time zone
in new places I am but an apparition — the ghosts of life disappear and I lack my usual self. the proximity to people like a convex mirror, the mind/body somewhat alienated but also seen in glimpsed moments of recognition - at times in a reflected alienation and at other times in connection.
I'm carrying a Sony A7CIV with a 85mm lens allowing me to keep some distance from people but close enough that when I raise the camera a person has the ability to see they are being photographed.
I want to catch these moments with a camera, this allows me the production of images, creating frozen frames of sanctification. fixing something that cannot be fixed.
There is no conceptual framework underlying the photos here beyond moments triggering memory and conversely triggering a desire to manufacture a new one, encapsulated in an echoed image.
The camera allows you to make images in order to fix something that cannot be fixed and these frozen frames afford a slowing of time, delusions of a disorientated mind searching to be soothed.
The resulting images exhibit a neutrality as the blurryness of intent creates resistance to categorisation — and running room for uncertain thoughts and emotions. And that is what is wanted — to escape certainty.
As a collection they are fragments of time and place sequenced and displayed into a linear format, but there is no coherent narrative — meaning resists integration via a decentred subjectivity.
In choosing the images from a wider group to include as a part of this work I was drawn to certain photographs that exhibited a weirdness, that caused in me an existential reaction underlined by a joy and sadness in the transient nature of these moments.
Taking photos in these unknown places challenges my fear of this world by lack of personal biography.
This is not a flattening of cultural or historical references.
emotional detachment
disorientated/decentred
frozen frames
Sony A7IV C 85mm Sigma Lens
Mark Stevens - Phillip Lorca DiCorcia - “Religiousness”
Mirror Neurons
Vague recollection / collection
constellations
Aesthetics & Ethics
Fantasy - Escaping - Dreaming - inflection of reality
Fear of reality
Dialetical Images & Free Association
Leisure Time
The sequence of images often suggests the universal in the local, patterns of micro and macro worlds.
neutrality - resistance to categorisation - the science of semiotics
even those that speak to the sadness of things.
For him, fragments are not merely remnants of a lost whole but active sites where meaning can be rediscovered and reimagined.
The banality of global trends
Strange but not a stranger
The photos reflect my consideration of the ethics of aesthetics - that is do the images I’ve selected degrade the subject. Obviously this is more obvious in my photographing people, particularly in public and without their consent. But this also applied to images of places and spaces — is my gaze malicious or constructive. Am I even able to judge this given the subconscious currents hidden in my motives or are they either/or.
For Benjamin, history is not a seamless, continuous narrative but a collection of disjointed, fragmented moments. These fragments of history—artifacts, memories, or texts—carry meanings that resist integration into a linear story.
In his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Benjamin criticizes the “victor’s history,” which imposes a coherent narrative on the past. Instead, he advocates for retrieving overlooked or suppressed fragments of history that reveal the struggles and suffering of the oppressed.
Rather than presenting a unified argument, he juxtaposes quotations, aphorisms, and reflections. This method mirrors his belief that meaning arises through constellations of fragments rather than through a single, cohesive system.
“Travel was once a means of being elsewhere, or of being nowhere. Today it is the only way we have of feeling that we are somewhere. At home, surrounded by information, by screens, I am no longer anywhere, but rather everywhere in the world at once, in the midst of a universal banality - a banality that is the same in every country. To arrive in a new city, or in a new language, is suddenly to find oneself here and nowhere else. The body rediscovers how to look. Delivered from images, it rediscovers the imagination.”
“This image was taken in 2018 while I was living in Mexico City, and marked a pivotal moment in understanding myself through conversation with the subjects I began to photograph. The camera, for me, became a mediating device, as the subjects became essential parts of my life. Is it easier to observe another body-mind, instead of observing one’s own? As a reflection on an archive, I can see now that each person—primarily womxn—was a crucial teacher. Each moment I recorded further weaves a constellation of imagery and fragments representative of both my psyche and the participants in unity.” – Zora Sicher
Vague recollection / collection
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160738324000136