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images waiting for a metaphor...
Most people think that working on a project is a linear process,
you decide what you want to do and then... just do it.
It’s not like that, at least not for me. Working on a project
is spending days wandering around with a camera and then searching
through work prints for patterns and themes, trying to understand
exactly what is going on in your subconscious, what made you shoot
that subject, in that particular way. Then going back out with thoughts
tickling at the back of your mind only to discover that you are
really doing something else.
When I was working on these images, I noticed that something
had changed in my work. I was being drawn to old subjects in new
ways and new subjects in ways that I found disturbing. Upthrusting
towers, cactuses looking like missile sylos, wispy plants blown
by the wind, gently swelling waves, kites floating on the wind.
The years since those chads fell the wrong way have been very
strange in Spain. At first there was a great sense of coming together.
Millions marching on the streets every weekend. At 22:00 every evening,
whole neighborhoods in Barcelona stopped what they were doing to
bang drums, pots, anything they could get their hands on, to show
solidarity with people in another country that they had never even met.
A totally
selfless concern. 96% of the country all thinking the same thing.
The eventual failure of this left many with a deep feeling of
impotence. I lost interest in conversations, reading newspapers,
in dialogue of any sort.
Looking through the images in this series i can now see my state
of mind more clearly. A preoccupation with symbols of power, or
desolation. A sense of helplessness combined with a longing for
something, anything, ‘else’.
These images aren’t metaphors. I couldn’t point to any and say
‘this means...’. But I can say, ‘if those chads had fallen differently,
I doubt if I’d have made these images’.
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