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Notes for Sean - Dr Henry Bond

As usual Sean you are a natural image-maker with this series. I feel very familiar by now with the area of woodland where the pictures have been made. The photos remind me of the scene from the beginning of Blue Velvet where Jeffrey finds a human ear in the undergrowth of the meadow near his home. They also put me in mind of police evidence photographs of course. The darkness of the pictures recall photos by Richard Misrach and William Klein--I also did a book called Point and Shoot with many dark photos in it. For me the strength of these images is in the way that the natural elements--grasses, ferns, roots etc.--form complex grids that are interwoven, undulating, spiked, and patterned. The context of this natural tapestry always remains as important as the objects at the centre of the images.

The abandoned objects are cast-adrift, forgotten, unwanted, as Walter Benjamin talked about when describing Atget's work. Or one could think of the forlorn objects gathered from the streets of New York--like cigarette butts--by Irving Penn. Looking at the pictures the quality that strikes me is of the power of night to transform the most arbitrary and mundane litter into objects with a powerful assumed narrative--there seems to be a story behind each of the objects, which is just out of reach. The subject matter of these unwanted things evidences certain activities; the images depict the detritus of certain human activities like drinking alcohol, having sex, etc. And just as there is in daily life, in these photos there is a taboo around the activities. The idea of a taboo is embodied in the darkness: the activities become clandestine, quite sordid--and suddenly exposed. The feeling in the photos is of the oppressiveness or undertow of night as claustrophobic and daunting--as in the poems of Charles Baudelaire.

Also it must not be overlooked that the objects are all examples of littering, the people who left these things behind don't care about damage to the environment in that way, they just leave what they need to leave behind. So the photos are evidence, at first, of an anti-social act, and beyond that a narrative that could be violence, rape, or even murder. For me there is a chilling beauty in these pictures--I have always been fascinated by crime scene photos--that is set in motion by reverse engineering the image before me: a man moving around in forest undergrowth at night. The man stops to take a picture and moves on, his activity is full of purpose but it remains unclear to the onlooker. At night in the forest every small detail can take on a haunting aspect--so that any small object can become alarming or disturbing. Above all, the pictures seem to depict vital clues useful to the detective--as Benjamin, again, wrote, "isn't every street-corner the scene of a crime?"

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Elliott Erwitt

“All the technique in the world doesn’t compensate for the inability to notice.”

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I have been thinking a lot about photographs and the role of the photographer. Obviously photographs are too easy to make, they saturate our culture. Everyone takes a photograph, are they all photographers? 

“Serious” or “professional” photographers struggle more and more to justify their position as a photographer.

It must come down to process. The build up to the actual taking of an image. So what previously defined a person as a photographer surely cannot anymore, preparation and intent does. 

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Traces

I took the previous images as pure documentation whilst walking between locations for another project. I used a simple point and click camera with built in flash. 

I wanted the images to be very deadpan, very central and hint at crime scene photography. However certain decisions in the process act to contradict this use of the photograph. In fact the objects that have been photographed do not clearly stand out from the background in all of the images, you cannot see details like colour, grain also diminishes some focus. 

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Traces - 

Documentation of things/ rubbish left in the woods. You can presume the purpose.

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Lets get something going again

Moving house, having another child etc etc...

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Edgar Martins - Such a good use of the darkness, simple and effective.

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What I like most about some of the Ghost crash images is the darkness. Something I have been thinking of a lot recently. Images tend to work better the less you give away. Edgar Martins work is phenomenal and he is the master of not giving too much away. 

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GHOST CRASH - So I have been meaning to make some work with regards to a ghost story I stumbled upon during my bypass project. 

These are the first images I have taken, purely as an exploration of place first of all. I enjoy them but feel I need more artist intervention and interaction. Can’t decide how I want to approach this. 

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Planes planes planes or (Dah dey’s if your my son) 

They have taken over life for a little while now. Starting with my little boys obsession with them and then my daughter starting at Heathrow Gymnastics club and the proximity to the M25 and my ‘Bypass’ project. The result has been months of walking the perimeter, finding lovely composition and photographing planes. The landscape surrounding Heathrow is so contested and has been a subject of discussion for years. Documenting the area and having fun including planes in lots of different ways has been a very enjoyable pass time and project for me. 

I do not believe it is over and am going to start turning the camera more to the Plane spotters around the area. 

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Still within the period of time I felt like exploring through making images, as apposed to reading. These are a little more abstract, this time I reversed the lens and pointed it skywards. Recording the light pollution above Twickenham stadium at midnight. 

These images have not been colour adjusted or edited apart from a 5x4 crop.

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I like the idea of playing with distance and it seems to me that artificial lighting helps to distort a persons sense of space. 

As it was that time of year, many people had decorated trees in their front gardens, I set about documenting many of them and enjoying the relationship to the images NASA had taken of the globe.

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Thomas Ruff appropriated NASA images.

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These images from Nasa are really intriguing, they are showing night time lighting across the globe. What is clear to see is the differences of light temperatures. The new LED (white) lights in the inner cities and the older sodium lamps spreading throughout the suburbs.

I like the relationship these images seem to have with the images I made of the plants under street lighting. Although the distance is vastly different the resemblance the street lighting has to leaves is clear to see. Roads stretch like the veins in the leaf, created and only seen due to artificial night lights.

Copyright Nasa

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https://www.edmundclark.com/works/negative-publicity/#text

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The excitement of this project is being snuffed out a bit by all of the reading I have been doing. It is a hard balance to find. I am quite impulsive, so when I have an idea and energy I make images, lots of them and at all costs. I think reading although extremely important to contextualise work slows me down and gets me thinking too much. 

Today I will get a camera and take pictures instead of reading essays.