Slipping

Nothing is more painful, more frightening than thinking that slips away from itself than fleeting thoughts that, barely conceived, disappear again, already gnawed by forgetting or rushing into others that we have just as little control over… We constantly lose our thoughts. That’s why we cling so doggedly to established opinions.

— Gilles Deleuze

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CPY

Art is, in a way, creating something out of nothing. But photography, in its very essence, does not create something from nothing, it is a device for copying existing images.

Then why not start from this assumption of copying, so we can get closer to the essence of a photograph. It has no meaning to create art work by one’s own aesthetic and concepts, however, when people take photos, one’s aesthetic and memory are always included. This is a kind of everlasting contradiction. This contradiction is acceptable.

The world is not only one world, but the world itself is scattered, we just copy these scattered worlds by using photography.

— Daido Moriyama, Near Equal

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Clusters of Lilac

When I arrived in Sapporo in June, it was so cold that the light purple clusters of lilac in the alleys and under the eaves were trembling in the cold air. While other parts of Japan had entered the rainy season, here the wind just kept blowing for days on end, and the streets and avenues were tinted white instead. Keeping the promise that I had firmly made to myself, I grabbed my camera every morning and took to the streets, with the regularity of an office worker, and no intention to meet any friend or acquaintance. I spent most of these three months on my own. Other than the very basic daily conversations – buying a ticket at the station, ordering a coffee, or making the occasional phone call – I was just keeping my mouth shut. I soon ran out of sleeping pills, and as I didn’t drink, all I could do was spend the long nights reading books. The daily photo shootings weren’t really fruitful, and there I was, sitting in my freezing apartment, at my wit’s end with my progressing mix of depersonalization, aphasia and insomnia. So as, in other words, my lifestyle was from the very onset based on that fawning, illusional idea of escape and isolation, my only justification that was taking photographs, was easily reversed from the true intention that it used to be, to mere pretense. Those days of feeling guilty went by one after another, and before the summer ended, I decided to go back to Tokyo. At the end of the day, I haven’t made any progress whatsoever, but what I do have, as a proof of my endless walks to miscellaneous places, are 250 used rolls of film.

– from afterword by Daido Moriyama

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Something

“Photography needs to stop being art. It needs to stop expressing feelings. When it is completely a record, it can be something”

— Nakuma Takahira

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Photography has to stop

 

The Camera is an apparatus to shed the light from the dark, the view of the world worth preserving from the one you allow yourself to forget, remember the moment you deem decisive and discard the myriads of constellations you consider irrelevant; the good (picture) from the bad. The camera is a moralistic apparatus.

(and here Fukase has burned his negatives; the arrogance of the photographer who assumes a moral position far above the blaze of this world. He wanted to get rid of himself, but everywhere he turned, he was already waiting for himself in the wings.)

His alcoholic intoxication,  the suicide attempt: It is not enough to die; you want to erase yourself from the world as if you never existed.

This impulse that tries to drive us over the edge into banality: The rage against “the good picture.”

It’s difficult to explain, but I like ravens. If I’m reincarnated I want to be a raven.

I’m wishing that I could stop this world. This act[of photography] may represent my own revenge play against life, and perhaps that is what I enjoy most.

— Masahisa Fukase, 1976

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Be Invisible

A desolate hill, littered. Forms that got on top of that slope might move on to the other side and be invisible.

— Philip Guston

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Now

 

“My idea was to see if I could illustrate a concept of (Harvard philosopher and cinema scholar) Stanley Cavell’s about color having a sense of presentness in time and black-and-white having a sense of nostalgia,” Baltz explains. “Black-and-white is two seconds ago and color is now . . . . You accept the black-and-white as reality and the color seems totally fake.”

— lewis baltz, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-03-29-ca-372-story.html 

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Addiction

Thyssen-Krupp, Duisburg-Ruhrort, June 2017

“Photography is a vulgar addiction that is gradually taking hold of the whole of humanity…”

– Thomas Bernhard, Extinction (1986)

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