It has been a while

Sorry for the absence of posts - life etc. Today though, as a half-term exercise, I thought I'd put up a few thoughts about style, specifically addressing what I believe to be an absence of a recognisable style in my work and the significance or otherwise of this. To help explain, here are some pictures (photographs? You decide - they've been manipulated to hell and back and may no longer count as photos per se and perhaps belong more to the realm of illustration):

That's me bottom left, the two guys on the right were at opening nights at Cuts in Soho, and the woman top left is from a portrait at the National Gallery. Not to everyone's taste, I happen to find these some of the more interesting pictures I have made - all done on my phone (after the originals were taken using a variety of cameras) using various bits of software, I like the painterly quality and the removal of digital photographic "reality", plus the made-on-a-phone aspect is important as they say something about the possibilities of our brave new connected world.   

Now compare them with these: 

These are meant to illustrate the struggle to attain knowledge; they weren't created on my phone. Not really very similar to the first lot are they? And yet I find both sets interesting in part because they have the element of surprise that I look for when I am creating pictures - I want to be surprised pretty much above all else when I create something, as if I have been helped by forces I do not own, do not control, forces outside me. Indeed, I have a whole cosmological creation myth around a character from a Clinton's card shop window, Thesky, but perhaps I'll leave that for another post - I've probably spawned enough questions about my sanity as it is. 

Anyway, does it matter, this absence of cohesion? For years I thought it did; indeed, it was one of the reasons I started the Advanced Practice: Photography course as I hoped that I might nail down a style, my style, and be able to say "oh yes, I like it when people say "that looks like a Dodds' photograph". But now? Now my thinking is changing - hammer, nail, wall: say hello to jelly. And part of the reason for this are some of the following statements from the book Photo Work: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice:

To Alec Soth: Do you have what you might call a "photographic style"?

"If I do, it isn't intentional."

Paul Graham answered the same question "Please save me from the tragedy of a fixed 'style' ... No thank you!" 

On a somewhat related subject, Elinor Carucci answers a question about what genre she photographs in thus: "... many times I go to galleries to look at what I think will be art and [instead] recognise commercial ways of thinking, pieces being made in order to be used as decoraton, in order fit into trends that happen to be appreciated at the moment, in order to be sellable. I am making art. It is sometimes staged and sometimes a snapshot, sometimes conceptual and sometimes emotional, and sometimes, if I am lucky enough, both. Who cares. F**k the genre."