I know very little about Witold Gombrowicz, let alone Witold Gombrowicz’s book, Memoirs of a Time of Immaturity. Still, upon reviewing his biography, one can’t help but find him a fascinating character. One part Jean Genet, one part Jean-Paul Sartre, Gombrowicz’s work seems to embody the twentieth century’s anxieties, both in terms of the Holocaust and […]
Othering, debated through the discourse of reading the camera as a difference machine, seems at the crux of much of photography’s woes. Challenged by the notion that the machine is neutral in its observational and technical ability, the authorship and cultural means of producing images are undergoing a fruitful re-assessment of its terms to represent, […]
The photograph on the cover of Jardín de mi padre (My Father’s Garden, 2020) shows Luis Carlos Tovar, carried in his mother’s arms as an infant. On the right side of the image, a man’s arm reaches from outside the frame towards Luis Carlos – his fingers are only a few centimeters away. Time is […]
Infrastructure and industrial sites offer an abstract alternative to the everyday environment. Though most of the sites associated with infrastructure remain hard to visit for various reasons, most of which deal in “security” issues, their strange form and dispossession of people in general terms make their profiles eerily desirous to photograph. There […]
“However, I am interested in how we discorporate and re-corporate an image of somebody based on how they wear themselves to the public and what the conversation around the image of that person is by addressing their image and performance in it as iconic”. How do we disassemble a look, let alone an “iconic” […]
“Images from French photographers in West Africa, Madagascar and also the Middle East, such as studies by Tancrede Dumas focused on hair as a way of defining difference”. Of all bodily parts most associated with photography, and though I would like to think there are many, hair remains the bodily material most associated with […]
“Jules Verne in his novel of the same name uses the phenomenon as a metaphorical tool in which the protagonist Delphine searches for a rare meteorological phenomenon which doubles as a search for interpersonal connection.” Pulse. Questions, rather interrogations must be committed to. Is jugular distension normal? A sinuous pulse distorts the natural curves of […]
“While photographic techniques and mysteries are patiently explained, the paintings present are left simply to be. Everywhere one sees photographers paying homage to painters, nowhere the reverse. A fact which speaks inadvertent volumes.”
“I think the darkness at the periphery of the work also comes from a desire to acknowledge a certain brutality inherent to the history of the western landscape, and to the struggle for survival within it.”
“It is not as a blackout from his own memory but to revitalise the missing parts, to allow himself and the viewer to fall into the image, to find oneself in that space.”
“The castle, which controls the populace, does so through an absolute production of its image. It is a tale in which plebian might is as disorganized as any contemporary parallel for leading a resistance against the juggernaut who rules by fear and an unethical chess game between the citizens and the tyranny of the castle’s own image”
“I apologize that so many men were mentioned. You have to understand that the books of history are uncomfortably weighted towards testicles”