Personal photography
The next roll of found film is about theatre. The photos seem to have been taken at and around the organisation of a play for the Avignon festival in the 70s. I know nothing about the play itself, except that it involves a lot of physicality.
Your audience self-selects partly based on shared cognitive architecture. This isn’t about intelligence or sophistication. It’s about whether your mode of thinking and communicating matches theirs closely enough that recognition happens.
My mother sometimes jokes that she raised a ghost, because there are barely any photographs of me as a child or teenager. I just hated having my photo taken and I’d find ways to hide to avoid it. When I started photography ca. 2002, I started taking photos of people around me. But I continued to hide from them when they wanted to take photos of me. My relationship with them was imbalanced.
It took me another 15 years to realise I was being stupid.
I don’t have a date or location for these photos. The box doesn’t say anything. Looking at them, I’d say maybe 70s.
Photography instruction assumes cognitive uniformity. Teachers describe their own process and expect students to replicate it. “Learn to see the light.” “Pre-visualise the image.” “Feel the moment.” These instructions make perfect sense if your brain works like the teacher’s brain, but they become incomprehensible if it doesn’t.
I can tell you exactly how I felt standing on a sand dune in Morocco many years ago, watching my wife photograph a sand dune through evening light. I remember the temperature, the angle of the sun, the smell of dust. I remember the specific quality of happiness that comes from being exactly where you want to be with exactly who you want to be there with. That moment is still accessible to me. I was there. It happened. The photos prove it.
This is the second instalment of my found photos series and also the second Spain 1966 episode.
Photography education and criticism privilege verbal articulation. You’re expected to be able to explain your work, discuss your influences, articulate your intentions, write artist statements. Grants and residencies require written proposals. Publications want accompanying text. Teaching positions demand that you can explain your process clearly.
But many talented photographers can’t write coherently about their work, and it’s not because they haven’t thought deeply about it or because they’re inarticulate generally. It’s because the work happens in a non-verbal mode and translating it into words requires cognitive machinery they don’t have or have configured differently.
Not legally, though we’ll get to the murky ethics of that. I mean conceptually, technically, aesthetically. Every image I’ve made is somewhere on a spectrum between homage and plagiarism, filtered through techniques I borrowed from photographers who borrowed them from other photographers who borrowed them from painters who probably borrowed them from someone else. Nothing I’ve done is original. I’m not sure anything in photography is.
I like to get my hands on photographs that people have discarded. These meant something to someone at some point, and it pains me to see that they’re being thrown away now.
I’ll start a series of posts about these photos as I scan them. I’ll post the entire rolls since I can’t know what the intent of the original author was.
This series contains photos taken from a few places around Spain in August 1966 according to the negatives jacket. Most are from Barcelona and surroundings, but not all.
