1 2

						1 2

Moments of Chaos & Nostalgia

Photographs like memories are selective. As Susan Sonntag once said, they often serve only to affirm or contradict what we already know. They are by nature, transient moments that, in their capturing become the past and thus subject to individual, post rational comprehension according to our sensibilities.

My earliest work with this camera (a Kodak Diana) was a release from the restraints I felt while completing my degree. It was a self imposed restraint on the technical expertise, a self imposed doctrine for simplicity to counteract the academic theory expected, an effort to regain the naivety and magic I once had as I began.

The work had no boundaries set. The pictures were always found, never constructed and never reshot upon failure. It began to explain itself only after the first six years and after a further six years found it's completion together in agreement with a gallery owner in London.

In contrast to the works poetic imagery and superficial order lies another random,chaotic side best explained in the text of Grahame Greene. A trust in instinct and an allowance for mistakes and accidental discoveries has been present from the start to the final selection and presentation. A mixture of old and new technologies stands as a metaphor for the old rediscovered in a contemporary light.

The work stands more as an analogy to the haphazard nature of memories. Each can bring their own definitions and explanations. Narratives can be found or disregarded. Like memories, interpretations, as they often do, ebb in and out of clarity.


Dan Wesker 2003

 

...It was like a life photographed as it came to mind,
without any order, full of gaps giving at best a general
impression. I couldn't help feeling all the way to the
new paper office, past the post office, the moroccan cafe,
the ancient whore, that I had got somewhere new by way
of memories I hadn't known I possessed.
I had taken up the thread of life
from very far back,
from so far back as innocence.


'A Salmon Tea' by Grahame Greene