FlashBack

I saw last night on a bbc iplayer a 93 year old man crying about the father he lost over 80 years ago. Then I watched the Alan Yentob: Imagine: Louise Bourgeois from 2008. It was late so I slept on it. This morning I partly listened to radio interviews of women who made the punk scene of London in the early 70s. I finished the washing-up and started thinking. the women liberation, the so-called Feminist Movement had nothing to do with women. The human race was ready to express its anxiety as to its coming about. Sex was just a way of demonstrating that all links could be sectioned off at any time while new one could be created. I think men wanted to shout at the established order too. That's why they invented the electric guitar and the synthesizer, no? anyhow, I am not going to talk about what I don't know. It's just that I got my comforter out of its box and dusted  this small piece of rusted metal found on the side of a railway 20 years ago. At time it can look like human feces. So when at look at this picture for example, I wonder what made artists use pooh to express themselves. Last year I saw an excellent show of Luke Fowler at the Serpentine and I could watch his fascinating documentary shown on multiples screens with some photographs of rebel psychiatrist R.D. Laing' s refuge Kingsley Hall in London. One of the most disturbed resident spent 3 months smearing the walls of her room with her shit. She felt better for it and started recovering slightly. Not particularly that bit but I adored that film. I'm going to befriend this rusty metal part again. As an homage to Louise Bourgeois.

         "I had a flashback of something that never existed"

Then I will work at something in homage to Martin Kipperberger. And may be then I will have find a way to do something for my beautiful Grand-mother. Not scatological! May be something with chicken feathers, old cast irons and quince. Roll on Pan F.

solaire

more human

Friday morning, despite a bright sunshine, I stayed home and finished reading Kazuo Hishiguro Never Let Me Go. Sometimes a work of fiction can impact on ones life with full force. that force can bring growth, can release an action hence its expansion. We create  to be more human. Art is not meant to be a representation of what makes us more human but a transcendency of the real toward the spiritual. This Mark Rothko kne. I am just starting to understand. Yippee!

Togetherness

As I'm fighting my little fight with bitterness and regrets, I really needed to recall times when taking photographs was just about experimenting and having fun and never never think about what the purpose was and where it fitted in the grand bal masqué of self-criticisms. We do not look like it on that picture, but we were having fun that day, we were king and queen of the highway, having a rest in the corner of our eyes. We were really together, it was always about being together. Now the photo is there to remember that. This is what Patti Smith talks about in Just Kids, her and Robert Mapplethorpe being together. Nothing can beat that.

don't give up

I saw this sad sad sight last week when walking along the Regent's canal. I guess the 7 inch had been damage by water in one of the barge before being left to melt in the sun. I wished they had been covered by a white cloth rather than seeing their decaying soul exposed to the glare of foreign tourists. I was never a 7 inch kind of girl, but hey, a groove is a groove.

all the things these hands have done

10 000 hours

For Edward

      

of no interest

in all aspects evenly

Louise Bourgeois and some 140 000 others died yesterday.

2010

                                     

                                                             

Tate Modern new blockbuster photography exhibition starts tomorrow. Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera,  is certain to have the right amount of shock, color, vintage, exotic, politic, artistic and crowd. I will be going, of course, to see the Brassaï, Weegee and some. The press coverage, illustrated by a black &white image from Jonathan Olley http://www.diemarnoblephotography.com/artists/jonathan-olley.html  reminded me of that  shoot of a street view behind Batersea Power Station I took in 1996. So off I was, scanning again. I will try to go down the spot one of these days. Looking at the image I remember that silence. It was on a sunday, all the surrounding streets were completely empty which made me feel that I was possibly trespassing, or for the least, I was wandering in some kind of unchartered territory; when I spotted the cameras, I did not feel reassure one bit, but started thinking that hordes of blood thirsty policemen and their dogs would probably arrive any minute and surround me with their automated weapons aimed at my Rolleiflex. I scampered off. 

The color picture was taken during my postgraduate course at Central St Martins and won the approval of my peers to be used as our end of year exhibition promotion material. It is a take on David Hamilton Swingeing London from 1968, one of my all time favorite pop images.

The unseen is fascinating because we will never know. The notion of what has been and what will be, before and after what we see, is one of the most interesting notion of photography It is a bit like children incessant interrogations about "before I was born" and "were will I go when I'm dead" or "do giants really exist". There are the images in our mind and the images we are shown and we have to, somehow, correlate the two.

London has approximately 10 000 CCTV.

                                                       

                                                                                

Verademashpolitalis

If I don't say anything, I feel as I haven't said enough.

Shrine

Rejoice

On stoicism

    

A while ago, I stumbled upon an old issue of Purpose magazine and I was really moved by a documentary on present-day slaves in France by Raphaël Dallaporta and Ondine Millot. The text  tell the story of 11 women who have been cheated in to slave labour for affluent families. The color photographs only show the building where their ordeal took place. The objectivity of the images contrast with the poignant tales of abject human behavior endure by naïve souls who were lured by the prospect of a better future for themselves or their family back home. I have long been fascinated by stories, fictional or real of people living in near isolation, voluntary or inflicted. The silence, the edge of madness, the lack of affection and communication, the forced withdrawal into oneself  is compelling enough to enter ones sanity through the exit door. As the daily ray of sunshine comes bouncing in the kitchen, I grab the DLux and narrow my universe to this one room. In an instant, my past, present and future flash in front of me. Nothing matters and everything matters. I am alive but above all I am free and I can play with that freedom. I choose where I want to be and no matter how many times I will find myself incapable of going further than my own neurasthenia, nobody has control over my movement but myself. I wish that somebody, somewhere right now is gaining or regaining his/her freedom.

Purpose n°9- Esclavage domestique by Raphaël Dallaporta and Ondine Millot

Is it right to steal from your children?

transmission characteristics

        Alice Virginie Reynaud née Rougon
24/07/1916 - 27/04/2010

mastering your hidden self

Whitstable

I drove to Whitstable on Saturday and believe me it was beautiful!

a photograph is not a painting

Disaster stroke last week; I lost the battery of the Leica dlux3. This essentially meant no snap shooting for a few days and the realization of how important this has become for me in the last few years, first using an Olympus mju2 and now the Leica dlux3. The evidence is that I  always photograph best when I am not thinking and only looking. Thinking does not engage feeling and snap shooting  is a good way to feel the world around; in that sense, photography is for me an artistic medium, like Haikus rather than philosophical statements. Not for me the big epic, the fresco depicting Hell, Heaven, the damned and the beautiful, I am only looking at the footprint, the chard, the electric wire. By having a thorough knowledge of art history, I often see elements of the real world which recall an art movement, sometimes a painting. This is somehow reassuring for me; what I see is part of the whole, others have seen it before me, be a long time ago or just a few weeks. When I see "that way", I might inconsiderately decide to shoot. It is probably my way of saying to dead artists:I know your work and I embrace you. Photography can hold hand with painting, the way it does with everything that might ever come out of a human brain, the way René Magritte hold hand with pipes and hats. But a photography will never be a painting. The time spent, the smell, the white canvas, wood, plaster which will be covered by hand, the patience also the impatience, mostly the time spent to produce one painting can never be compared to even the longest exposure, the most fastidious Photoshop fiddling, or chemistry enhancing of a photography. So what is Jane Ure-Smith trying to say in this week end FT Life and Art, when she titles her review of Andreas Gursky new show at Sprüth-Magers in Berlin "Painterly Photographic"?, calling him a "painter" of modern life? Possibly, she does not know her De Kooning from her Richard Misrach. Did she meant to refer to his sense of composition? It seems Mr Gursky affirms not being interested in an objective view of the world but a painterly view, which is not the same idea at all than him producing "painterly" photographic work. He mentions the formal qualities of painting, that is the form, not the essence. Form follows function and it is evident here that Mr Gursky is not about to abandon the walls of the museums to start a blog showcasing the snapshots of his "carefree days, driving through some nice landscapes."
I shot the back of this advertising board in front of the old Commonwealth Institute and I was in  a Lucio Fontana meet Picasso mood.


http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/73a56e86-4e63-11df-b48d-00144feab49a.html

http://spruethmagers.com/exhibitions/258

Lorna Sage

As I wait for the bag of frozen peas to work their magic on my knee, I have started to read Lorna Sage Moments of Truth, Twelve Twentieth-Century Women Writers. The anonymous portrait on the jacket makes me want to read every single word she has ever written. She married at 16 because she was pregnant but still graduated and became a literary critic and a Professor of English Literature. She died in 2001 aged 57. I feel that along with Grace Paley, whose Collected Stories I read last year, I will find in LS a true inspiration for what to thrive for as a creative woman and mother: quiet determination, a self-belief so powerful that reserve and shyness have no means of survival. Great accomplishment does not necessitate weekly manicures and in order to shine a woman has no requisite for the services of Mario Testino or Brigitte Lacombe.

http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/Authors/5070/lorna-sage

                                                    
                                                              shining in the kitchen 2007