Tut Tut

 So, a bit of a telling-off in class today as we are apparently not very good at keeping our course blogs up to date, hence this post. Sitting in Sturm und Drang Oleg and Steen to avoid the rain I just read this short piece, which struck a chord: too much freedom makes creativity harder, not easier. So, time to narrow down my thoughts about "I Cried to Dream Again", which I've tried to do in an email to my model / actor / collaborator for my pictures in which I told him the following: 


"What I'm after is a very short narrative: Caliban is awake, hears music and susurration, falls asleep, sees visions, wakes again, cries and we cut to black. Something like this anyway. The photographs will be dreamlike and may switch from b&w to colour and back again as the "story" progresses. The images will be used in an exhibition at the college where I am undertaking my course and I may want to use them on my website. I'd be happy for you to use them in any way you saw fit if you wanted to.  

I'm looking for a bit of a contrast between Caliban's appearance and his language, his voice: punk appearance, angelic words. If it is OK with you, I'd like to record you giving the speech as this might accompany my pictures - would that be alright? I'd bring down a little hand-held recorder for us to use."


What I'd really like to do though is nail down what I want the viewer to walk away with, the feeling(s) I'd like to evoke in them as they move on. My default is melancholia since I believe life is a somewhat melancholic affair, all the more so when represented in photography, that most melancholic of art forms: 


“As for me, I see both beauty and the dark side of the things; the loveliness of cornfields and full sails, but the ruin in them as well. And I see them at the same time... The Japanese have a phrase for this dual perception: mono no aware. It means "beauty tinged with sadness," for there cannot be any real beauty without the indolic whiff of decay. For me, living is the same thing as dying, and loving is the same thing as losing, and this does not make me a madwoman; I believe it can make me better at living, and better at loving, and, just possibly, better at seeing.” Sally Mann. 


To be honest, I'm not likely to have much trouble with melancholy - it's everything else I find hard to represent. And I'm meant to be expanding my photographic repertoire, I think, rather than doubling down on what it is already. So, let's say melancholy won't be too much of a challenge; what else would I like to leave the viewer with? Beauty, and memory, and a dream-like, oneiric view of the world. I recently read somewhere that a magician liked to hear how his audiences left his shows and looked at the world afresh, at the dark inky blue of the night sky as they left the auditorium as if it were an hallucination - something to do with having been tricked into seeing new possibilities in the world because of what they had witnessed on stage - I can't quite remember exactly what the explanation was but yes, I'd like to leave viewers with a slightly heightened awareness, a slight hallucinatory quality: a bit of a tall order given I have no history of ever having done this and given the confines of the project but hell, you have to aim high. It is the artist's responsibility to be remarkable... So, of course, here's some more melancholy, though hopefully with a touch of the dreamlike: 





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