Likeness is not enough. Sameness of feeling is not enough. Total refusal of kinship with the subject is not enough.
Few of my own portraits satisfy me over a long period of time (past a few days, for instance).
This doesn't dissuade me from creating more portraits; in fact, it's quite to the contrary.
Arguably, dissatisfaction with my own work is largely to blame for my bottomless drive toward it.
My voice 1: I don't even know what a photographic portrait is.
My voice 2: You don't know what it is? Then of course you can't make one!
My voice 3: Break it down with logic.
Here's how far I get:
1) Is it two dimensional? For me at this time: Yes.
2) Does it have a subject? Not necessarily.
3)
Yeah, exactly.
So I sit at my desk. It's like standing at the first fork in a labyrinth.
I have photos open on my computer. I have small photos on the table. I have large photos on the floor next to me.
You know what happens then? I start to feel one overriding impulse: to shoot more.
The rest disappears around me, and I clean up the carcass of what was.
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| Rose Kuo, July 2012 |
* * *
I'm not sure I understand it.
I know very well I don't understand it.
- W.S. Merwin in a talk I attended at the University of Houston, Spring 2012
3 comments:
I often wonder what you see in your pictures. I know it's not what I see, or anyone else sees. I often wonder what you see.
3.0 All we know of light is that it passes through space and time, and are limited by space and time.
3.1 As a spectating subject I do not see all the light, but only the reflection of light available to me through alignment of objects, the alignment of a source of light among those objects, and that light is only the light rejected by those objects.
3.12 Even by the mechanics of perception, I am precluded from witnessing the objects themselves. I see only their interaction with light. I see only their interaction with light through my interaction with light through my eyes.
3.13 Vision is not evidence of myself.
4. A photograph is evidence of light removed from the instance of light. It is a removal of time.
4.1 A photograph is evidence of space removed from that space. As two dimensional, it's own interactions with light may only be universal, not particular. (this is why you shoot only film)
5. You are left only with the evidence of a subject's rejection in a photograph. Evidence of that subject is rejected by the light that interacts with that photograph, and therefore is a rejection of a rejection.
Is to refuse something twice a move towards or away from the subject?
The weening moon rises late, in the same way by which my body responds more slowly to injury in my increasing age. I will heal. But I will not be a new moon when I am again full. This is the difference between the moon and me.
I cannot privilege my wound. It is as unparticular as the moon of any month. Unlike the moon, I cannot measure time by my wounds.
I am full. I am a new moon, meaning: without clouds I am the light of a thousand scattered stars lost in a blink.
New, meaning: nothing. Occluded moon in the shadow of that on which I stand. Occluded stars behind the drape of that which flees and is trapped by the terrestrial: clouds. When it is cloudy we do not call the hidden constellations new.
I want to see the moon outside of the shadow, always.
To make the world an alegory of myself is to assume that I am also the world. I am the world.
The moon hides something behind its back.
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