on reflection

interesting how the puddle reflects from a low viewpoint

Raising Boys - Film Still ( 1of 6)

Fallen - Film Still (2 of 6)

Fall - Film Still (3 of 6)

Falling - Film Still (4 of 6)

falling, a photo by mdx on Flickr.

Laura - Film Still (5 of 6)

Laura, a photo by mdx on Flickr.

Neil - Film Still (6 of 6)

Neil, a photo by mdx on Flickr.

twin peaks

4 weeks into the first term and the looming twin peaks of essay and practical project are showing themselves. The first short project is finished - shoot 6 film stills, using portable flash lighting to produce images which imply a narrative. I did it despite myself - not at all the easiest way of working for me - and yet I do get a sense of the layering of meaning that becomes possible. Next up is the group project with Laura, Marion and Valerie. We seem to be settling around a theme of "Waiting". A shot each using medium format on slide film, And then the essay - 3000 words by January, the module is "Technologies of the Self". Have been trawling through Neil Young's albums on Spotify. Busy times.

dusk (GWL)

A photo for flickr's Guess Where London? group. So far it's had 95 views and couple  of guesses.
I might have to clue it up a bit.

Gerhard Richter at the Tate

Had a quick visit to Gerhard Richter's Panorama retrospective at the Tate. A questing body of work, each room fresh and intriguing, near the end a small collection of personal photographs partly painted over - the blurb suggests both violence and caress - maybe - but also an encouragement. I'll be back.

“One has to believe in what one is doing, one has to commit oneself inwardly, in order to do painting. Once obsessed, one ultimately carries it to the point of believing that one might change human beings through painting. But if one lacks this passionate commitment, there is nothing left to do. Then it is best to leave it alone. For basically painting is idiocy.” (From Richter, 'Notes 1973', in The Daily Practice of Painting, p. 78.)

art box

art box, a photo by mdx on Flickr.

we visited the new white cube on Bermondsey Street - just round the corner from us - and then went looking for leftover art round the back
which led to this interview with Jeff Wall http://www.whitecube.com/artists/wall/video/48/

STAY ON THE BUS

The Helsinki Bus Station Theory: Finding Your Own Vision in photography http://www.fotocommunity.com/info/Helsinki_Bus_Station_Theory

seeing is believing

“The photograph reduplicates the world and in time even comes to displace it, taking on the character of what is true and what is real. Seeing is believing, we say, a maxim which was unimaginable prior to the invention of linear perspective vision. And with the camera we have further qualified this vision: not any seeing is believing, but only that seeing which duplicates the neutrality and impartiality of the camera eye.” Romanyshyn63

Descartes’ model of the self is conceptually linked to Alberti’s model of vision

“Almost two centuries before Descartes will establish the philosophical grounds of a … self, separated from the world, the … eye of the artist has already prepared the space for that achievement.” (Romanyshyn p42) “When [Descartes] says ‘I think therefore I am,’ he simply articulates in philosophical language that distance from the body which the geometry of linear perspective vision has already created.” (Romanyshyn p48)

perspective

“In a sense, perspective transforms [real] space into mathematical space. … It forgets that we see not with a single fixed eye but with two constantly moving eyes … It takes no account of the enormous difference between the psychologically conditioned ‘visual image’ through which the visible world is brought to our consciousness, and the mechanically conditioned ‘retinal image’ which paints itself upon our physical eye.” (Panofsky, p31)

Perspective

Perspective creates distance between human beings and things … but then in turn it abolishes this distance by, in a sense, drawing this world of things … into the eye.” (Panofsky, p67)

Linear perspective

[Linear perspective] establishes … a formal separation between a subject who sees the world and the world that is seen, and in so doing it sets the stage, as it were, for that retreat or withdrawal of the self from the world which characterizes the dawn of the modern age. Ensconced behind the window the self becomes an observing subject, a spectator, as against a world which becomes a spectacle, an object of vision.” (Romanyshyn, p42)

plant life