Well forked but not dead...

There's this great quote attributed to photographer Garry Winogrand in which he remarks "I photograph to see what the world looks like photographed". I really quite like this as a raison d'etre for taking pictures. Its absence of methodological convolution, political/social (or otherwise) agenda, and general lack of pretension regarding the photograph as document or art make it an overwhelmingly simplistic mission statement its hard to argue with. However, I feel this apparently modest and simplistic rationale for making pictures belays a profound and truly intellectual way of looking at the world around oneself, that I can't help but admire and subscribe to.

To look at the world 'photographed' is not to look at the world as we know it, or the moment as we experienced it; but rather to take the fleeting glimpses captured in our camera and divorce them from any sentiment or context. They are not tokens or memories rooted in nostalgia or subjectivity - but isolated and self-contained vignettes; abstracted by the severing of their time and place and expressionist in embodying the photographers decisions of composition and subject matter.

This is rather at odds with mine own photographical pursuits with diaristic intent - however since making a recent and rather dramatic break with the Irvine Welshian forces that had hitherto frequented both my life and photographs I've made a very concerted effort to foray into the realms of the 'normal' - leaving a void of how I should now approach my subject.

Joel Meyerowitz on a discussion of Eugene Atget gave a great account of how framing the outwardly banal allows it to take on new meaning, which is also a perspective I really like, and resonates quite strongly with that of Winogrand. As such, though my work is still inherently diaristic in nature - I've lately felt the need to progress now, to divorcing sentiment or any sense of biography from future photographs by omitting captions, context or any text I usually impose for support and let the images speak, or not, purely on the aesthetical makeup of their framing and contents.

This not to say I'm trying to create technically beautiful or 'professionally sound' images that don't warrant explanation - but rather isolate what I've ventured to photograph and allow ambiguity to seep in and impose itself on everything up to the most potentially straightforward scene - which can speak volumes in the absence explanation.

Regardless, despite my on-going photographing, my updates here will be few and far between as an MA dissertation calls and my impending sense of dread is already undulating somewhere deep within my bones...