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10 Print “KILL! KILL! KILL THEM ALL!”, 20 GOTO 10
Yes… This really is me playing around with the two most defining inventions of the 20th century. The ZX81 & the AK47.
I later went on to develop the ZX47 a state of the art hybrid compact death delivery device. But it failed massivley due to having a very wobbly barrel that kept falling off if you accidently bumped into it.
Thoughts on Photography – Fractured Stories
Photography can be very frustrating. There are more images I have failed to capture due to poor timing or technical incompetence than I would care to mention. But this does not bother me as nearly as much as the occasions when I will haphazardly press my shutter release to capture a scene that I have little expectation about, only to find I have captured something I really like. In fact one of the best photographs I have ever taken was shot accidentally after I pressed the shutter release whilst putting the camera away in my bag.
Sometimes it really does feel like the camera is taking the photographs it chooses.
This is why I like to look through old Photographs I haven’t taken. I like to try and understand what the original photographer was trying to capture and think about the moment the image was taken. I believe that this will help me sharpen my own instincts in a much more effective way than dragging my brain through the maze of critical writings on such subjects.
Old images are full of variations in cultural references and social norms that are alien or at least different from those of our own time. They have a language all of their own and one based on the relationships between the people and the objects within them. They throw up questions that only have guesses for answers and allow us to romanticise in the safety of knowing that we will never be proved wrong.
For instance a candid family holiday snap whilst mundane and average to most will show a group of people who ceased to be the people that were photographed the moment the photo was taken. Depending on the age of the image they may even have ceased to be completely, or at least so far away from that particular moment in time that even viewing themselves within the image would be like looking back upon the memory of a stranger. That split second capture has immortalised them and even though they may now be long forgotten they symbolise a time and a type of event that is very unique.
To read these photographs we need to employ skills of empathy and history in order to understand what we are seeing.
The types of holidays we have gone on over the years, the range of family members who went and the clothes we wore are all good indicator of the structure of our society through out various points in history. When we view these photographs our brain makes all these assessments automatically and leaves us with an opinion and an understanding of what we are seeing.
Our modern thinking and understandings are also relevant as they allow us to find new and unrelated themes within an image that the original photographer could never have considered at the time. It’s also impossible not to have these views as a bias to the judgements and understandings we make when we view an image as they are part of our everyday critical thinking.
But disengage those automatic functions and switch over to asking these questions manually and the way you read a photograph may indeed change and allow for a much more creative and enjoyable experience. An image can be read like a book and like all good stories they should be devoured slowly and re-visited so new understandings can be revealed.
I hope that anybody who takes the time to view the photographs I have found and posted on this blog enjoy them as much as I do.
Found Photography
I like hunting out Photographs long since forgotten
Found Photography
I like hunting out Photographs long since forgotten
Found Photography
I like hunting out Photographs long since forgotten
Found Photography
I like hunting out Photographs long since forgotten
Found Photography
I like hunting out Photographs long since forgotten
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