considered the “collective design unconscious.”
“I was very motivated by Deborah’s Bright’s 1985 essay: Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men, which stressed the importance of differing subjective viewpoints from the established patriarchal vision”
“In a dialogue where it is often difficult not to mention “medium specificity”, it would be fair in jest to contemplate why photography’s utility is toward change and simultaneously toward stasis. Stasis is where comfortablility lies, but this position also breeds contempt.”
“Vandalism” is a way in which to authorize or sign off on a negation of agreement of form and intent. It is to suggest that at its heart, what vandalism does is to distort the fabric of time in appearance governed by the individual” Crypto-architecture is not purposeful on the plane of first person experience. […]