Published by Photoworks

There has been talk around what is being labeled the “Alec Soth incident” at the Brighton Biennial. Regardless of the views expressed and the incident itself, what I find interesting is the fact that some have labeled it “incident”.

The word incident is by definition related to violence, hostility and danger. In any case, this project by Carmen Soth, initiated and instigated by Alec, should be labeled a happening. It is definitely a self conscious act that intends to comment on street photography and the art world, it’s curators, and it’s supporters (magazines, institutions, etc.). It is in my opinion a big mockery. It comes across as provocative and perhaps pretentious, but when has art been any different? I dig it.

Here is an interesting post and comments.

Also Joerg Colberg has a few things to say.

I completely omitted this photograph when I made the initial edit from the student protest in London (November 8, 2010).  I remember the moment when the fire extinguisher was thrown off the roof so clearly.  It was, like in a photograph, as if time stopped.  I can’t explain the many thoughts that crossed my mind in the brief instance that it took for that object to drop to the ground, but they were all terrifying.  The most terrifying though was that someone would definitely be killed the moment that the extinguisher got to ground level.  Miraculously this did not happen.  I don’t know if we owe this miracle to the police or the students, but in that moment, police and students, for as brief as it was, were on the same side of the gun.

I do not wish to enter in the meaning of this moment, but I will say that it shows a break in the comradeship of students.  For the fight at the time became not against the establishment, but against the activists who were at the time on the roof.  Perhaps, if we get more philosophical, we were fighting ourselves, who until then were supporting what was going on.  And many still cheered after this happened.

Now, as a photographer I thought that the image could have been stronger if I would have been closer to the falling object, and captured both the expressions of the people and the extinguisher.  Having thought about this photograph for some time now, I’ve realized that the image is actually stronger as it’s been shot.  The space that the extinguisher occupies in the surface of the photograph is insignificant.  Then there are the people on who can be barely spotted on the roof, and the crowd of police and students in the bottom.  This insignificance of the extinguisher in mid flight on the photograph becomes an allegory of the whole reason for the demonstration.  On the one hand, it shows how insignificant the person who threw it thought this act was (and how insignificantly small his brain was too).  On the other hand, it represents what the government has done to students.  At this point of the day, the activists on the roof have taken the place of the institution, and in this act, metaphorically illustrated what the government has done by raising student fees.  They’ve dropped a bomb on our heads and everyone else who was there (ie the police) while they sit in Parliament and politicize education.

I have started a new project on the Mancuspia.  I stumbled across this curious animal when I found an old book at Stoke Newington market.  The book had many pages erased and crossed out, so this immediately stood out to me. There don’t seem to be any breeders of Mancuspias any longer in the UK as there are many pathologies associated to the animal.

The project can be found on my website under the 2010 projects.

Today is a day to remember. What started as a peaceful demonstration, ended in violence at 30 Millbank (as expected. Amongst us, were some who couldn’t keep their sticks for the signs. Although these students and activist were a minority the police was outnumbered. They couldn’t fight back those who fought for their rights and every persons right for education. The message was clear. You say cut back, we say fight back.

(for queries on the photographs contact me)

A year ago I was in Kosovo and Serbia.  There I took these and wrote a journal.  Most of the photographs were taken with an Zeiss-Ikon 517/16 from 1949.

click:

I came across this photo on Peter Gowland’s webiste .  I understand the strangeness of it, but it’s still completely bizarre!  I’ve looked at it again and again, and it always has that striking strangeness.

The Psychoanalytic Framework of Looking

In order to understand the act of looking as socially structured, we must first embrace some concepts of psychoanalysis that relate to the constitution of human sexuality in childhood.  The first concept, Fetishism, is known to all of us and our understanding of it is not far from Freud’s theory.  A second notion is Lacan’s mirror stage as a formative function of the I.  At this point, it is too early to jump to an explanation of these concepts, but I will resume with their theoretical considerations further on in this essay.  We will see how Freud’s idea of Fetishism, influences scopophilic desire and voyeuristic tendencies in adulthood, and how Fetishism and the Fetish can be expanded into the realm of photography and film to understand the psychological and sociological processes of looking which occur in the spectacular apparatus, but also how these two types of media have been used to reflect upon it’s own condition.  Furthermore, we will see how Lacan’s “mirror stage” can be used to understand subconscious processes of spectatorship in the cinematographic spectacle through ideas of desire, sexuality and identity.  After this has been laid out, I will conduct an analysis of Canadian artist Michael Snow’s work Powers of Two, and present considerations on how the gaze and the notion of spectatorship work in classical Hollywood film, taking Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window as an example.

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