lens_cap105's photostream

At 39 years old after spending the vast majority of my life without so much as more than a handful of tattered and neglected snap shots, without ever having owned or thought of owning a photographic book or camera I find myself obsessed by photographs. I am taking photographs obsessively and when I'm not taking them I'm thinking about them.

Photography has always been for me an essentially fleeting and insignificant expression - there is something so inescapably momentary about it - whether in the moment of its conception or reception its a single frame - more slender than a second - it does not hold you in time, it does not grant the traditional grace of the suspension of time. Every photograph takes its place in the relentless passage of time and if it freezes a moment of it and holds its image still it seems only to remark that this was only one moment amongst an infinity of moments, one object amongst an infinity of objects as beautiful, as seductive, as great as a photograph might be there is for me always this tragedy to it - that it is always indifferent to its subject. This is its inhumanity reconfirmed again in the inhumanity of its gaze- no matter how much a photographer manipulates his work, he will always only be modifying the primary creation of a machine. As a representation of reality, the photograph derives primarily as an expression of that reality and only secondarily as an expression of the man who frames, arranges, manipulates, and ultimately executes that representation by pushing a button that sets off a chemical or electro-magnetic chain reaction resulting in a photograph. A photograph is always deficient in the humanity - in the anthropomorphic gesture through which we make ourselves at home in the world, by which we humanise it. And yet of all art forms it is the most familiar, the most intimate with our daily lives - it reflects us to ourselves on the most mundane, prosaic level in the true sense of the word familiar. It is as though the photograph was the gaze of the universe, of nature, or whatever you want to call it - that can look on the most beautiful object, the most tragic scene, the most compelling expression of grace or power, as fleeting and relative - an essentially inhuman gaze and yet, it is an essential expression of man kind - a means by which in his most intimate parts he represents himself to himself. In a sense the photograph partakes in that paradox within which man defines himself as other than "nature" and at the same time demonstrates he is nothing but "nature".

For me its not surprising that I should take up photography now, at this moment of my life when the last original layers of youthful idealism dry up and peel away. The ambition, the hopefulness, the illusion of significance, of permanence, are slowly slipping away, revealing an image of the asceteline universe as cool as the edge of broken glass as sharp and cruel as the perfect focus.