yesterday morning school run

the two eyed truth

Every day, I try to reconsider why I take photographs, which one are worth showing, which are best kept hidden for the time being and how much I care or not about the photographs belonging to a certain category or school or what degree of ripping off other people's work, inspiration, of being under the influence have possessed me while pressing the shutter ( thank god, so far cameras still have a shutter release even if THEY are trying to convince us that HD video  is the new photography... leave the shutter open for 5 hours you might get a good image out of it). I know, it is time consuming. It leave me no time to do something else. Sometimes, it leaves me no time to go out and take photographs. But I enjoy very much doing all this  r e c o n s i d e r a t i o n. I take it very seriously. It means, I have a tremendous knowledge of the history of photography and I have to be up to scratch with art history as well and sociology is important, so is general history and a certain amount of understanding of technology, optics and chemistry becoming things of the past but you never really forget what you learned at school. In order to reconsider, to consider objectively what I am recording, I have learned that the most important things are honesty and modesty and those two traits belongs to philosophy because they are entirely subjective. I genuinely enjoyed reading Roland Barthes and Regis Durand when I was young, it spoke to me even more so than Jack Kerouac,  Celine and Henri Miller all together; to this day, my bible is The New History of Photography by Michel Frizot. I am a photography swot; but when I shoot, I'm high on adrenaline and my entire body contract in the single effort of catching a fickle vision, my brain stop functioning under the pressure. I'm close to death. It will take my senses from an hour to many years to retrace the event. I was going to start talking about photography as a mean to step out from a situation, as in Larry Clark, Nan Goldin and probably William Eggleston and probably Juergen Teller and probably countless others including myself have saved their life by holding a camera in front of them but I do not like to brag about people I have never even met, so I'll go and make a cup of tea and start considering those shots of an 18 year old model I took on saturday.

The ones that did

Any length of string or ribbon would be saved. Any wrapping paper. All buttons and zippers would be removed from garments before the clothes became rags for cleaning, blocking, signaling if not turned into new garments such as children clothing or summer version of themselves. The lace works of shirts and underwear would be removed to be used again. The products of years of careful collecting will be thrown away. Colors and manufacture's quality of past clothing will be forgotten, unless miraculously inherited by a museum that will charge us the rate of half a day work to have the privilege of admiring what was once in our grand-mother chest of draws or in our great-grand-father garage.

The ones that didn't make it

Hampstead Heath

Du regard en reconnaissant

through your hand

no shield

In 1997, I had lived in London for may be a year and I still believed in the magic. I used to work behind the bar of a Charing Cross nightclub and in a menswear shop in Covent Garden. British Journal of Photography used to have their offices above that shop and the editor at the time was a regular client. When he learned that I had come to London in the hope of breaking through as a photographer, he offered to include my profile in their young photographer section. I was thrilled...I thought my time had come. Then came....I'm going to let Thom Yorke of Radiohead say it, because he says things the way I mean them:   

            Prove Yourself
 I can't afford to breathe in this town
 nowhere to sit without a gun in my hand
 look back up to the cathode ray
 I'm better off dead
 I'm better off dead
 I'm better off...
 Prove yourself
 Prove yourself
 Prove yourself
 I want to breathe, I want to grow
 I say I want it, but I don't know how
 I look, I bleed, I beg and pray
 I'm better off dead
 I'm better off dead
 I'm better off...
 Prove yourself
 (why.....?)
 Prove yourself
 Prove yourself

 ©Radiohead- 1993

and because I didn't know how to prove myself to content the editors, the art directors, the art buyers, I became really confused about what being a photographer was about and I stuck to serving Southern Comfort and selling hooded tops. Luckily, I kept on taking polaroids, and printing very dark portraits of friends or dead baby rabbits and enjoying myself. I got better at understanding what photography was about. But most importantly, I stop caring as to getting published or receiving a pat on the shoulder. I glued hundreds of photos in scrap book, until I got so bored of my own self-obsession, I rang a friend and suggested that after 20 years of trying to build a pyramid on my own, I would like to build a shed in the back garden and would she help me to nail the boards. I'll spare you a long blurb about the philosophy of failure and success. I have a few 6x4 prints to glue. 

a

goldpeg

 I download my 11 photographs of the week. I choose 5, I upload them; one of them is accidently deleted. I leave it at that. I choose the sequence at which the images are being seen. I leave it at that.

I'm listening to Indian music from a beautiful documentary being played on C4, which you can see in full length but really bad quality here Dhrupad a film by Mani Kaul .

Before that I watched Exit through the gift shop, the first feature film by English street angry but nice artist Banksy. and that blew me away (I'm a bit tired from this afternoon swimming). That film sure woke me up. It's pure genius in the way that Being John Malkovich was. It made me so happy to see something that was not about money. I have great admiration for filmmaker who have the insight of giving us much more than what they said they would. This is not only a documentary about street art, a comedy about a childish selfish bohemian nouveau riche but an acid self-critical mockumentary about selling out and the contemporary art market. I wish I could sing.

easy does it

Just as I'm running out of patience and wondering what I have done with the spool of string that will take me back, here come my little collection of brown bottles, laughing away and patting me on the shoulder, as if to tell me to just put the lid on it.

territoire

server

I have just signed in for one year of web hosting with some dodgy american company, and I have a domain name,  to try and not feel a fraud when I say I am a photographer. I just have no idea how I will get from here to there but I'm pretty good as an electrician (if it goes in somewhere, it has to come out somewhere... brown wire , blue wire, yellow and green, it's all a big circle). let's hope I will be able to go from linear to binary without much damage. 

Atropa Belladonna

Holidays

tète

 track-list for the day:

 Bloodstain- Unkle  listen

 Sometimes I feel like a motherless child- Clarence Smith listen

 Live my life with you-Corinna Joseph listen

 Kill 100- X-Press 2 feat Rob Harvey listen

 100%- Sonic Youth listen

Lords of Hawthorn

I'm on the steps.

tell tale

I'm trying to remember where the front door is. while listening to a Black Dog mix. or may be I'll stay in the shed. look, look, look again.

Particulars of shares

slow motion

 The other night, a friend was telling me how she had been inspired by a dead mining town in America, and we agreed that anything decaying and derelict held much  drama and grace. Andrew Moore Detroit Disassembled is a perfect example of how powerful an image abandonment can create. I grew up in a street perpendicular to the rue Lavoisier (Chemist 1743-1794) and his discovery that matter may change its form and shape but its mass remain the same, abbreviated in the famous statement that" nothing is created, nothing is destroyed, everything is transformed", has become my motto. I remember discovering photographs of abandoned cars in America and Cuba, their carcasses devoured by vegetation and feel a shiver ran down my spine, and the terrible scenes of Jan Saudek end of the world imagination whose poster hang on my wall for most of my teenage years, were the ticket to  the world of adulthood, so much more than the glossy cover of Photo and Zoom magazine  that my father used to buy. Those dark and dusty scenes always had more appeal to me than Andy Warhol's Campbell Soup Cans even-thought the two are intrinsically linked. I am still lusting after that aluminium foil tape so.

yellow

et voila, I'm back from 6 weeks in the south of France. There are tons of digital images to sort out, a wedding to shoot on monday, the 10th issue of Cream, Creammier to read through, the bike to dust, the rant to have at Saatchi Young British artists exhibition  and the éloge of the Arles Marin Karmitz Collection display of Michael Ackerman to write. Poor me.