On the photographic process....
When I was in Australia I visited a photo exhibition by the German film director Wim Wenders. Very large photos of American landscapes and decaying urbanscapes.
Writing about his photographs he said:
"In a way, I never believed that it was me who found the places I photographed, but rather that the opposite is true. Those places called to me.
Behind the photos is a wish to look at something (regarder) and to preserve it (garder). The french word gets it nicely - re-garder. The photos Walker Evans took in the Depression were just that: preserving something that was going to disappear in three of four years' time, in your eye and in your memory."
Jean Baudrillard goes on from this, to say that:
"every photographed object is merely the trace left behind by the disappearance of all the rest. It is an almost perfect crime, an almost total resolution of the world, which merely leaves the illusion of a particular object shining forth, the image of which becomes an impenetrable enigma .... "
When I was in Australia I visited a photo exhibition by the German film director Wim Wenders. Very large photos of American landscapes and decaying urbanscapes.
Writing about his photographs he said:
"In a way, I never believed that it was me who found the places I photographed, but rather that the opposite is true. Those places called to me.
Behind the photos is a wish to look at something (regarder) and to preserve it (garder). The french word gets it nicely - re-garder. The photos Walker Evans took in the Depression were just that: preserving something that was going to disappear in three of four years' time, in your eye and in your memory."
Jean Baudrillard goes on from this, to say that:
"every photographed object is merely the trace left behind by the disappearance of all the rest. It is an almost perfect crime, an almost total resolution of the world, which merely leaves the illusion of a particular object shining forth, the image of which becomes an impenetrable enigma .... "
