Essay - On Not Being Able to Shoot In Europe

This has been a source of major heartache. I’m always worried when I’m not working. I don’t know if the tap will run dry. But I haven’t really been able to get excited about shooting in Europe for a number of reasons.

  • It is too familiar. I know these people. I know the streets. I know the pace of life. I know their secrets. All of this is what I grew up with back in Sydney and I don’t find it immediately interesting. If I did I would commit myself to finding the stories that exist on these streets too. I left to Sydney to escape this. It makes me worry about what my three months back in Sydney is going to be like photographically. I can’t just market and study. What will I shoot?
  • I don’t have a base of operations and the clear free-time to go out and explore and really settle. Everything costs so much in Europe even though I’ve had free board in both Vienna and Paris. But it’s more a matter of coming up with a regular stable pattern of working. That just hasn’t been possible.
  • It is boring. Maybe I should try harder but Europe is the epitome of bourgeois values and the urge isn’t to capture it but to puncture it with some performance art.
  • People are powerful and bourgeois here and are much more likely to get pissed off. It is also illegal to shoot someone without there permission. Neither of these things should stop me but I’m afraid that they probably have had an impact. Sad.
  • I just don’t get the light. The light is crystalline. Pale, wan and boring. I don’t know how to get contrast here in the colour pictures. Everything comes out limp and lifeless. Of course, this is probably also a matter of effort but I think that I just don’t love this place aesthetically. I can’t put my heart into it. It took me a long time to get the colours right in Bangladesh and I loved it once I did get them right. I’m a little worried that Australian light will be like this in the outback and that this will make the project that I’m planning difficult. I just have to wait and see.
  • I need a break after all the work in Bangladesh. I’m not sure if I believe this though. I think that I did need to spend time editing and I’ve gotten all of that done in Europe which has been great (although it took a longer that I expected for the Twilight set). I also had no access to books in Bangladesh and that’s been nice to have that here and be able to research a bit. It’s not that fun looking at pictures from new photographers, the quality is very low and I’m rarely moved but there are some good things and the classics are always very good. It was lovely to read Szarkowski’s essay on Winogrand when I was in Berlin.

Excuses, excuses, excuses. We’ll see what’s what when I get back to Australia.


Posted 2 years ago

Essay - Sell, Sell, Sell

“I’m really tired right now kid.”

I have been showing my work around like crazy. To anyone I meet who I have the opportunity to share 10 minutes with. People having a drink in bars, people on transport, girls I meet at museums, people in bookstores and sometimes I’m the one who is approached, like in Berlin.

These aren’t uncomfortable or awkward encounters. No really, they aren’t for either party. It happens very naturally with just one initial hurdle where they fear that they will have to respond to really bad art with the artist right in front of them. Scary. But having done it enough times now, I’m pretty natural about presenting them the opportunity to see some photos “which are really good, I promise you’ll like them” and they have very little time to really say no before I’m already into my “I just spent 3 months in Bangladesh shooting close up …” and looking straight into their eyes.

Usually the conversation runs on and on. It’s always at least half an hour of them looking at the photos and commenting. I have a spiel that I do now for the photos and an order that I show the photos in. Talking to people like this has been great in first, clarifying my own ideas about my work, but more pleasurably, getting original reactions to the work form others that I wouldn’t have thought of. I thought that this whole audience participation thing was a myth but it is decidedly not. It has made me hungry to get my work out and in front of other eyes and minds so that I can have more conversations about how great I am, my art is, and my ideas are.

However, there are some problems in paradise. One, there is little point I think in showing the photos if I don’t have the time to show significant numbers of them. Otherwise the overall story that I’m trying to tell does not come across and I start rambling incoherently and quickly. This is especially bad in France where they pretend not to understand English.

Another is handling any negative comments. And really from about 10 people I’ve shown it to I’ve received one negative feedback. Even that was couched in how good the work was technically and that I had a very good ‘eye.’ But a French art bookshop seller (who also makes collage artists (yeah I know)) said that my work had already been done. When I researched the references that he gave me to backup his statement I could not find any similarities. Also, he believed the way the art was made, or it’s context of creation was not important. Once the work was done, it was done. Of course I do not agree with this. It is very important to my work that it is real and hard. That the people in the photos haven’t consented to the photos and often do not know that the photo has been taken. This gives the work authenticity that is lamely lacking in the art school theatre that passes for photographic art. I had the time and I should have showed him all the photos.

Another problem which surfaced in Berlin was that often the director of the gallery is not the one who is in the gallery at the time of the visit and the assistants are very reluctant to look at the work, and they aren’t of huge use anyway. I need to start printing work and learning to use the mail system (or dropping them off) to be able to reach the directors and not fall into the email rat race which I refuse to participate in.

Hopefully I will be doing a lot of this stuff when I’m in Australia.


Posted 2 years ago

Essay - The Next Plan: Back to Australia

Photo by Unknown

This is an excerpt from an email to a friend explaining what I want to do for the next seven or eight months.

I walked the streets of Paris tonight thinking about what I should do next. I’ve been thinking about this a lot since leaving Berlin.

Bangladesh was a huge success, even if the fruits aren’t ripe enough to eat yet. I took the first steps in learning to work hard, and I have started to find out how I look at the world that is different to everyone else’s. Next, I was confused between going to New York to try to sell what I have (which would mean spending 6 months there making contacts) or coming home to Australia to first learn to print, second get a gallery, and third a grant to do the printing, a beautiful catalogue and a show and if I’m lucky a bit left over for the next trip.

I will be getting a tattoo on my arm which says ‘work.’ It will be in the clearest of typefaces, the most unadorned, Helvetica. It will be a centimetre high and run down my wrist. It will only say ‘work.’ It will be with me for the rest of my life. It describes my greatest weakness, and it will describe how and why I became great. I want to see that word for the rest of my life. I haven’t talked to many people about it but others who do not make art don’t understand why I’m doing it. I was initially going to get ‘Arbeit macht frei’ which is what the Nazi’s sarcastically (or maybe in a bout of compassion) wrote above the entrances of many of the concentration camps. It transliterates as ‘Work makes free’ or ‘Work will set you free.’ Garry Winogrand when interviewed and asked why he did what he did replied ‘because when I’m photographing I forget that I exist. And for me that’s very attractive.’ I didn’t know it, but I’ve always felt the same way.

And so I let the as yet imaginary mark (I have been writing it on my left wrist in pen) be my guide. Where can I be which will get me closest to working again? And the answer for now is that I’m most excited about Australia. The home my dad chose for us in 1982. My uncle told me in Dhaka, “you know, I really wanted to send your dad to America, to New York, but for some reason he really wanted to go to Australia, he was set on it, and so he went. I couldn’t stop him.” I want to explore the impact of that decision. I want to explore what country my dad bought us to. I have been working on some ideas which are more specific:

  1. I will do my close in shots. But will be very difficult to do them ‘in natural state’ like I did in Bangladesh, but that’s OK. I’m exploring a different subject (not the street) so set up shots are all right. I very much liked Benjamin Rinner’s portraiture style around Berlin. I think little narratives for certain types of outback residents would be very interesting. A portrait. Them and their house. Them and their car. Them and their animal. Their room. Two or three shots of their work (more if interesting). 10 people, 7 or 8 pictures each. Or 7 or 8 people and 10 pictures each. People in the country have structured, regulated lives unlike the ADD ones that we have in the city. I want to see if I can get a clear narrative for the people I meet with just those pictures. Need roughly 20 people to choose from. August Sander-like portraits of people in their own environments. I need to make a connection to these people. But why will my attempt be new? This has already been done by Sander but he had an even more ambitious plan to photograph everyone from all occupations in Germany. What I’d love to do is beautiful action shots of these people. Riding horses, rounding up cattle, cutting down logs. It has to look amazingly beautiful, beautifully lit etc., and they should be in a decisive moment.
  2. Aboriginal communities, both towns and hopefully more nomadic groups. Call it The Aboriginals. Define them as ‘they’, something other. Sander like stuff will work very well here, but want to hearken back to what they were before. Something majestic but simple, something truly archaic. I know that’s racist but that’s what they were. I’m absolutely in love with their existence in the vastness, of their freedom in it. They overpowered loneliness perhaps? Were they lonely? Or by being one with the ground, with the serpent, with the trees did they eschew the idea of loneliness. I love, love, love their concept of going Walkabout. Of revelling and recharging oneself with loneliness. Loneliness as a positive. I think the townships are an attempt for them to be something they aren’t. They don’t have the religious-cultural drivers towards banding together in a civilisation and making progress. Or they didn’t until they are forcefully assimilated (but was it forceful?). I want to capture that more organic drive. That beautiful positive nihilism!
  3. I also want to explore the desolateness, the lonesslines of the outback. It’s inhumanness. The red dirt and yellow trees. But I don’t want vistas. There has to be a new way of showing this stuff. Of getting closer to it. That movie about the girls who went missing did this at some points (Picnic at Hanging Rock, Luhrman?). A real mystery. A real hostility in the land. The land wants to nearly expel the new-comers. Australians have been pushed to the edges of the land, they can’t live in the heart of it. Really interesting. A potential solution is to unbalance it in its detail, to make it a mess but still make it aesthetically balanced. Cy Twombly’s work really reminds me of the outback. Lee Friedlander may also be a good model with his views of bush. But his are an aesthetic exercise and not a main work. Mine will need to tell a dreamtime story.
  4. Need to understand the small towns. Becher-like recording of all the buildings I come across. Not judging like Evans but nearly a scientific study of what is there and what is being lost. Things that aren’t usually seen by Australians. Front on, nearly scientific. (Will I need a tilt shift lens? Or can stand on top of the car.) Need to research Evans as well as Bechers as that is what I want to be led by, but it will be in colour. But also need the town itself from a distance, to show that it is ragged, rough haven from the loneliness of the outback.
  5. Night work in the outback. Tiny bits of light in an ocean of vast darkness as a continuation of my Dhaka night work. I think the ideas of loneliness and isolation will be enhanced in the dark. Can take a more abstract view and be expressive rather than scientific as is my usual drive. I don’t want one single style. like Picasso I want to develop and interweave skill in various types of styles and use whatever is needed for the story.
  6. Also take video interviews of these people talking about what it’s like living on the land, loneliness, silence etc. I may not get what I’m looking for (I may be a shit interviewer) but if I have a show it would be nice to have a video installation.

The work needs to be new, new, new. It’ll be a personal reaction and that’ll help but I also need to make sure it has never been done before. Need to research what photographs of Australia have been taken before but be able to resist that work when I’m out there and make my own thing. Maybe I will get ideas from historical photographs and paintings. Also need to see the work of the great American lanscape photographers and painters from the 19th century. Also would like to reread my history books from year 7 and 8 on Australian outback history if I can find them!

On whether I will be bored out in the outback. I want to find that out. It is the big unknown, just like it was for Cook when he sailed past these mostly barren shores. I want to be in this state of ambiguity and then see what my reactions are. It is something I have to try. But I believe “there are pictures to be made out there.” I also have a healthy respect for boredom (but not for being uninspired). I think boredom is important in the creative process. Whether you can work through it is a good determiner for whether the work will be good or not. There were times I was really bored with the work I was doing in Bangladesh and didn’t think it was any good, but I pushed through that.

… I plan to come back within a week, or at a maximum, a month (If I go to Egypt). I will probably spend a couple of weeks at home with my parents whatever I do and then I’ll need to decide where I want to be based for a guerilla art attack on the establishment:

  • Doing my printing to get exactly the look I want (in large format). I plan to buy a 44 inch wide professional printer and print 1m x 1m prints of my work. It will cost me upward of $4000 for the printer and I don’t know how much for paper and so on. But I want to control the entire process right down to the print. Detail and colour are very important to my work and I want to make sure I get it right and learn how to do it myself. One of the things I hated about my past jobs was that I was in a strategic idea-making position but I didn’t do any of the day to day building. I didn’t really understand how the things I was thinking up were built. This time I want to get my hands really really dirty.
  • Innovative marketing to the populace and then maybe to the art world. I want to print up these posters and plaster them around the city so that people walk by and notice these heads of Bangladeshis that they’ve never seen before. I want them to wonder what’s going on. I want to make booklets as cheaply as I can and leave them in bars, toilets, restaurants, art schools, giving them to anyone interesting I meet etc. I want to get a top gallerist by getting their friends and current artists to lobby for me, or dropping off a booklet in the mail, or a poster across from their house etc. Something scary like that. But I want to be different. I want to treat the marketing like an artwork itself. Then I’ll take what I learn and use it when I’m in New York to own that fucking town. My way.
  • I want get a grant to either print my current work and get it framed (which is going to cost an imaginable fuckload) and for my planned work in the outback. If I can’t get a grant then think of some other ways of funding because after buying the printer, and buying a new camera capable of doing double the resolution I currently can (and new lens and reflector etc.) and living in Sydney or Melbourne for a bit I’m not going to have much money left for a trip. I may have to work!
  • Although I’m a little scared of over-thinking or over-researching this trip, I think it will help to be a little more planned out than I was in Bangladesh (money is much tighter now, and I’d like to start getting good photos as quickly as possible). I want to do the research that I mentioned earlier.
  • I also need to learn how to light like Benjamin Rinner’s work. Maybe work at a photography studio for a while, or read up on it and play around or something. Or a quick course at the ACP in Paddington. I also have to figure out to get make a transportable black background and use a reflector for these shots. Avedon took around a white background when we went touring through America.

So that’s another 2 or 3 months in either Sydney or Melbourne. Hopefully Melbourne because I really don’t want to stay with my parents, but that’d probably be the cheapest, most sensible option. It would be fun to be based in a vibe that isn’t Sydney, but the galleries that actually sell anything are probably in Sydney so I don’t know. More thinking and research required.

I also would like to go on a trial attempt for a month maybe in NSW and see if it will be fruitful. Prototyping. I’ll probably do this on my motorbike and so on.

Also, as you can see I’m really directed about what it is that I want to do and the time frames I would like to get things happening by. The actual trip can be fairly open-ended. I want time to be open hearted to the country and have all my plans and expectations and research totally upturned and thrown out. But I want to have good stuff to try to do another show and have enough money to get to New York for a while after that. … (Secretly I’m thinking 4 to 6 months for the actual trip. I know that’s unromantic to have a timeline, but that’s roughly what I’m thinking.)

The other issue I’ve been thinking of is that of loneliness. It’s strangely important in my work and is intimately tied in with my current ideas about Australia and the work I’m planning to do. I wonder if I need to be lonely when I’m doing this work? I wonder if I want to be lonely?


Posted 2 years ago

Story - How to Pick Up a Bauhaus Expert and Fail

X

So you met this girl on the last day right? At a gallery?

Y

Yeah, a Bauhaus exhibition. The biggest one ever put together anywhere ever in the history of our universe.

X

Oh yeah? And how was she put together?

Y

It wasn’t like that. Well, it was. I really liked her nails. They were this electric orange. Shocking orange. But you could tell that she wasn’t shocking, that she liked to fit in, to not splash around too much.

X

How did you run into her? Did you run into her?

Y

I was in the line to the exhibition, and you know how I get in lines. I get anxious. I feel subversive. Well then I see her, in a bright green shirt with a question mark on the back.

X

Hah. That’s a little obvious even for you right?

Y

Well I don’t make the world up, I just try to alter it slightly. Anyway, she has her hair done up. Not quite the Tutonic braids but it’s up and tight and she has a small figure to go with the hair. And, you know how it works. You like the way a girl moves, the way she drags her shoes across the floor. You like the slight turn of the head as she answers a question. The wide open eyes as she looks around. You like everything and really, nothing. You know nothing about her and that’s lovely. It’s all you, it’s your drama.

X

Drama. How do you survive with this stuff in your head?

Y

I barely survive.

X

Anyway, you shouldn’t think this way. You’re always talking about work. You’re going to get WORK tattooed on your arm, how can you justify this much effort on a girl? This much thinking? You do this all the time.

Y

Well, I can’t; except to fall back on that most cliché of artistic tropes: it’s life, I’m making life. I’m making myself up. And to do that I need to act, I need to shift the reality that’s presented to me.

X

Well the reality here is that you’re perving on a girl.

Y

Perving has gotten a bad name. It’s the classic past time of the aristocratic classes. So, I’m in line and I see her. Maybe 20 meters away. And she starts walking over. An old English lady, helpless as can be, asks her a question. And the girl in green answers so sweetly. To the point, but nice. German, definitely. And suddenly I’m so interested. Everybody needs a German of their own.

X

No disagreeing with that. Who couldn’t use their life straightened out?

Y

Right. So she comes over and this is where my new found craziness comes into play. I just stare. Boldly, uncontrollably, no sneaking around. No coyness. Just a hard stare. She can feel it and looks over and looks away. There’s a doe like recognition of danger. She moves away. I think about something else. Maybe she never noticed me at all. It doesn’t matter.

X

Girls always notice. Or they never do.

Y

They’ll never tell you in any case. ‘Oh, you saw me first?’ It’s so funny, all the pornographers tell us that girls like narrative, but in the initial contact it’s always brashness that wins with them. It’s always aggression that they want. Maybe, it’s a naunced aggression? They want the representation of danger without the actuality of it. Certainly not initially. I think they do want narrative, but they want an exciting, dangerous start to the story. Something which isn’t what happens to them everyday. Something which they can dream about.

X

You are so up yourself.

Y

Yeah.

X

But you’re probably right. For the girls who matter anyway. So anyway, what happens next?

Y

I have to tell you this story doesn’t end well. I cry softly at the end.

X

Softly, huh? That’s, that’s you.

Y

Well, it’s the child-like wonder in me. So I walk into the exhibition the wrong way. Through the exit. I like doing that. As I’ve said I’ve already forgotten her. I realise that the exhibition is huge. Like really huge. And that it’s chronological and that I can’t just go back to front. I walk sheepishly past the security guard and start again the right way.

X

I like doing exhibitions back to front too, it’s nice to see people’s faces as they are walking past you.

Y

Art and faces and bodies, I love museums. So I’m walking through the first couple of rooms at my usual glacial pace. 30 minutes per room, you know me. And I’m always looking at the people looking at the art too right? It’s busy. People milling, and suddenly two rooms away, she’s there. And she’s just floating about. And I see the question mark on the back of her green shirt again and it just draws me. I falter. It’s all very risky. So I slowly walk over, getting faster and faster as I get closer and closer.

X

Stalking?

Y

No, my fears are stalking me. She may not even be there. Actually she could just disappear from this story and it wouldn’t change the ideas.

X

How L’Aventurra of you.

Y

So before I know it, I’m there, and her face is eloquent. Her eyes are luminescent and stands out in the soft elegance of the museum’s uplit atmosphere. Her nose is catastrophically beautiful. And she has the lightest patina of freckles that gives her face such a tenderness, such a depth that you feel like fainting. I fainted.

X

Right. You’re such a wanker.

Y

Right. So I instantly jump back to my feet from my temporary nothingness and I’m thinking that she helps with pointing out where the information desk is and where the exhibition continues to rather than the finer points of the evolution of the Bauhaus. And so I ask her why Architecture was considered the umbrella art at the Bauhaus and why such great artists such as Klee and Kandinsky would become servants to what seemed like an architectural style, a technological style. She doesn’t even blink.

X

What does she say?

Y

Basically she tells me that I don’t know what I’m talking about, but she says it with those eyes. Those subtle, caressing eyes. She says that although Gropius had his own practice as an architect, the actual Bauhaus was interdisciplinary from the beginning. She quite charmingly doesn’t tell me that the room I had just walked into makes the same point. I need to recover. I say that perhaps it was that the key problem of that age was mechanisation and technological design and competition and all the arts were affected in the same way and it was an organic alignment of stylistic innovation. Of course I said it more eloquently than that, more simply. I also throw in the Expressionists, that they had run out of ideas by then and the horror of war was such that art could not recover from the shock fast enough to tackle it directly.

X

That sounds kind of right. But also pretty banal.

Y

Yeah, I was flailing. But there’s something about her. She has been helping people so long, that she can’t help but help. And there’s something about the German sense of completeness. They are very reluctant to let things peter out. Slowly and elegantly I claw my way back and she leaves me enough room to do that.

X

Was she leaning in?

Y

Not at first, but then we started talking about our own art. She’s studied architecture. She’s from Berlin. It’s so heartbreakingly cute how she pronounces her English. She says, ‘cue-ol.’ She talks all over me in her excitement, and for once in my life I’m happy to be interrupted, five times. We talk deep art. We talk a little life. We know that something’s going on here but I can’t tell, she’s German. And from the initial looks of it, a hipster. I enjoy the conversation and then suddenly we both realise that it’s gone on for a little too long. That it’d gotten a little too personal. And we slowly wander out of our dream. I stop talking. She says “You have a long way to go in this exhibition.” I pretend that doesn’t have a triple meaning.

X

Whoa. You know it’s such a hard thing when you’re talking to someone who’s there to provide a service. To be able to tell when it goes beyond that. When you’re out drinking there’s a lot of touching, a lot of eyes lingering on eyes, heads bent. You know what’s going on.

Y

I think the rules are the same anywhere. It just happens more slowly, more quietly. The things you’re talking about happened. And actually, to totally contradict myself it all happened pretty quickly.

X

What was her body like?

Y

Petite. Great, great ass. She was wearing calf high leather boots. Very cool. Tight jeans which forced her bum into a transcendental state. Her name was Anja. Yeah, with a ‘j.’ We both walk off.

X

Theatrical.

Y

No it wasn’t, it was very natural. The funny thing is, although I’m playing up the story, it was all very organic, linear. It fit, and the actions weren’t grotesque or large. Just really small looks, touches, but fast words, our conversation clicked together.

X

So you shagged right? Like, it gets bad after you shagged?

Y

I went back to the exhibition room that I was in. I was intrigued by the Bauhaus even more after talking to her. She did her job! I was thinking about things deeply. It was the early, more abstract works that were testing out the theories of the Bauhaus before they became sophisticated. (Although I’m not sure if they ever did to the level they could’ve if they had more than 14 years). I started my half step, tap the back of my shoe with my other foot, another half step dance that I do in galleries for some reason now. I kept on wandering. I didn’t think about her for another two rooms. And then I started wondering.

X

This seems very well paced. It’s good to have that time apart. To get a beer, or a pee, or a line of coke whatever. To have time to be amazed at what just happened, don’t you think?

Y

I do think my friend. But it can be crushing. Your imagination can crush you. You’re amazed at what you’ve done, at what she’s done, but you don’t want it to end, but you also don’t want to go through that emotional high again. It’s this contradictory urge for adventure.

X

Where is she now?

Y

With her boyfriend in Berlin.

X

Ah.

Y

But I wouldn’t find out about that till later. I walk around and she isn’t in any of the rooms that I’m so slowly meandering through. Maybe she never existed. Maybe I spoke to some video art. Some conceptual outpouring from some tortured male artist’s inner being: a beautiful, intelligent girl who makes objects, who wants to talk to you about all your ideas. I was dreaming. I was high. I was lonely.

X

Sure sounds like it. Did you masturbate before the Bauhaus?

Y

No. Sadly no.

X

Well, that most likely contributed to this whole imaginary saga.

Y

But it continues. It goes on. Oh hang on, I did see her one more time. It was fantastic. We slid by each other in the fifth room and she nodded her head. I hardly moved my eyes. We were both wondering what the fuck was going to happen.

X

Enthralling.

Y

Tell me about it. So I do see her again, in a darkened room with a light installation by Moholy-Nagy (she humiliating corrected me into pronouncing it Moholy-Nach, the bitch). She’s answering some guy’s questions. He’s quite obviously a graphic designer. Talking about typefaces and shit probably. I nearly puked. I walked past and neither of us recognised the other. There was no tension. I felt a little disappointed really. I walked out of the room.

X

Does anything actually happen in this story of yours which isn’t just two ships passing in the night?

Y

Patience! She finishes her talk with the failed artist and comes into the room that I’m in. It’s full of beautiful things that she loves and she wants to tell me about it all. She approaches so directly that I’m thrown by the suddenness of it, the elation of it. She comes in, looks into my eyes and silently guides me to these gorgeously complex, but organic, structural paper models made by some students in the workshops. We’re both happy just to be talking together. We could’ve been talking about anything.

X

So what’s your purpose, what’re you trying to do here?

Y

Just be around her. Just talk.

X

Pathetic.

Y

And other people notice it too. People know when something like that is going on, it’s like a mugging. No one wants to get involved, but no-one wants to miss it. And you can often see the pathetic need in the guy, the blank, unthinking desire. No matter how high my talk was. I was attempting something. And it’s never pretty to watch someone attempting something. What if it goes horribly wrong, you know?

X

I love the way you save your self from judgement. You’re always one step further in thinking about what you are doing and the paying out each little piece. You don’t leave any room to hurt you.

Y

Thanks.

X

And you call this art?

Y

I do. I do. I do. So where was I?

X

You’ve re-met. Rekindled. Whatever.

Y

And we just talk, and flirt, and brush up against each for just a little too long. And she laughs and looks at my eyes. And I look at her mouth. It was all very intellectual.

X

Did you just stop looking at the art?

Y

No. As I found out later she had to pretend to keep on talking about Bauhaus to me just in case the director walked past and so we just spent hours telling each other what we like and revealing ourselves through aesthetics. “I like this.” “Well, I like this too.” So I like you. Well, I like you too. Well, that’s what I thought was happening at the time.

X

Surely this exhibition ends at some stage and why isn’t she helping anyone else?

Y

Because we’re together now. The exhibition did end. With a sign saying DAS ENDE.

X

And?

Y

Well before that I told her I was a photographer and that she should see my photos. That she’d like them.

X

What did she say?

Y

She had to say yes.

X

But what did she say?

Y

Yes. She said sure. But that she was busy tonight. She didn’t tell me that it would be with her boyfriend; meeting some friends who were going to LA. She asked me what I was doing tomorrow.

X

What did you say?

Y

I said I was flying to Paris.

X

Nice.

Y

It was. But everything about being in Europe is nice that way. All the nouns have deep histories. Deep romantic histories. So she says, ok, we’ll have to meet early then. I said, “yes, I fly at 4pm.” We walk out and she looks around keenly for observers. I propose fruit.

X

What?

Y

I propose fruit. I’ll bring two different kinds of fruit. And she has to bring two different kinds of cheese. And we’ll meet at a park and I’ll show her my photos. It’s decided. She gives me her number with no reluctance. We’ll meet at Friedrichshain Volkspark. The people’s park. It’s an illicit meeting deep in the Soviet east. I nod.

X

Are you confident she would come?

Y

Well after the history of the past week. No I’m not. But I’m excited. The meeting is a good one, a story at least. At the least a bad story. And that’s something.

X

You sound a little sad about it all.

Y

I’m just a little tired. These aren’t ‘good’ memories in the end. They give a dark, warped pleasure, not a bright one. The problem was I didn’t know what I wanted beyond an experience. Or maybe the problem was that I wanted something beyond an experience and that just wasn’t possible. It’s a funny thing that there is a cliché that art comes from the artists extreme suffering but that’s not really true. Art comes from the artist’s usual suffering. That may be extreme for some but for other it can be the slightest, sweetest sorrows. Small. The littlest unfairness’ of life can be the most powerful drivers to creation.

X

Yes. But it’s still a sad life.

Y

We don’t get to pick the kind of life we have. We don’t get to pick ourselves. It’s the great lottery right?

X

So what happens after she gives you her number?

Y

Well we had been flirting a lot and I knew I could lean in and kiss her on the cheek although she was at work. It’s Europe so it’s both cheeks. Twice the fun. But it wasn’t that fun. And then she threw me out.

X

She definitely sounds like she was into you.

Y

I thought so. And so I’m on some magic carpet, or knowing her, on some van der Rohe created flying roof. And I run out of the museum … but without my bag. I walk back in to get it feeling a little dumb and she’s walking down the stairs, we give each other a nervous smile. I wonder if that created some doubt in her mind.

X

Seeing you coming into the Museum again? Probably. She was most likely thinking about what had happened, and then to see you again, coming in? Weird. But I’m just saying what your pessimistic personality is telling you. She probably didn’t give a shit.

Y

Yeah maybe. But I think that kind of little stuff matters.

X

Only to you.

Y

Stop flattering me, you cunt. So I’m rushing to get back to the Hostel because I have to meet Ben to go out that night. And Berlin seems to be lit like some nativity scene, a deep orange of the sun going down, all peace and harmony. It seems like I’m the only one excited about anything. I keep on thinking how cool she was. I can’t stop thinking about how pretty she is.

X

You’re so shallow.

Y

Am I? I did just talk to her about the Bauhaus, Art, and Life for 3 hours. That was “deep” right? I like to think that I have range. You shouldn’t ignore the beauty of a girl or a guy just because it’s politically correct to do so. It matters. We care about aesthetics when we buy clothes, or furniture, or decide to live in a home, or a neighbourhood, or when we make art, why not in the people we want to be with? And whatever people say, it happens, we care, we notice how someone looks. Maybe it’s the whole Nietzchean idea of powerless ugly people trying to claw themselves back into the game.

X

But, that’s the main thing you notice.

Y

So? I make art. Aesthetics is important. And more, I make a silent art, photographs. And so the surface, and the capability of the surface to say something, or have an effect, is really important. In any case, I thought she was hot. And so I have a good night out with Ben at some bars and head back. Now I start doing shameful things.

X

Oh? Jacking off?

Y

No. There is no shame in pleasuring yourself. I start thinking about what it’ll be like. I start creating these narrative threads. What she’s going to say. How I will get close to her. Where to touch her first. The steps to get me to kissing her. Adolescent things like that.

X

Fun to think about though. For you that is. Other people are just busy living their lives. Busy kissing girls.

Y

My life needs to be augmented. It’s not enough that a situation is happening, that situation has to be raised to a higher pitch. Then of course that has to be recorded and reproduced as art. So I think about how I may spend the rest of the year in Berlin if things work out with her. That I shouldn’t cancel my flight, but that maybe, just maybe I could come back from Paris to live happily ever after. But I know this is all a crude but personal fantasy. That things don’t happen like that, that is, unless they extraordinarily do. That the configurations of a situation are powerful determiners and you can only adjust them only so far in such a short time.

X

But your life is good now. You don’t need a girl.

Y

Not in actuality. But I still need to need a girl.

X
ight. Pathetic.

Y

Maybe, but that’s who I am. And it’s getting too late to change things. Anyway, so I get up in the morning and I’m going to be flying to Paris that day and I have a list of ten chores to do beforehand. I try not to think about her but Time turns oozy. It drags. I want Time to get lost until I see her. But then suddenly it’s there, it’s time. I have to rush to the park with my strawberries and oranges and drink and chocolate croissant. My loose bike chain falls off like three times, and I’m in a sweet panic. I get to the park and it’s huge.

X

What were you going to do if she doesn’t come?

Y

Well, Ben said, “at least you’ll have something to eat.” I was deeply hoping she would come because at this point she was an opportunity for … I don’t know. For salvation. To not think about myself for awhile. For intellectual pleasure and maybe some physical hedonism. But also, a better me. A smarter, funnier, faster, stronger, harder, softer me. I believe in something called ‘reflective’ art which only appears as a reflection from something else. Perhaps that’s what a relationship is, an enjoyable reflection of yourself. I wanted her to be there. We said we would meet at the main gate, but I didn’t know which one that was. But I finally found it and sat down a little exhausted. It was a leafy entrance. For a Volkspark it seemed quite aristocratic. I could hear fountains and a pool in the background and see a wide white cobblestone walkway into the park. I’d just sat down and she appeared like a dark apparition.

X

Haha. So it begins huh?

Y

And so it begins. I didn’t recognise her. She looks like she had slid off the pages of French Vogue. No piece of clothing was especially noteworthy but the way it was all put together: with such Modernist precision, that it chilled your bones. A dark jacket that was cut for her by some Milanese master, and a deep purple jumper underneath. No bra. Her chest, skin, a gorgeous golden in the tree dappled sun. Hair loose this time, flowing behind her and around her, a majestic veil about her doll like face. Aviator glasses took away her eyes and what remained was someone I had never met. Her small leather boots clicked on the cobblestones. As she pushed her black bike over to me, I fell into a deep disappointment. She had come dressed to be unattainable.

X

Uh. Wow. Did you feel weak?

Y

No. I now know Disappointment as an irritating neighbour. I’ve learnt to handle her. Even take some wry enjoyment out of her. Sometimes she does some funny shit. But the first thing Anja says to me and my cycling-battered fruit is “I’m so tired. Me and my boyfriend went out with friends last night, and I drank too much.” I said, “I told you not to drink” trying to wring some power out of this heavy stone I’d been given. She ignores that and continues, “And then he wouldn’t go to sleep and kept on walking about all night.”

X

Ouch. How efficient of her.

Y

Then she gets cruel. “I’m so sorry, but I also don’t have much time.” I’m thinking, well why the fuck did you come? Traumatised, I decide I won’t even sit close to her. But I need to show my photos. I need to show my work. And it’s a nice day and we have fruit and cheese. I want to see what happens. I decide to not react at all. And that’s not difficult actually. I didn’t feel shocked by what she was saying, I’d expected anything, and this experience was another to add to my tattered bag. When you can get benefit from the good and the bad, life becomes far more manageable, far less stressful, and far more engaging.

X

Stop the bullshit, I feel for you man.

Y

No seriously. I knew that nothing could have really happened from this. Even if it did it, it couldn’t continue. And even if it did, it wouldn’t have been ultimately all that valuable to me. I need to do my own work. She’s not going to take my pictures for me, no matter how eloquent she is on the Bauhaus.

X

It must have been disappointing on a dick level though.

Y

Dick level? You mean on the level of being a dick?

X

No, I mean just intimately, sexually, the penis urge etc.

Y

I didn’t see her as a sexual thing. That was too far away. Except she did have a really nice ass. I saw that sexually. Both me and her ass were disappointed by the turn of events. So, we’re both surprised that we aren’t super uncomfortable and we find a place underneath some shade. We lay out our picnic and it looks good. She has bought some good semi-hard cheeses.

X

The same hardness as …

Y

Oh, come on!

X

You know she fucked you over of course.

Y

Yup.

X

She could’ve easily told you at the museum that she had a boyfriend. She could have not touched you and flirted with you, and done a million of those little things she did.

Y

Yup.

X

By not saying anything she lied to you. Why?

Y

I really don’t know. She said her life was “boring.” But then I asked her if she wasn’t enjoying it, and she contradicted herself by saying that, no, she was just cruising and it wasn’t so bad. That she was always trying new things out to see what she could do but she hadn’t found that thing yet. She knew she didn’t want to do architecture because she was always attracted to the smaller things, the things inside and around the architecture. She has a cool idea for a product design that I can’t tell you about. She’s working on that.

X

Are you avoiding the question?

Y

No. I guess I got a little off track. I asked her about her boyfriend, and he’s putting together a fashion fair. That’s all I needed to hear about him. I think she’s very lonely. And loneliness makes everyone an adventurer. I think she saw me as an adventure and got carried away between 1922 and 1928 in the evolution of the Bauhaus. And then she went home, saw what she had with her boyfriend, saw that life was a liveable thing. Slept next to him, and told him that she had met me and given me her number to create or feed a pool of jealousy that she is filling.

X

Did she tell you that she told him?

Y

Yeah, she did. But, I think she liked me. Her movements, her touches were so natural, with so much ease behind them. But overnight, she realised that that wasn’t possible, and that she didn’t want that, and she had to work with what she had.

X

Do you think she even thought that way? That there was something more really happening between you two than a day in a museum and a day in the park?

Y

Well I told her I was going to Paris that day. She knew that there were no traps, strings, pulleys, ropes or cages. It must have still been hard to come if she thought what I think she thought. Or maybe she had come to hurt me. Maybe she knew that she would be doing me a favour by hurting me. Maybe she was just being nice to me, and that I’d like it, and be able to use the pain. But there were the photos too. I hope that she really did want to see the photos. But most people make such bad art that being shown something by someone is the most painful chore on earth, so I don’t know. Maybe she just didn’t like the way I looked outside of a museum. People just get carried away sometimes.

X

By you?

Y

By things which are different. And I’m becoming very different to everyone else. And I can feel how people deal with me. I like it.

X

So did you actually get to show her your photos?

Y

She loved them. She was very impressed. She saw that I was going to be big. She saw that I was not just a talker but that I work too. She softened towards me. We started looking into each other more. I got excited talking about my work and I said things intensely. She spoke about the work a little, but I don’t think I really gave her the chance. I have my spiels for the work down so flawlessly now that I close off interpretation for others. Well, maybe I don’t close of interpretation, but I think I close off their desire to express it. I think she could have said more but didn’t get a chance, or didn’t give herself a chance. I was pleased that she liked them but I knew she would.

X

What did she say about herself?

Y

Not much more than I’ve already told you. She’s still looking. I think that she really is bored. And her boyfriend’s never there. They’ve been together for 4 years. She’s being a coward. It’s time for her to move on. If I was in Berlin, I’d do that for her.

X

You’re so arrogant sometimes!

Y

Or maybe not, because she had come so prepared. I felt a little antagonistic towards her. Only a little. I saw some imperfections in her. She didn’t seem as in control as she did in the museum, as confident. At the exhibition she was the queen of her realm. I was really attracted to that. She’s polish.

X

So?

Y

Nothing, it’s just a fact. Well, don’t Polish women get larger later? The whole East European gene?

You suck.

Y

I still loved her eyes. But the softness in them, the luminescence only came back a couple of times. She purposely covered it up and that made her a little hard. Not always, but certainly in the beginning. Maybe in the end as well. She said she felt bad that she had to go. That she wanted to hang out in the park, in the sun, and talk. I didn’t mind that she had to go. I’d said what I wanted to say and now I wanted to think about what had happened. I wanted to be a little sad about everything. She said that we should keep in touch. I said she should grow some balls and travel. That she should come to Australia. I had to explain that balls were testicles. And in Australia men talked like that to each other and how theatrical, how entertaining it all was.

X

What did she say?

Y

She said she wanted to. But, inside she didn’t really want to. Or her internal dialogue is that she couldn’t possibly afford it, she could, or she had too much going on here, she didn’t.

X

She’s still coming to grips with what she can do.

Y

Yeah, she’s making the first steps. I’m worried about her though. She’s too pretty, too stylish, as I was saying she wants to fit in too much. Maybe she wants the simple kinds of happiness too much. And I wonder if life gives itself too easily to her. Not real life, but the go out to cool parties, meet ‘interesting’ people, be gawked at by guys kind of life. When I initially told her about my WORK tattoo she was horrified. She said, “how about happiness?” Things get a lot harder from her age on. I think she’s realising that deeply. That’s just what I think. Maybe she has it all under control. I’m always looking for girls with problems I can solve. I lose interest after they’ve solved them.

X

You’re like a knight in brown armour.

Y

Yeah, thanks you racist fuck. Anyway, I took a couple of photos of her. She got up, and I said I wanted to take some photos. Ever since I went to the Helmut Newton gallery and saw how he dealt with a model I’ve wanted to try it. And she was there. I took a photo with my phone from the back of her hair which says everything about that day. And then I turned her around and minutely controlled everything about her. She initially really didn’t want her photo taken but as I gave her more commands she realised that the choices were so deeply mine that the photo, and her representation in the photo would be my doing, my thing. And that she isn’t the one who will be judged but it would be me. I really wanted a shot of her nails. The second picture didn’t come out well. We kissed on the cheek. She got on her bike, and without once looking back she rode away fast.

Sunset?

Y

No, the harsh glare of the midday sun. I felt like she was going to come back. I didn’t want her to, but it felt like she was. I sat down, put my headphones on and felt so deeply lonely, so helpless in the throes of sadness. I tried to cry but I couldn’t get there. I stayed in the park for an hour. I felt happy of course. I felt glad to be going through it and that it’d make something in the end. Throughout the whole thing she refused to acknowledge that anything romantic had happened between us besides the obvious fact that we were a boy and girl who had planned to meet today and enjoyed talking to each other. Of course she wouldn’t tell me what she was thinking about all that, she couldn’t considering her circumstances. But it felt like she didn’t feel anything at all. She is a good German. I don’t miss her.

X

Here, have a joint, you serious fuck.

This story is a pastiche of my fevered loneliness. It’s all lies. Paris.


Posted 2 years ago

Essay - On the Narrative Power of Detail in Faces

What is new about me as a street photographer is that I am getting closer to another human being on the streets than anyone ever has with a camera. There are some reasons why I’m doing that.

One is because by getting closer you feel more. Your senses perceive more from being closer. And feeling is a key part of understanding. Two, is that by using a short lens and using depth of field as a hint, I can show heads which look three dimensional. Like something real instead of something flat (flatness being the essence of a photo that I wish to resist in this case). A third reason, is less idealistic. I want to do something that will be hard for anyone else to do. A white person, with the visual sophistication required, couldn’t get as close to Bangladeshis as I’m able to with the colour of my skin. And a Bengali (with some notable exceptions) doesn’t have the visual sophistication. In Bangladesh the photo training is woeful, but worse, there are no books and resources here, and even worse, there isn’t a culture of intellectual visual innovation (mirroring the rote learning taught in schools). So, the third reason is competition.

But in the Architecture of the Human Face, a fourth very simple reason is the most important, detail. Looking at a close-in of the first photo allows the stories of this man’s face to flourish. You notice the number of times he has fixed his glasses with his pins. How did he break them? How poor is he that he has to do this to such a cheap pair of glasses. Looking at the glass, how can he see through such cloudiness? Was he blind? And there are aesthetic stories. Looking at the colour of the frame, at the patterns etched on the glass. And then larger issues develop out of the detail. Looking at his nose and the chunks that have been taken out of it through age. Is that what will happen to me? There are more stories. Both in number but also in extrapolation and in the differences between the people who will be looking at the photos. Perhaps for someone this picture reminds them of their father. Or the gasping mouth a reference to the moment of death. I don’t know. What I do know is that I have to show as much of the detail as clearly as I can so that people can start telling stories from the pictures.

There is yet another advantage to the detail. It’s attractive. It’s interesting in an aesthetic sense. The first job of art is to make you look at it. Seeing these faces like this, lit like this, coloured like this should draw you in. When printed larger and with care it will be even more attractive. All of the deeper meaning will only be accepted if you can attract (or at least interest) the audience.

So, detail is important to me for various reasons; so that I can feel more and understand, so that I can hint at three dimensions, so that my art is new and hard for others to replicate, and lastly and most importantly to create a density of narrative, to have enough detail to tell the vast stories of age and difference and destruction, and emotions that I want to tell.


Posted 2 years ago

Essay - The Impossibility of Becoming in Berlin

Earnest

If you do not come from Berlin, it will take you fair amount of time, and a fair amount of your will to resist Berlin. I mean, to avoid its Sirens of a good time, of good things, and good people. This is a great place to be, but not to become in because it is just too joyfully, too overwhelmingly distracting. Too seductively alien. This would be a place where you’d need to invest time into settling. Learning the language, making friends, building a network for your art, finding out what art you could make here etc.

Hipster

What do you mean ‘become’, I don’t even know what you’re talking about.

Earnest

Well, to become something. An artist, or musician, or taxidermist. To start out in and learn the skills to do what you need to do.

Hipster

Well then. You’re totally wrong.

Earnest

Oh yeah?

Hipster

For so many reasons that I can’t even order them in my head properly. One, let’s talk about being an artist. It isn’t just about technique in the hands and in the head. It isn’t all just mechanical. It’s about who you are and what you’ve seen and the way you interpret that world and then express that interpretation. Being somewhere like Berlin, where the best of what’s being made is collected, in great bookshops, libraries, galleries, in good internet access is crucial. But even more important is the ‘scene.’ The shitty party scene, or the art scene, but the scene made up of 5 or 10 other life changing people that you are going to meet, be around, compete with, antagonise, help, be helped by, learn and teach to. This place is a fly trap for intelligence, beauty, and sophistication. Just being here is going to fundamentally improve your aesthetics. You will become a better person.

Earnest

But what you see as advantage can also be seen as disadvantages. There are many artists who worked at a distance from the cultural centres. Some of them were the most original and had the unique beauty of Galapagos flowers. Is a library going to make your sculpture? Is minimal techno going to make your painting? Is that cute girl you’re seeing that you met at 10am at a club going to write your novel for you? Maybe all these things will help, but they have the potential to hurt. To take you away from the lonely, hard, rejection filled process of making art. You don’t actually need much to make art. And constraints are like candy to a good artist. Art comes from these constraints.

Hipstser

I see what you mean, but I still contend that Berlin is good for some. Let me be narrower then. Berlin is great when you are starting out. When you need to learn the history of what you make, when you find out how an artist lives, and live that lifestyle (and learn to survive on kebabs), it’s also important to kick you up the rear if you need it. When you start seeing all of the galleries full of art (you only have an inkling at that point how truly bad and not new or original all that art is) you come to a fork in your life. Are you going to play hard or are you going to go away and play something else.

Earnest

I can agree with that. I think you have to come here, spend some time, soak it up, and even, shock, horror, enjoy the aesthetics, the environment, but then when you need to make you need to get out of here and be either somewhere quiet if you make the plastic arts, or somewhere loud if you make photography.

Hipster

I do still think that there are real advantages to having to adjust to life here. Learn a new language, see a subtly different kind of life, be ‘central.’

Earnest

I know that all sounds very sensible, but it does also come down to your individual case. I can’t work here. I’m not excited by what I’m seeing, and I don’t feel like pointing things out, and by that I mean, taking a photograph. For me all of the other great things about Berlin are actually a cancerous growth, slowly taking over the healthy, productive aspects of my art.

Hipster

Right. Of course it’s different depending on the work you’re doing.

Earnest

It is also a question of degrees. All those are good things, but you have to ask how good. So much of that stuff is about consumption. And consumption is the lazy way out. You avoid the hard work of making or doing something yourself. You get the end product and there is a modicum of skill in knowing how to enjoy and use that product but you don’t get as much out of that, you don’t learn as much as you would if you had to make that thing from scratch and make all the mistakes and success and the deep understanding of the problem that comes along with that process.

Hipster

But you aren’t going to just go and make some minimal techno are you? You’re not going to put that into a railyard club.

Earnest

But minimal techno isn’t my art. It’s nice. It makes me happy. It may even effect my art. But the point is that the affect is too low for the investment of time that I’d have to make. The investment is too low in comparison to me clicking the shutter release in the Congo.

Hipster

I can see that. But life isn’t just about working.

Earnest

Yes. For me it is. It is what makes me happy in the long run. That important happiness that comes from taking stock of your life. I want to come to places like Berlin for the fun of it. To get a quick taste of what is considered normal now, but in the end I have to go beyond in.

Hipster

But here’s my point number two, you need to survive. And a key drive for an artist is to have your work shown right? To have people see it and react to it. You can’t get that out in the Australian outback.

Earnest

Now, here you’ve found a conflict in me. I think that a really good, original artist has no need to for an audience. Or if he does, he is happy with an audience of one, himself. I think most great art has come from the depths of the individual to please and allay himself and his complexities, his urges, his failings. Now it is true that we need to live. But do you need to live from your art? It doesn’t take much money to live. And, as a photographer you are decidedly reality based, isn’t it interesting to have jobs and be in places where you see a different reality to the artist that is supported by a gallery.

Hipster

That’s all important, but you want to be seen right? Let’s go further, you want to be remembered by millions!

Earnest

We humans are such a failed, fallen species. And artists are the most fallen of all, the weakest in dealing with their desires and wants. Of course I want to be in the biggest gallery in New York, and earn enough to live just decently. And for that reason to I think you have to come to a place like Berlin. But really Berlin is a kids playground, you may learn here, but you don’t trade. The places to go to sell yourself is New York, and London, and Paris, and Koln. And make no mistake you have to go there and you have to be there for a little but, there is no jet setting in as a new artist and having it all happen, no matter how good your work. You have to settle and make some friends, and go to the galleries, the openings, and make opportunities to show your work. The magazines I think are very important because they are seen my the most people. Sending emails is the creation of the devil. It is a supremely ‘low-touch’ method of selling and doesn’t work well. It’s as easy to delete an email as it is to sneeze. You’ve got to turn up at their doorstep and beg with your eyes for them to see your photos. Of course once they see your photos it’s a done deal. And yes I want my opening with people spilling out into the street.

Hipster

But this is where the conflict comes in again right? Is that where important art comes from? Hipsters like me in galleries?

Earnest

No. But it is important indirectly. An artist needs hope more than nearly anything else. Not constant, ever lasting hope, just enough to get him to the next work. Like gas stations and petrol. You can be out there in the middle of nowhere working your butt off but you really don’t know whether you are producing something great. You have inklings, but you’re not sure. Being in a place like this allows you to test that.

Hipster

But perhaps the test is a poor one?

Earnest

Yes you could be right. There aren’t that many people here who have really studied, and who’s heart really feels what art is for. That it must be new, and not just competent. Or even a lack of people that believe that art needs competence! But there are those people, and you can find them here. But the thing to know is that as humans you are essentially finite in your memory and your time. You don’t need a hundred of these people. You need some good ones that you like, and want to be around and can trust. Those people live in other places to, and although their numbers may not be as high, they are more ‘earnest.’

Hipster

So are you going to get out of here?

Earnest

Soon, soon. I need to get a tatoo. And there is an amazing exhibition of the Flemish masters that I want to see. But after that and Paris I need to get back to harsh realities of life at its basic. Go to North Africa for a bit and then go home to Australia, and figure out what home means. New York will have to wait, as much as that hurts to say. I will need to show, but I will try doing that through magazines and shows in Sydney (where people will actually turn up) and Melbourne. After that I’ll make an attack on New York. God it hurts to say that. I feel like just going there now with what I have and making it big, but realistically I need to do more work. Work.

Hipster

Here, have a joint you serious motherfucker.


Posted 2 years ago

Essay - A Run-of-the-Mill Guide To Breakups

I wanted to write up some notes and procedures on how to break up a relationship. I’ve been through my fair share recently, and I think I can provide a thoroughly imaginative, yet mundane, step by step guide.

Make it dramatic!

Really you don’t get that many goes, and rarely do you get such a willing participant in a drama. Start failing your arms about, undo your pants, throw it at them. Make sure you pick a public place for this spectacle. It’s best if your (and her) friends are around. A party is perfect. But if you are going to do it at a party make sure you do it early whilst everybody can still remember shit (but not when they’re totally sober, they may try to stop you), and give them time to discuss it for the rest of the party. Be careful to not veer into melodrama, you want people to be really scared that they are in this awkward situation with you two. Don’t give them the chance to distance themselves.

Bring up the past, in spades

If you are any good, you’re already carrying around notes of past transgressions that the other party has made and this is a great time to get them out. Dredge deep into apparently insignificant slights that person has caused you. The smaller, the better. Smaller things are more psychologically suggestive. Really wallow in all the wrongs. It’s good to bring up some of the happy memories as well, only so that you can throw them into question. For example ‘Oh yeah I did come 4 times that time, but I was thinking about my 3rd grade teacher, so who knows really if you’re any good in bed?’

Lie

It’s best if you throw in some outright lies, so that the other person becomes utterly maniacal and starts bringing up all your faults. This is what you’re working towards. Now with both of you taunting and insulting each other you can climb the glorious spiral of vitriol to a heavenly individual implosion.

Total war, take no prisoners

What will hurt most is the lack of a future. Bring up all the fun things that you were going to do, those fantastical plans that bound you two together. Say how you’ll have to find someone else to do those things with now. Again, if you’ve been following my past guides, you’ve already created an arch-nemesis for your partner amongst your friends. Some girl who makes her insecure. Bring her up. Show evidence that you’ve been going to her for emotional support during this difficult period.

Feign sadness

I know this is going to be a hard one to follow. But you have to make sure the other person is emotionally engaged. The best is if you can actually make yourself sad. The insults and barbs will be sharper and dig deeper that way, both for you and the other person. Tears help, but physical acting is the best. Throw yourself around a little. A bit of James Dean will not hurt your cause. Touch your face a lot.

End it abruptly

A really good break-up never ends. There’s always something else to say. Make sure you pre-emptively end the initial fight so that the other person feels zipped, that they didn’t get to say what they wanted to say. Let things fester. Leave things unsaid and without closure. Trust me, you’ll thank me in the long run.

Flirt at the same time

This is an advanced manoeuvre but one that is certain to get results. Whilst breaking up, try looking at some hot girls. Or even better express new found interest in the same sex. Again a party is perfect, but fashion shoots, Kookai, or the beach are also excellent places to put this technique into action. For example, ‘And who gets to keep the fridge? <Whistle> Whoa, take a look at her. I feel so free right now!’. Be physically prepared for an attack, as 40% of the time your partner will try to knock you in the head with something. Just beautiful!

Make random, unwanted contact

After the initial break up, the thing to do is to be totally random. Contact at odd times. Leave long periods where they hear nothing from you. But always end up making contact. If you’re starting out pretend to be wasted in your initial contacts. Send poetry (if you’ve never done), used condoms (not a real ones of course! That’s gross. Use diluted glue), mail love letters pretending as if you’d never broken up in the first place. Turn up at some family gatherings at your ex’s with two longnecks of Fosters. I can’t imagine anything more worthwhile you could be doing with your life, post breakup.


Posted 2 years ago

Essay - What’s Next? Hint: Don’t Know

I don’t know what’s next. Not knowing, that gnawing ambiguity, is what I’m slowly, very slowly, coming to like. Soon, I’ll love it. A friend sent me an email the other day saying she loved the night work, but wondered how effective I’ll be in Europe. Rightly, her concern was that the light will be different, the photos less ‘archaic.’ I’m worried about that too. It may be more anodyne, less interesting, less action, just less.

I did quite a bit of work in Sydney, and by the end I needed to get out of there. It just wasn’t inspiring me to work anymore. I needed to see new things. I don’t feel like I’m done in Dhaka. There’s always something different here, something happening, something becoming. There’s a depth here that I couldn’t have imagined, even after 10,000 photos. Europe. I know all the non-shooting reasons that I’m going. But I can’t imagine what I’ll want to make a set out of.

But really I’m forgetting my own advice about creation—perhaps because it’s so unintuitive. The ideas will come from working, from the tiny little pieces of work. I have to get there and get into it. The work comes before the ideas do. Or start working, before you know what you’re working on.


Posted 2 years ago

Essay - On Dancing

Shooting on the streets is a blood sport. It’s an orchestral piece with highs and lows, of stillness, silence, then intense, sub-second movements. Often you’re stalking the streets, your prey, ready to catch it, aggressive. Or else you are dancing, languid, flowing in and out of the crowd, lightly, oily. Snapping without an eye on you. You feel the throb, the flow, the shifts in the heaving crowd. You sense where there’ll be an opening, where the interesting face is, where the fight is about to erupt. You don’t need to look. Your mind calculates how to get close, your body shifts the subject into the right light. You take the photo. You take another. You’re gone. The person is left wondering what happened. Or most often, they didn’t feel a thing, they’re wrapped up in some personal dream, some hidden, secret anguish, or some public drama.

But most of the time, it’s a slow, teeth-gritting grind. Moments, events, actions appear, happen and disappear. You’re watching a river of human activity, bubbling up from the the bottom, or rippling across the surface. You’re noticing. You’re predicting. What will come around that corner? Who’s behind you right now? Turn, snap. You’re constantly checking your settings. Adjusting as the light shifts, clouds, shade, colour, time, distance. You are constantly being. You’re choosing. Is that important. Is that the right configuration of reality. Can I frame that? Is that interesting enough. Should I wait? Should I go? It is a constant, unbending focus. You don’t stop. You try to but you can’t. You are a reactive machine, something happens, and you ask yourself how to react. You don’t. You react.

There is a permanent, overwhelming inquisitiveness. I wonder what’s down this alley? What’s behind this door? Is it unlocked? Who’s that? What’s she doing? A constant interrogation of your environment. You’re greedy. You want something interesting, a story, something visual. Most of the time it is just emotion, or intuition, you can’t name it. You react to a light, or a colour, or a face, or a girl, or a man in spiralling distress. You react because it’s you. Someone might not have chosen that exact thing to look at, inquire about. You find out about yourself every time you’re out there. You forcibly shut down your analytics, and let your eyes and muscles react. It works.

You’re not a bystander. You get pushed, prodded, picked on. What are you doing here, who are you, why do you want from me? Often they just ask with their eyes. You don’t have time to answer. You don’t have the answers. You’ve got to keep moving. You move. You get physical. You shoot mid-step. You shoot falling back. You shove yourself in between flying fists and take what you need. You need more room, and you swing over the railing to get it. Be quick, be decisive. Noticing someone falling over you start running, you have to be there for that. You have a camera, it’s important. You ask yourself if it really is important.

You forget who you are and what you want. It’s the happiest moment of your life. You shoot, you move on. Your eyes are relaxed, scanning, your finger tense. The camera is always there, it never says a thing. It knows you.


Posted 2 years ago

© Adnan Chowdhury 2011