Joanna L. Cresswell
history   ask
Arts Writer currently living and working in London.

Project Manager at Self Publish, Be Happy

Please contact joannacresswell@gmail.com for more information & commissions.
/This is Tomorrow. 2012/ Shoot! Existential Photography “Like guns and cars, cameras are fantasy-machines whose use is addictive. However, despite the extravagances of ordinary language and advertising, they are not lethal… The camera/gun does not kill, so the ominous metaphor seems to be all bluff… Still, there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as the camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a sublimated murder – a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.” – Susan Sontag, ‘On Photography (1977)’ There is a black and white photograph. Jean-Paul Sartre looks on as Simone de Beauvoir takes a shot with a rifle – eyes closed, poised, concentrating. The trigger is pulled, the target is hit and a photograph of the moment is captured forever. This is the nature of the popular photo shooting galleries found across Europe in the period following World War I, and this is one of the defining images of The Photographers’ Gallery’s current exhibition ‘Shoot! Existential Photography’. Exploring the shared lexicon of the gun and the camera – aim, point, load, trigger, shoot, fire – the exhibition traces the theoretical relationship between the two. Along with Sartre and de Beauvoir, a whole host of artists, intellectuals and thinkers lined up to take their shot, including Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, Lee Miller and Robert Frank. Opening with a selection of vintage photographs and a slideshow named ‘Celebrity Cabinet (1929-1955)’ by Clément Chéroux, the show pinpoints early signs of how this curious sideshow attraction came to fascinate and inspire countless artists’ work. Through central philosophical themes of mortality, deconstruction of the ego and reflections on the self, ‘Shoot!’ highlights the unfaltering presence of gun and camera in art right up to the present day, with a rich selection of artists to illustrate. The work of Sylvia Ballhause comes in the form of a multi-media installation. First there is ‘Shooting himself (2008)’ - a set of found shooting portraits of an unknown man arranged sporadically across the wall. Then there is ‘Shooting myself (2008)’, in which we see a constructed photograph of a woman in the act of shooting a photographic target. Finally there is ‘Shooting rig [active/passive] (2007)’ – two photographs of a photographic shooting gallery set-up. The three separate pieces (from a larger body of work named simply ‘Shootings’), though perhaps not as powerful individually, work incredibly well as one complete entity, and are actually something of a good reference point for the core ideas in the show. Following on seamlessly from Ballhause’s found shooting portraits, is Erik Kessel’s ‘In Almost Every Picture #7(2008)’. The project documents the life of Ria van Dijk who, as a young girl, took her first photo-shooting portrait on 5 September 1936, and then every year (save for wartime) until the present day. Not only do the pictures trace the life of van Dijk - ageing, changes in fashion and friendships - but also the transition of the photographs from sepia and black and white into colour as it became more widely available. Set in an array of multi-coloured frames, the photographs are visually stunning and are arguably one of the strongest aspects of the show. In the same room, Emilie Pitoiset’s reprints of photo-shooting gallery portraits onto silver paper in ‘Just Because (2010)’ are quiet and beautiful works. In cutting up the pictures to create the hypothetical consequence of a bullet hole, she has created delicate pieces that echo images of shattered glass.  A number of artists use the gun and the camera simultaneously to create their work. For three in particular the camera itself serves as the gun’s target. Jean-François Lecourt created ‘Shot into the camera (1987)’ by shooting the camera to generate an image and creating a photograph pierced with bullet holes; Steven Pippin presents ‘35mm Pentax camera shot in the side (2010)’, alongside a sculptural piece examining the camera post-shot; and Rudolf Steiner built a pinhole camera in ‘Pictures of me, shooting myself into a picture (1997)’ at which he fired a shot. Pierced by the bullet, a ray of light enters to capture an image, but simultaneously the photograph itself is torn, the bullet having pierced straight through the image of Steiner’s head. Paired with the philosophical reflection that arose early in the exhibition, these projects start to build a pattern of symbolic suicide – the notion of a ‘creative killing’ in which the artists shoot themselves at the exact moment of creating their work. This same idea is echoed in Niki de Saint Phalle’s piece ‘Fire at Will (1972)’, in which she recorded herself firing a rifle at paint-filled balloons to explode them across canvases, and Agnès Geoffray’s ‘The Female Shooter’ (2005) - a single photograph wherein the lady subject looks down the barrel of a gun, echoing how one would squint to focus a photograph. The real epicentre of the exhibition is surely Christian Marclay’s spectacular large-scale, multisensory video installation ‘Crossfire (2007)’. For a total of 8 minutes and 27 seconds, a room inside the exhibition becomes a physical, charged space as an explosive montage of moments from Hollywood films plays out. More precisely, the moments of cinematic technique devised to heighten suspense in which characters – in westerns and war movies, gangster films and action flicks – raise their gun to the camera, aim at the audience and take fire. Standing in the middle of the room, with firearms all pointing inwards, the viewer is able to experience being under fire, considering the dual experience of being the viewer and the viewed, observing the shooter while simultaneously becoming the target. Covering all four walls and playing with our spatial perception, the piece is an immersive experience in which the metrical, pulsating rhythm of the guns echoes that of a sort of symphony, or a choreographed attack. The final spectacle is a real photographic shooting gallery, built and staged by the artist Martin Becka, in which for a small price visitors can try their luck at shooting their own photograph. Though this interactive aspect enables visitors to engage with the sheer delight and thrill of the pastime, the exhibition on the whole expertly transports viewers to the peripheries of perception and on a rather remarkable journey through a much darker, more philosophical vein. In photograph after photograph, the gun and the camera mirror each other entirely, and either way the spectator is left in the line of fire. By the end of the exhibition, one will feel a long way from the funfair. To read the original article please visit: http://www.thisistomorrow.info/viewArticle.aspx?artId=1599&Title=Shoot!%20Existential%20Photography
/HotShoe International. 2012/ Published spread of 8 book reviews in the October-November issue of HotShoe International.   An extract of my review of ‘Ice’ by Antoine D’Agata is found below: Shortly before leaving for Phnom Penh to create Ice Antoine D’Agata told Flaunt magazine, “I will continue to go to the heart of the sensations, to observe the extinction of breath…and to find the pictures, the language, and the necessary strategies to oppose the many falsifications which propagate death.”  True to his word, this new title is a searing portrayal of narcotic lucidity and the descent into the world of methamphetamines.  Set to the backdrop of the Vietnamese sex industry, we bear witness to the effect of D’Agata falling simultaneously in love and into oblivion – two equally dangerous vices.  Through a diaristic fusion of images and text, straightforward ‘documentary’ is blurred in a hybrid of scenes from the insidious void between drug-generated fictions and reality. Ice is wild with compulsive pleasure and paranoia - bodies bursting, flowing and thrashing like waves.  Charged with the ever-present erotic intensity of D’Agata’s work, the book is a gasp for air.   To read the rest of the book reviews, pick up a copy of the latest HotShoe International now.  (www.hotshoeinternational.com)
/HotShoe International. 2012/ Roman DritsAuftakt “Auftakt” is the upward stroke made by conductor, a gesture that comes in the moment when music does not begin to sound yet. It’s a gesture made in silence, but combining full information about time of performance, tempo and semantic fullness of music, it’s stroke and character of the sound. – Roman Drits “Auftakt” in English, means Prelude.  A prelude is described as an introductory performance, action or event preceding the principal (or more important) matter.  Roman Drits’ work is concerned with intermediacy and achieving a connection to the intangible, alluring space that lies just before, or between, events or states - his attraction is to the “silence and calmness that can be felt in one second before the storm comprises the great anxiety.”  The consistently grainy black and white photographs exude silent motion and offer a presage to unfinished events –here we find a continuous collection of moments before moments, before the happened and the happening, each one a precursor to the next ‘non-moment’. The view through Drits’ lens is blurred and unfocused and aesthetically challenges what we think we know, what we imagine we see and what we are told is visible. Shifting through each hauntingly poetic photograph – from bodies and hands to windows and animals, an immersive darkness ties them all together. Sated with melancholic uncertainty and quiet equipoise, ‘Auftakt’ is a visual meditation on everyday life, taken during 2005-2010 using analogue techniques on 35mm, 120mm and a mobile phone camera.  The wider context of time and location of the images - though important - is not, Drits says, the foremost aspect of the project.  That being said, it is interesting to note that the photographs were all taken in the artists’ home country of Latvia, in a time foreshadowing the imminent political and economical crisis.  This is an ode to what comes immediately before dissonance and disturbance.  The accompanying music to the piece – The 1978 piece of music ‘Spiegel im Spiegel’ by Arvo Pärt– is undeniably important.  ‘Spiegel im Spiegel’ is a German term that means ‘mirror/s in the mirror’, referring to the infinite images produced by parallel plane mirrors, endlessly repeated and slightly distorted each time.  For Drits, “Auftakt” is an “instantly disappearing fragment of time” that occurs infinitely, and mirrors the endless reflective motion of ‘Spiegel im Spiegel’.  This is a complex, metaphysical body of work with meanings reflecting and refracting back and forth upon themselves.  In physics, there is a moment of equilibrium where an object thrown is neither falling, nor rising – the net force acting on the body is balanced and thus a state of absolute rest occurs.  This very notion is mirrored in the upward stroke of the conductor (that in turn, acts as a metaphor for the wider ideas of the project) – for an infinitely small moment of time the motion is suspended, though holding full information of what is to follow. Auftakt is so saturated with opposing forces and “paradoxical opposite feelings”, yet the piece is enveloped in a static, yet charged silence.  There are things to come, this much we can be sure of. Read more at: www.hotshoeinternational.com 
/ HotShoe International. 2012 / Sugar-Coated Cautionary Tales In the Pantone world of Dutch artists Lernert and Sander, it seems as though butter wouldn’t melt, but then nothing is ever quite as it seems, is it? If their videos were narrated, they would begin with the words, “don’t be fooled, viewer… this story does not end happily”.  With a preference for household items in monochrome settings this artist pair use their signature black humour and simple aesthetics to create small stories that provoke the viewer in the most effective ways.  Like the darker underbelly of classic fairytales, sugar coated lessons and cautionary tales against the outcome of matters such as procrastination, revenge and the frustrations of being an artist are played out; a chocolate bunny is subjected to multiple deaths by melting whilst various items of household hardware exact revenge on a single, isolated egg.  The videos are simple and communicative works, where illustrative commercial photography is indistinguishable from contemporary art. As part of a 2-hour documentary about revenge for VPRO Television, Lernert and Sander were commissioned to create a series of short films illustrating their take on the theme of ‘Revenge’. Set to the somewhat epic soundtrack of a Sufjan Stevens record, the film simply and powerfully stages the destruction of a series of innocent eggs.  Each time, the fragility of the egg is heightened as it perishes in a slow, violent fate at the hands of a variety of objects such as a bowling ball, a hammer and a shower of tennis balls.  Quite possibly the most beguiling one of these videos is the most simple of all - in true Lernert and Sander style, it’s a simple, mundane scene.  The components: a bottle of champagne (ready to pop) and an egg, right in the firing line.  The objective: absolute revenge (quite what the egg did to deserve this retribution, I guess we’ll never know). In a convergence between the still and the moving image, the scene is extended in time with the use of video, so that something as instantaneous as a champagne bottle popping can take over 2 minutes to happen.  The trick here is that the artists employ the spatialised stasis of the photograph, but the duration of film and so our traditional notions of video and photography are confused – classic definitions of the photograph as something that cuts into the flow of time, and the video as something that embodies that flow are not so black and white anymore, and that’s frustratingly compelling to watch.  There is a new type of temporality, just as it is constructed within this space.  A trivial, fleeting moment becomes a performance, an event – it’s painfulness at once mesmerizing and terrifying.  Most of all, the piece is deliciously perverse - as with scenes of chaos in classic action films, we are able to delight in the gloriously delirious pleasure of watching something destruct in slow motion, as the cork finally frees itself from the bottle neck and shatters the egg as into hundreds of tiny fragments.  Though perhaps not immediately clear, we are able to finally accept the lessons Lernert and Sander want us to learn about the nature of revenge - as we watch and wait, it’s easy to see that it is not, in fact the act itself that is maddening, but the anticipation, the frustration of the inactivity and the suspense.  In their surreal, colour pop world, Lernert and Sander create pieces that at once deliver the necessary message and reflect on the dual endeavor of making art and making a point.  Their approach and response to each brief is truly unique, and each piece works as well in a fine art context as it does in a commercial sense.  Next time you view a video by this wickedly clever pair, watch closely…it may not be immediately obvious but there’s sure to be an important lesson in there somewhere.  
/HotShoe International. 2012/ Project Pozuzo “Oh, and how quiet the valley is, surrounded by high mountains and dense forests, and so far away from the world, so far away from the mountains these Tyrolean’s love so much. I was suddenly overcome by a deep wistful feeling.” - Friedrich Gerstärker. Pozuzo. 1863 The air is still.  Enveloped within the silence of forests and mountains hides a small valley, forgotten in time.  The distant sounds of tinkling instruments and yodels and voices singing carries lazily through pine forests and banana trees.  The conditions of modernity are yet to find their way here - the men still tend to the cattle and work the land; the women are homemakers and look after their children. Together they live in wooden houses that they build by themselves.   In 1857, a group of 300 Tyrolean and German peasants embarked upon a journey across the Atlantic Ocean from the historic region of Tyrol to the distant country of Peru, in order to found the ‘only Austro-German colony in the world’.  Here, they had been promised a new beginning. After almost two years of struggling their way across the mountain chain and thrashing through the most impenetrable undergrowth in the heart of the Amazonas jungle, they reached their settlement in 1859.  For the next 150 years, they would deforest vast areas of the jungle, cultivate fertile land and after time, the small, cattle-raising community of Pozuzo would grow from the hard work.  Due to it’s location, the colony remained isolated from the rest of the world for over a century and fell into all but complete oblivion until, in 1976 a dirt road was created that connected it to modern day Peru.  As a result of its extended stint of geographical isolation, Pozuzo became - and remains - a place of self-sufficience, with inhabitants retaining their ancestors’ language, as well as many of their traditions. The 19th Century idealism that the community embodies mirrors that of their ancestors.  Through the passage of time, nothing much has changed at all.   Interspersed with stark and beautifully shot landscapes and scenes of daily life, the film introduces us to members of the community gradually, as if the valley were a film set and they the characters; lingering, gently moving portraits, set up just like stills, each time these people staring directly at the camera.  With a lightness of touch, Kulenkampff plays the part of the inquisitive outsider, allowing us to indulge in the prolonged wonder of looking at the unfamiliar.  Open faces and imploring eyes remind us that they know as little about us, as we about them. There are no words, but through a subtle and lucid mix of juxtapositions wherein we may see a dance take place in traditional dress, followed by the slaughter of an animal or a Cockerel fighting take place, we can understand so much about this community and it’s classical way of life.  A documentary photograph or film is understood as a visual device used to record events and tell a story, but there is nothing to say that all of these stories have to follow the traditional discourse of an epic tale with a beginning, middle and end.  Project Pozuzo presents us with a quiet and contemplative narrative that leaves off much as where it begins – nothing changed or resolved, just glimpses of a world so different to the one we know– a place that has managed to remain on the diving line, in-between cultures and neither here nor there.  The foreign and the familiar have adapted to coexisting within this nowhere.  When we think of ‘Home’, we think of a place we feel connected to and can return to unconditionally – a place that is our own.  For this community, the word ‘home’ is an intangible, ungraspable thing – their sense of ‘Home’ is still bound to the Tyrol their ancestors said goodbye to all those years ago. Their yearning is something that is deeply rooted in a sense of belonging to a culture they are no longer part of. A nostalgic sense of loss clings in the air.  Playing out the same traditions as always keeps them a step closer to this ‘Home’ that they have never directly known.
/Published in limited edition publication in conjuction with Maja Daniels’ Miniclick talk. 2012/ The Science of Seeing “If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug around a camera” – Lewis Hine How do the images that surround us affect us in our everyday lives? We are constantly confronted by an onslaught of visual imagery in varying cultural contexts - manifest in everything from the media to advertising to art and much more. Within the context of these representations, we can explore visual sociological constructs, and a theme (defined by the constraints of visual sociology) emerges, in which photographs have the ability to reflect, illustrate and generate sociological theories and concepts.  In his 1974 publication Studies of the Anthropology of Visual Communication, Howard S. Becker wrote, “Photography and Sociology have approximately the same birth date, if you count sociology’s birth as the publication of Comte’s work which gave it its name, and photography’s birth as the date in 1839 when Daguerre made public his method for fixing an image on a metal plate.From the beginning, each worked on a variety of projects. Among these, for both, was the exploration of society.”  Photography and Sociology have always been inherently connected, their relationship deriving from the early, assumed belief that the photograph could accurately transcribe and document reality.  Visual sociology uses photography, film and video to study society (along with its visual artifacts) – it is photography as research method.  The aim of a visual sociologist is to study interaction, the presentation of emotion and the use of photographs to elicit information, employing the camera as a tool with which to portray, describe or analyze social phenomena.  Increasingly, social scientists are combining qualitative methods of sociological research (ethnographical methods) with the use of the camera as an observational and documentary instrument.  Visual methodologies can produce rich data and provide insights into both the production and consumption of visual material. However, in using photographic materials for social science purposes there can be some confusion, and over the years the definitions of genres have become hazy and unclear.  What is a visual sociologist?  What defines visual sociology from other forms of photography?  How do we differentiate between Visual Sociology, Documentary Photography and Photojournalism?  Whilst it will presumably always remain a matter of conflicting debate, there is much contemporary theory on the matter to suggests that perhaps the key lies in a number of different factors; namely the social context within which photos are taken, are made available to various audiences, and are viewed and interpreted by those audiences thereafter.  According to Becker, “Just as paintings get their meaning in a world of painters, collectors, critics, and curators, so photographs get their meaning from the way the people involved with them understand them, use them, and thereby attribute meaning to them.”  In this way then, one could conclude that each of the genres – visual sociology, documentary photography and photojournalism – are whatever they have come to mean - their meanings socially constructed; defined by their uses and the way they are viewed in society.  In the same way that the photojournalist will seek quick impact and immediate clarity due to the often fleeting chances in their practice (and the nature of their final output), the visual sociologist will spend time on images saturated with information – pictures that can be used as evidence, bearing the very matter of social change.  But this view has not come without its repercussions or skepticism - photography has long since fought the battle of its tentative yet intrinsic relationship to truth, but the collective wariness of accepting photography as a form of ‘evidence’ is still somewhat apparent.  Since the idea that photographs were direct stencils of the real was disregarded as naive, the weight placed upon photography to be a tool for ‘absolute truth’ has been dismissed.  This has gone some way to stunting the growth of visual communication within social science and research, and earned the medium much ongoing debate as to how reliable it really is as a research method.  As a result, it can be noted that sociological journals have routinely published images alongside their field studies for many years, but rarely are photographs used as the primary source of recording.  Visual sociology is defined as a sub‐field of qualitative sociology, always finding itself at second place next to non-visual data – the relationship between cultural studies and the photographic image remains problematical.  In a semiotic sense, all visual traces of the world are treated as ‘texts embodying messages about politics and class relationship’ and while this shows an overdue inclusion of theory into the study of images in social science, it also reduces the photograph to being understood as simply a means by which ideas are communicated, rather than as a basis for discovery. Though there is some way to go, interest in photography on the part of social scientists is increasing.  Even recent critical examination of society (found in cultural studies) is coming closer to more sophisticated visual ethnographies, which address the matter of the constructed image as well as the image as representation.  Logically, visual sociology as a field possesses a number of distinct areas of investigation that make a strong case for its equality (or arguably even superiority) to non-visual data; the importance of seeing and vision in the construction of social understanding, the construction of imagery and how it can be used to communicate information and manage relationships, and the techniques of producing and decoding images that can be used to investigate social organization and psychological processes.  This relatively new understanding of the photographic image is suggestive of the fact that photographs do not lie, but rather, they are not absolute.  Whilst this may initially seem like a negative point for its place in the field of social science, it does not detract from the fact that photography is still the most powerful tool for observance and accuracy to detail that we possess. The relationship between the photographic image and sociological thinking is strengthening, and the view that the explanatory value of photographs can be enhanced by accompanying texts is slowly dissolving, giving way to a mutually appreciative relationship between all forms of sociological research.  In order to be able to gain ‘the whole story’, social science is starting to recognize the photograph as a critically and equally important part of its discourse.  Those photographers who fuse aspects of sociology, photography and journalism together bear witness to the photographs ability to be an alternative mode of telling a story objectively, sustaining and strengthening the importance of visuals in contemporary sociology and collectively proving that it is a natural and important progression.  Ultimately, the matter is relatively simple - to be able to visualize social scenarios is inherently desired, and as Jon Reiger wrote, “When we talk about social change everybody eventually starts to wonder what it looks like”.
/Published in limited edition publication in conjuction with Emma Critchley’s Miniclick talk. 2012/ Scenes from Silence Time has a quality of intangibility, a fleeting half-life, emitting its duration-particles only in the passing or transformation of objects and events, thus erasing itself as such while it opens itself to movement and change. It has an evanescence, a fleeting or shimmering, highly precarious ‘identity’ that resists concretization, indication or direct representation. Time is more intangible than any other ‘thing’, less able to be grasped, conceptually or physically. – Elizabeth A. Grosz The fundamental debate regarding the inextricable relationship between time and the photographic image can take many avenues; narration in the image, the process between the beholder and the image, and the time that is connected to the construction of the image.  Throughout the history of traditional photographic theory there has always been the deduction that the photograph is a static object – a frozen moment in time.  French philosopher Gilles Deleuze once offered the idea that time (in its fleeting and shimmering evanescence) can be seen as running parallel to prevailing ideas about photography’s relationship to instantaneity and to the idea of the photograph as a record of a transitory moment in time. Such infamous books as Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, with it’s emphasis on the indexical value of the photograph as an uncontainable trace of the real, highlight the perplexing temporal conundrum that the photograph confronts us with when we try to grapple with what it means to have an image that quite literally freezes time and then preserves it indefinitely. The photograph is an object associated with permanence, stability and immutability, and as a result, it is often used as a way of trying to preserve events with a nature of impermanence, and instability. The flux of boundaries between the individual and space, presence and absence, object and subject, physical and neurological can all be contained within the photographic frame.  Photographers have long been concerned with distilling the essence of time within the photographic frame, and using the medium to understand, extend and preserve that which we cannot control in everyday consciousness.  It has been widely acknowledged that through the photograph we can explore the nature of suspended states - freeze transitory moments and temporality in points where our physical or mental states are altered.  Personal suspensions of consciousness and of physicality are particularly important in art photographic practice because the extent of their duration is so beyond our control  – suspended states we can enter for only limited periods of time; sleep, being underwater, meditation, unconsciousness and even holding one’s breath become intriguing. An endless list of contemporary photographers and filmmakers have employed the medium to explore such areas, with Hiroshi Sugimoto, David Williams, Antoine D’Agata, Susan Trangmar and Bill Viola being just a small section of that inventory.  The lucidity, the transience and the ephemeral and ever-changing nature of these states often mean that one theme can slip silently into another as the flux between the real and the imagined, the conscious and unconscious perpetuates.  The allure of fixing fleeting moments indefinitely is what makes photography such a powerful tool – it offers us a way to look back upon ourselves, and we are perplexed.  As a result, photographers will often make work that pushes to find the very peripheries of the camera’s limitations and in using the medium to explore the limitations of the medium itself, we can in turn explore the limitations of ourselves, our bodies and of our understanding of our time here.  The relief felt through containing something within the condensed image is absolute. Barthes said that within the photograph, “Time is engorged, it contains an enigmatic point of inactuality, a strange stasis, the stasis of an arrest“.  It is in these ideas that we can find a way of understanding the inextricable link.  The physicality of the photographic print offers a conduit through which these in-between threshold states can endure, making it the most powerful tool with which to align the intangible, ungraspable and unattainable within a material terrain. In collapsing the spatio-temporal boundaries of such physical and mental states, and translating them indefinitely into the photographic space, we are able to encapsulate these ephemeral moments in a form that we are able to hold on to, like with no other medium. “The photographic act implies not only a sign of break in the continuity of reality but also the idea of a passage, a crossing irreducible.” The photographic image, through its intervention into the flow of time, reduces the event to a form of absolute spatiality, and inside the photograph lingering, meditative spaces can be built.  The ‘optical unconscious’ is defined as the ability that photography holds to illuminate spaces that previously only existed within the terrain of dreams.  Somewhere between asleep and awake, conscious and unconscious, water and air a certain form of pictorial consciousness emerges. In photographing ourselves or those around us in states that will not last, in states that can be found at the very core of our psyche and our senses, and that we cannot grasp onto, we can extend the wonder of these moments and allow ourselves a prolonged experience of looking.  To immortalize these scenes from silence is what drives us forward.  Whether we’ve seen them or not, or even experienced them consciously at all matters not. Through the photograph breaths and bodies, dreams and memories are suspended, frozen, crystallized in a still and silent space where a tangible version of the true event – liminal or otherwise - is preserved.  Ultimately, the phenomenon of altering ones state can relate back directly to our inherent understanding of photography.  The desire to fix time and space indefinitely is inherent within us all, and our collective magnetism to the photographic image endures through the promised chance of immortalizing in print that which we cannot keep from disappearing and dissolving before our very eyes.  
/HotShoe International. 2012/ In Search of LightningEsther Teichmann  The desire to fix time and space indefinitely is inherent within us all - the chance to immortalize in print that which we cannot keep from disappearing and dissolving before our very eyes.  In grieving for the loss of her lover, Esther Teichmann found herself searching to align the physical shock of loss with something just as powerful. On a humid summer afternoon some time ago, Teichmann sat writing a story about mourning and loss. “I come here almost every day”, she tells us. When a thunderstorm broke outside of the glass house, the power and the light that came with each flash of lightning seemed to echo what Teichmann was writing, and how she was feeling. The place was alive with ethereal energy, and at the very heart of it, her hypothetical, intangible world began to unfold - charged with a sudden visual intrigue. Her acute yearning for “the delirium of falling away, of dissolving”, lead her to seek out a way of repeating the clarity of sensation she felt during that first thunderstorm in the greenhouse. In turn, this translated into a desire for the immersive, supra-sensorial qualities of image and sound combined.  In Search of Lightning is a haunting lament to mortality, grief and loss. Seductive in its palette of sumptuous blues and greens, the film transports the viewer to the peripheral edges of perception, following a journey through sub-tropical scenes of greenhouses, swamps and caves. We watch as water trickles from the lips of statues of gods and goddesses from long ago, and inky pools of water remain static as steam rises above them. “Inside and Outside collide here” she says, and throughout her deft soliloquy the boundaries of autobiography and fiction are collapsed, the flux between the real and the imagined perpetuating as one loss slips into another. The womblike space of that humid greenhouse, just like the other places, offers comfort and Teichmann returns to them again and again; their pull too powerful to defy. They are beautiful, irresistible; each one a silent stasis in which her ideas and her feelings and her dreams are built. The relationship Teichmann has to the production of her work is indistinguishable from her process of mourning; they breathe together. In Search of Lightning began as words on a page, until a single instance manifested into the possibility of a film. Photography is a medium of love and loss, and the relief felt through containing something within the condensed image is absolute. The spectral, enchanting quality of fiction that the camera allows within the construction of a photograph, whilst some other form of ‘reality’ persists, is what lures Teichmann deeper still. The ‘optical unconscious’ is defined as the ability that photography holds to illuminate spaces that previously only existed within the terrain of dreams.  Somewhere between asleep and awake - in beds and swamps, greenhouses and caves - she searches for lightning, and continues to explore the process of grief, as she waits for the images to come to her.
/British Journal of Photography. 2012/  This Storm is What We Call Progress Ori Gersht opened his first UK museum solo show recently, not at an art gallery but at London’s Imperial War Museum. The display presents two dual-channel film pieces and a new body of stills. Often drawing on wider themes of history, conflict, time and landscape, Ori Gersht explained the nature of his process in saying, “Scars created by wars on our collective and personal memories are at the essence of my practice. In my work I often explore the dialectics of destruction and creation, and the relationships between violence and esthetics.” The show opens with a beautiful print of ‘Against the Tide: Isolated’, from a new series of photographs entitled Chasing Good Fortune. The project is an exploration of the shifting symbolism of the Japanese Cherry Blossom. With its early links to Buddhist concepts of renewal, Gersht translated this idea into the field of conflict and photographed clusters of Cherry Blossom at sites in Hiroshima where trees grew in contaminated soil. Cherry Blossom also came to be linked with Kamikaze soldiers during the Second World War, and Gersht spent time photographing its presence at memorial sites too. Many of the images were taken digitally at night in poor lighting conditions, and as a result have a strangely disjointed and textural quality. They are like fragments of rich tapestries; woven with layer upon layer of history and meaning. The fragmented quality of the images also raises questions about the reliability of the medium as a tool for truth, which conversely is another theme interweaved through Gersht’s work. Whilst these stills are seductive and pictorially beautiful, the real stars of the show are undeniably each of the dual-channel film pieces, artfully recounting the lives of two people shaped by their (very different) experiences of the Second World War. Evaders is the first of the two-screen video pieces. The film begins with a haunting recital from a section of an essay Walter Benjamin wrote in 1940, from which the show takes its name. Benjamin sets out to describe the plight of the ‘angel of history’ that he sees in Paul Klee’s 1920 painting ‘Angelus Novus’. Benjamin wrote of the painting, ‘the angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress’. Benjamin’s tragic (but unfortunately not uncommon) personal story reveals that he struggled across the mountainous path of the Pyrenees Lister Route in an attempt to escape Nazi-Occupied France. Upon finding the border closed when he reached Spain, Benjamin took his own life instead of returning to France. Taking inspiration from this physical struggle through such a dramatic environment alongside the ideas Benjamin posited within his texts, Gersht touches on an array of cultural, physical and psychological borders, ultimately exploring ways of representing transition. In the film, we see a man struggling against the cold, pressing ever onwards with his journey, as the snow falls ever earthwards. The repetition of this struggle, and the sense that there is no real progress - just a cycle repeating itself - as he fades and flickers into blackness every so often is compelling, though difficult to watch. The beauty of the landscape juxtaposed against his pain is exquisite. The second film piece Will You Dance For Me? Introduces us to glimpses of 85-year-old Israeli, Yehudit Arnon as she dips in and out of the light whilst rocking back and forth on her chair. Arnon recounts the experience of being a young woman in Auschwitz and the consequences of refusing to dance at an SS Officer’s Christmas party. As punishment, she spent the whole night standing barefoot in the snow. The very same night, Arnon vowed that if she were ever to leave Auschwitz alive, she would dedicate her life to dance. We watch mesmerised as, bathed in light, Arnon is slowly transported back to her time on the stage, a vague smile creeping across her face as her body moves in tiny, almost non-existent contortions - some semblance of a last dance forming as she remembers her days dancing in the spotlight. She looks frail and small, flicking in and out of the immersive darkness, just as the snow repetitively continues to fall each time the video loops beside her. There is the innate feeling of a woman whose experiences whose strength is fading, but whose spirit defies. In each of the two film pieces the snow is a kind of melancholic beauty that masks the brutality that we know is behind it. To have the show in an environment such as the Imperial War Museum, instead of a gallery space, is inspired. Gersht has spoken before about his constant struggle with ‘the difficulty of representing violent history’, and as a result of the nature of his practice, the risk of being seen to aestheticise or poeticise war is high. However in this sense, the work is placed within a wider context, housed in the same place as artifacts and figures and the grittier realism of war and can be appreciated as an alternative way of representing and remembering conflict. Gersht seems to approach his subject with all of the sensitivity and sincerity expected of a photojournalist when documenting war zones. The only major gripe to have with the show is that the sound from each film piece bleeds into the other at certain points. It would have been more enjoyable to see each piece contained, completely exclusive of each other. Aside from this, the show is a stunning overview of Gersht’s recent work and goes a long way to firmly establishing his name in the UK.  
/Published in limited edition publication made in conjunction with Harry Watts’ Miniclick talk. 2011/ Everything, All of the Time “There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness, which dulls the senses and hides the wonders of existence. For those of us not gifted in poetry, it is at least worthwhile, from time to time making an effort to shake off the anaesthetic. We can’t actually fly to another planet. But we can recapture that sense of having just tumbled out to life on a new world by looking at our own world in unfamiliar ways”.  - Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow When the Russian Formalist Viktor Shlovsky put pen to paper to write his ‘Form and Material in Art’, coining the term ‘Ostranenie’ within it, it was not visual arts he had in mind.  Ostranenie, or the process of ‘Making Strange’ refers to a literary technique intended to defamiliarize the audience’s perception of the ordinary, the quotidian and the habitual.  However, over many years the term has been employed by a number of other art forms, with photography particularly adopting the term into it’s lexicon.  In the mid-1960s, sculpture of the time began to seriously influence a new strand of playfully conceptual still-life photography, in which artists attempted to make art from matter readily available in daily life, and in turn began deconstructing the rigid formal boundaries between the studio, the gallery and the outside world.  In many cases, subtle aspects of street photography were also employed, beginning an ongoing trend for using the street as studio, where in amongst its’ detritus, artists realized still lives could be found.  Artists such as Peter Fraser Julian Stallabrass and Marten Lange have all shown us ways of responding to this in recent years, and photographers ‘ in general have long been drawn to the unnoticed and the everyday.  Simple juxtapositions between shapes, forms and shadows and the energy and relationships found in seemingly unimportant objects and matter come alive within the photographic frame, creating a poetics of the ordinary. But why is there this recurring motif of the mundane?  What is our connection to the overlooked idiosyncrasies of the everyday? Photography has a unique ability to illuminate the disregarded and the discarded - to document materials that have been transformed through the agency of the human hand, and help us look upon the redundant paper cup, the smattering of oil glittering on the pavement and the stray shoe forgotten by the roadside with a new appreciation for sublime ordinariness.  When viewing a photograph of something we have seen a hundred times before, we will undoubtedly question; why are we looking at this?  When did these objects become worthy of our attention and of their new status of iconicity and as art?  Confronted with the outright thing-ness of these ‘non-subjects’ we are forced to consider their status and our expectations of them – form, weight, scale – are destabilized.  All of a sudden, easily missed and superfluous details are charged with a degree of visual intrigue by being framed and photographed in such a subtle, straightforward and stark manner. The absurdity of our relationship with the photographic image endures through the problematic yet persistent reliance we invest in its status as a documentary tool.  The ambiguity with which photography has managed to place itself as both document of an artistic gesture, and a work of art in itself has resulted in a perpetual flux between the definition of object and subject.  Because we ordinarily pass these objects by, or keep them restrained at the periphery of our vision, we may not automatically give them any credibility within the realm of art.  But this type of photography makes the ‘nothing’ of daily life the subject – the mundane objects into the ‘something’ in the pictures.  The endless flux between object and subject is explored through the image and it’s content until eventually we are forced to consider the entire picture and its’ layered complexity as a whole.  The power of photography lies in the camera’s ability to elevate the status of an unimportant object to a beautiful subject in a single moment, creating a sort of serendipitous illusion.  Has everything in the world already been photographed?  Maybe.  But in placing something inside of the photographic frame, in considering it for that period of time, it is immediately deemed significant once more.  The importance of continuing to photograph what is familiar - to make normal what is strange, and to make what is strange, normal - is absolute.  “The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known” Shlovsky wrote, and it is with this sentiment that photographers continue to work with this process of searching and seeking out pictures in the flow of everyday life, with the encouragement that it is a strategy to contemplate the way in which we construct our lives and find order in the world around us - the repetition in itself is important.  Everyday objects have the ability to remind us of our impermanence, just as the photographic image does.  Photography is equally about seeing and looking.  Capturing the mundane objects and happenings that furnish our existence are all attempts to shift our perceptions of our daily lives and to confirm our having been here – anti-climatic and small perhaps, but all the more resonant because of this.  Before these objects are disturbed by a gust of wind, or overturned by passing traffic, the photographer can fix them from their ephemeral state into the relative permanence of photographs.  Ultimately, we all use photography in one form or another to archive and index the world around us, to indulge in creating an ‘inventory of things’ and to bear witness to the weight of collective and personal histories as the extensive life of matter and objects are set against the fleeting time frame of human existence, and our restricted time of looking out and seeing the world.  
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