Walking Project

We could discuss this in clinical terms. We know, for example, that the photographic device has obsessive-compulsive effects. The apparent ‘neutrality’ or ‘objectivity’ of the medium quickly turns it into a device that is driven by the anxiety that something is evading it: an obsession for registration and organisation, an obsession for information, documenting, cataloguing, systemising and creating hierarchies with respect to the apparent reality. On the other hand, due to the opportunities that photography offers to be there on the spot in any situation, it soon becomes invested with a hysterical desire: the cry for ‘reality’, ‘authenticity’, ‘intensity’, the demand that the image will take me to the very heart of the activity that it has registered. The image must fulfil me. We want the real thing and we want it now. The whole ‘human interest’ business that has been hollowing out the information sector for years, cultivates that hysteria.

— Frank Vande Veire, Blind Auto-Reflexivity: Dirk Braeckman’s Light on Photography

Walking Project

We could discuss this in clinical terms. We know, for example, that the photographic device has obsessive-compulsive effects. The apparent ‘neutrality’ or ‘objectivity’ of the medium quickly turns it into a device that is driven by the anxiety that something is evading it: an obsession for registration and organisation, an obsession for information, documenting, cataloguing, systemising and creating hierarchies with respect to the apparent reality. On the other hand, due to the opportunities that photography offers to be there on the spot in any situation, it soon becomes invested with a hysterical desire: the cry for ‘reality’, ‘authenticity’, ‘intensity’, the demand that the image will take me to the very heart of the activity that it has registered. The image must fulfil me. We want the real thing and we want it now. The whole ‘human interest’ business that has been hollowing out the information sector for years, cultivates that hysteria.

— Frank Vande Veire, Blind Auto Reflexivity

Re: Hello, my gentle sun, let’s talk.

— princess livingston

Paris, April 2018

giv me reply

at least I hav pretty hair

i hate posting pictures of myself bc i know once i’m famous ppl will use them as the before pics for my before & after comparison shots

most of the time i think the whole world is cruel & evil but sometimes someone is nice 2 me and i start to cry bc i think maybe the world isn’t cruel & evil maybe im the cruel & evil 1 & i h8 every1 for no reason

i love getting random questions like that tho ty anon

-vampyredoll

Anyway, I think I will restart my work with the Illustrated Botanical Dictionary. I am going to capture subjects in daylight with color photography; I will compile them into the Illustrated Botanical Dictionary. For that, they must be color photographs. This is because I would like to completely cast off any trace of the hand that remains with the darkroom process of black-and-white photography. The hands themselves have made the art. The hands are the others within oneself. But of course the hands are the self. Manipulation and a thing manipulated by the hands are still an extension of the hands. The world is manipulated by the hands. My Illustrated Botanical Dictionary will come to exist by cleanly severing all ties with hand-manipulation. In that sense, the color photograph is already in the other world. Release the shutter once, and everything comes to an end

–Takuma Nakahira, from Why An Illustrated Botanical Dictionary

Walking Project, Mannheim, October 2020

The catastrophe […] is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn’t end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart. What caused the catastrophe to occur, who knows; its cause lies long in the past, so absolutely detached from the present as to seem like the caprice of a malign being: a negative miracle, a malediction which no penitence can ameliorate. Such a blight can only be eased by an intervention that can no more be anticipated than was the onset of the curse in the first place. Action is pointless; only senseless hope makes sense. Superstition and religion, the first resorts of the helpless, proliferate.

— Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism