over the threshold

Not my typical topic but I must mention the artist Mat Collishaw’s current installation using virtual reality (VR) with the subject of the world’s first exhibition of photography held by William Henry Fox Talbot in Birmingham in 1839.

At first sight you see a white washed room empty apart from a set of tables and cabinets also painted white. Donning a VR headset transforms the space into a detailed recreation of the room at the time of the exhibition.

This is itself a compelling idea but I admire the attention to other facets of the experience both sensory and historical that enrich it. Mice scurry across the floor, smells and heat from a fire prickle your face. Moths get too close to the candle flames. You can hold a glass photographic plate. From outside the window the sounds of Chartists demonstrating against new technology taking away people’s jobs echo through space and time. Other 21st century visitors appear in your field of view as ghostly shapes.

Thresholds by Mat Collishaw from Mat Collishaw Studio on Vimeo.

My fascination is in the way Collishaw uses

• new technology to tell a story in way that enriches it without it becoming a product demonstration 

• VR in particular as today’s magical way of representing reality 

• the original uncertainty around what photography was and who was it for as a counterpoint to the current ubiquity of images 

• photography as a harbinger of social disruption (last but not least)

As a practitioner of photography very much rooted in the 20the century it prompts me to revisit my thoughts on modernising street photography. Can these technologies add another dimension to my ways of working? Not only in creation but in production, display and distribution?

Interesting times! 

veni, vidi, vici

Last year's cameraphone experiments were rewarding but, a little like following a particularly restrictive diet, left me hungry for more. A recent trip to Italy gave me the opportunity to indulge myself with a full menu of digital and film, colour and black & white. The first time I've worked with these combinations all together. The modern world, eh? 

Well despite my fears of analysis paralysis it didn't really disrupt my natural ways of working. In the same way my fears of "thinking too hard" about my work by reviewing and editing my pictures for a book were unfounded, walking the streets of Venice with 3 different camera types felt more like enhancing my ways of expression. More seasoning if you will. Never miss a chance to overextend a metaphor...

Another first for this work was the resurrection of my social presence. I've tried Instagram but the way of collecting images together on Flickr was particularly useful for this piece of work. I appreciate I'm missing out on the sharing/following/interacting bit but that's for another time. 

Patience, patience.

ambiguous redux

My inclusion in fLIP's on the streets edition gave me a kickstart to re-join my local group. I attended my last meeting in 2005 so it was a bit of a rip van winkle moment when I stumbled back in.

The timing of my (re)arrival became more propitious when we started talking about a new opportunity for the group to exhibit a sequence of images created by each photographer responding to the picture before to create a chain of apparently random but connected images. In one of those lovely moments of serendipity that street photography seems to cultivate I happened to have a copy of Ambiguous with me.  

Nice to see the idea have another life.  

Bit like me. 

back on the streets

Delighted to have two images published in the latest edition of fLIP, London Independent Photography’s group magazine. 

It’s a great edition showing a range of work from the street both stylistically and thematically. I’ve always liked the written pieces in the magazine and the interviews by Chris Moxey are particularly fine.

 

My last appearance in the magazine gave me a kickstart to produce more work (link). It’d be great to see the same effect this time. 

There’s lots to do. 

things fall apart

Caption. Just a few words about the picture please. How hard can it be? Yet my love of photography - and street in particular - is that its meaning is open to the eye of the beholder. No nudges or hints necessary. Just breathe in and breathe out. Simple.

Perhaps it's my Irish roots but this year had a particular significance even before it began and the last 11 months have compounded that dramatically. I was looking back at my work over the summer, at two images in particular. Ordinarily they'd be filed as candidates for the next part of the journey but bringing them together is as close as I ever have to making a statement, however oblique, about my take on the images.

What's that you say? Where's the caption? 

Let's make it a quote from W.B. Yeats. 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

End of sermon.