why not....

The following post represent a beginning for myself in terms of a series of images around the sytock of images i have gathered over the course of six years. The images derive from the photograph print or negative. I place the image in the centre of the frame and then expand the edges of the image into the surrounding frame. Along with these images i ahve also been painting over various images from media sources, magazines, newspapers, illustrated books. The intention began with a want to use the paint to isolate subjects in the image. However as i began using the acyrilic paint i realise that it was difficult to control the edges of the paint, so i unintentionally began to build up a layer over the image. This led to a expanding out of the edges of the frame, in a way the imagined edge of the images began to dominate the subject...


in effect an imagined representation is constructed from the seed of an indexically grounded image.. what does this mean, Im not too sure.. i think im trying to get back to the 'me' in the image. isolating and exploding the reality of the photographic....

i want mostly not to claim any identity as painter,
i can ignore any notion of photographer,
i just want to understand my own mind,
as best i can..

Reflection In A Shop Window

A Rocky OutCrop

Hands

after an extended break from the word of the photographic, and an absence from a certain graduation, i am beginning to come back to the work that i have left for the last six months. i have been working as an electrical apprentice, a job i could never have seen myself in, but desperate time, anyway its a good job, i work hard all day and come home tired in the evening.


i am though reinvigourated with a new found sense of purpose, a pupose that is resolved around the belief that the work i make from this point is work i create for myself about myself, no more half veiled refeerences to the social or the political, to the material or the emphereral.. work that is born out of lived experience that is only constructed as a means to understand that which is ini front of me..

anyway the work is kinda of shit, but my shit so not to worry, i intend to begin making a daily record of the image of m,y hands accompanied by a brief description of the moment of the images construction, the initention is not really important... recording the physical impact of everyday upon my hands...

also recently have had a friend of mine ask me for an image from the catalougue of buried negatives for a cover of an EP he is putting together, a good boost....

talk soon..
as soon as i get a day off

portrait of the artist as a young man...

economically challenged young man poses as artist in reflection

 of economically challenged piece of art...

early man flee's economic woe's and a small fire...

call me jimmy rabbit....or not that up to you really..

or not... not sure why im here any more.. the 80s have arrived..

welcome back to the 80's.. any one fancy starting a working class blues's band called "The Commitments", Jesus these long titles are killing me...

Government sponsored artist draws the dole

Yes it is word play

growing a beard for the rds

it does seem timely that as i continue to grow my beard the rds awards approach am i preparing for something, or is it that my dole hasn't come through yet and i can't afford razors,

just back from belfast today, which is good..

bought the guardian though, which is good

the woman in the internet cafe made me pay in advance,
im thinking it could be the beard, which is not so good

life without out a camera, not so good,

altough there was that blind photographer guy, he really couldn't have been very good at all.

at an end...

MAKE HAY WHILE THE SUN SHINES

strictly artists...

yes artists are elitist snobs, cant even go for a drink in your local bar and they are taking up the space..im only curious as to who they are expecting after 9pm??

missing presumed blue....

local artist opens show in trinity college, local college bans artist from use of trees for unspecified period of time, local artist uses local college to get pissed and decides what the hell, sure the rain forest is fucked anyway....

Tueaaaaasdays exhibition......

well were not all perfect.. we make mistakes.. but i finish college today, so all i can say is see you tueaaasday...

Critical(mass)Evaluation.....

Over the course of the last four years we set out to define ourselves as photographers, image makers or visual artists. Yet in certainty we can only say that we are photographers and as such we are defined by our use of the camera. It is with this position in mind that perhaps i can communicate something of my understanding of what it is to study photography and in my case to be a photographer who values ideas over execution. I began over five years ago now, pursuing a notion of what it was going to be to be a photographer. In the pursuit of this idea, I have been lead through many regions of understanding as to what it is to be a photographer, be it commercial, land art, reclaimed photographic imagery or any other use of the photographic medium. And I stand now looking back to these beginnings and i can say just this. 'So far i have come, but I still haven’t left.'

The beginning of understanding is rooted in our ability to refuse. With photography there is no margin of refusal, no space to breath. What I am getting to here is that as a photographer I learn to make photographs, and as such I am a photographer. Yet to go beyond this means a certain level of foresight to see the folly of representation. The inability to distinguish between many truths is human; the ability to fix a truth is photography. With this explanation of my position as a photographer, Maybe now we can go on to understand why the images I create are no more final or finished than the maker of them.

Your Invited...

Free Poster to download, please feel free to wallpaper your house, if thats want you want...
or just come on the 10th of July...

Unearthed negs.

Really think that this image is my favorite out of all i have seen so far. the repetition between the leaves in the foreground and the soil and residue in the top part of the neg. It is for me, one of the more evocative images in the set.

jpeg cloud...jpeg sea

Thomas Ruff, maybe, bad college scanners definitely. Possibly the most out of focus,
low resolution image I have ever had the pleasure of mistakingly making.


For more out of focus, pixelated images check out my "bogpegs" on

www.photographyshubris.blogspot.com

To Bury the Dead

I'm just back from the bog, went out early this morning to look around and find a few different places to bury the negatives. As i was doing my this is art, I'm creating here, returning to the mother nature bosom.. a big rat ran out in front of me, nearly shit my pants. It was really huge,could have been a cat.. Anyway dug a big hole in the ground, about 3 foot deep, technically no longer a hole but a trench, and threw about half the negatives in there. Dug another hole further away and threw the rest in that.

Was looking over the images last night, as i was cutting them into seperate pieces, and did feel a trepidation about destroying the images. This is important, that these things don't do anything but represent an attempt to represent the space and the memories, the threads that join me to this space and to my photography.

More importantly is the creation of something new, something that goes beyond me, releases me from the need to hold fast the image, the space. In this way i leave the final intervention to serendipity...apart from my act of burying the images, the result is unknown, the finished image will be unfinished... My hand is now out of this process...

Was thinking about how my burying these images comes back around to the initial thinking about the space and history. The discovery of the bog men in these space, as so beautifully evoked in the poetry of Seamus Heaney. I also wanted to share the origin of the title of "Unearth" and something that influenced my way through the last 5 months. In The Moveen Notebook, the second generation Irish-American poet Thomas Lynch, asks the simple question:

‘To bury the dead, must we first unearth them?’

Free Downloadable B&W Negatives

Download and print negatives from the comfort of your own home.

Ceci n'est pas un negative mais une photo d' negative..

Magritte, George, Magritte.

Stone-Henge

The Bog Moves...

This is a piece of video that I was working on in the early stages of this process. It was just an experiment with looking at the forms in the landscape, it ended up being too much about the beauty of the landscape and not enough about the idea of a searching.

Unearthed....Photographys Hubris....

Some examples of the final submission I hope to end with. The idea of burying the negative and then reclaiming it, is meant to work in different ways. Firstly as a means to interrupt the image so as to create an object that is changed and in a process of continual changing, Secondly to disrupt the photographs indexicality, to render it as a non photograph. To destroy in a way the photograph but rather than destroying it, transform it into a new object that mediates the fallibility and inadequacy of the pursuit I have involved myself in. To destroy the negative in this way is a means at which i can underplay the photographers desire to hold fast the real and fluctuating processes of both the landscape and the memories held there within.

"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley.

I'm torn

Negative Series

Mark Durden: Bouncers

"For this performance, 15 bouncers were hired to adopt and maintain a confrontational geometric configuration in the gallery for the duration of the opening night of the exhibition। Drawing upon the rhetoric of Minimalism, the piece is meant as an aggressive work, impolite in relation to the viewing public।"

www.newport.ac.uk

Unearth...Final images

Unearth

These images are the beginning of the possible edit of the upcoming book for the exhibition in June. These images of the backs of the family photos, along with the text describing the image, represent both a refusal to add to a collective memory (as constructed by photographic imagery) and a meditation on the distance between lived experience and the representations we make. in trying to unearth the memory of my father, the photographs i constructed revealed the inability of photography to reveal the individual.

The importance of these images is in their refusal to show, the refusal to add to collective memory. The importance of the realisation that his memories exist not are mere representational forms but as part my own experience and thus part of myself.

'A photograph passes for incontroveritible proof that agiven thing happened. The picture may distort: but there is always a presumption that something exists or did exist,'

Susan Sontag, On Photography



The possibility of truth?

More Shadows

Stephen Gill 'Series of Disappointments'

New work from Stephen Gill, around the proliferation of betting shops in the Borough of Hackney. The discarded slips 'were shaped by loss or defeat, then cast aside. these new forms perhaps now possess a state of mind, shaped by nervous tension and grief. After these images were made, little autopsies were performed on the papers to reveal the failed bets held within.' (stephengill.org)

The idea of obsolete objects being rephotographed and transformed interests me. It fits well with the work around the documentation left over from my father, it seemingly insignificance and at the same time the importance of trace and the human touch in these objects.

http://georgemcmanus.blogspot.com/2008/04/so-what-exactly-is-good-photograph.html

Notes from the Editing Process.

The following Images represent the beginnings of a book documenting the process of representing the death of my father. The book is intended as an additional piece alongside the images of the landscape. The book will primarily focus on the objects surrounding the link between my father and myself, old family images, condolence cards, the negatives i have shot over the last 5 years and other ephemera।

i dont know..

I just found this, who knows what it was, but it makes for an interesting abstract.

The of leanings of lunacy are never lucid..

Its dark outside...

I suppose it's just one of those things you have to do, photograph at night.. lights, agian found these recently, like the double negative.. movement, narrative, cinematic seeing.. i don't know but it is interesting in its own right..

So what exactly is a good photograph?

Sitting here today, asking myself, what the hell is a good photograph. Is it purely an aesthetic consideration or is a more emotional relationship with an image? Is good even the right term for describing an image, is effective, emotive or challenging better qualities for an image, or are they all bound up in what we believe a good images to be.

I don't think i can really answer a question such as this, since i'm not sure if i would know a good photograph if one was to run me off the run and reverse over me. I suppose obviously its a subjective thing, people have different tastes, culture baggage etc. etc. but what is it about an image that produces a effect people describe it in terms of being good or bad.

Is an images good quality to be found in its theme, its subject matter? Can we assume that a certain subject is bound to produce a good photograph, or a certain style or effect will produce the desired effect. Can a good photograph be something that raises issues and opens up a hot subject ie. migrants, multi-nationalism or is it not confined to the object we place in front of the lens. Is it how a photographs makes us see rather than what we see that creates a sense of a good photograph. If we are shown a new way of seeing, or a new vision are we to assume that this is then a good photograph.

Of course the idea of what a good photograph isn't fenced into the notion of the arts, a good photograph can be of a loved one, or an event one attended and evokes memories. A good photograph can be an accident of shutter releasing and over exposing a negative. A good photograph can be constructed entirely from component parts of multiple images.

i may not have slept in about 36 hours, so then this could be the incoherent ramblings of a very tired student of photography. But i just think the idea of a good photograph is unnecessary in terms of a photograph, not merely because of subjectivity but because a good photograph is as interesting, provoking and important as a bad photograph. In another way i suppose i'm saying that imagery can't and shouldn't be judged in terms of good or bad, like or dislike, but the relationships it paints, the connections it makes, between people.

Some Early Images from Grave-yards.

These are some images from about four years ago, had a bit of a fascination with grave-yards for quite a while. Interesting spaces to photograph. What caught me was the attempt to shoot the site in a tight, shallow focus approach. Similar to something of what i was attempting to do in the bog. Not at all crazy about these images, but just thought that it was an interesting point of reference to what i have been working through with the bog.

My Father.

These represent two of the only images i ever recorded of my father before his death. I think that showing them is important because this was my father, not the images of the landscape. His face is filled with memories for me, and i suppose i wanted to say with the work i was making that this is my father, who can no more can speak for himself, so i now speak of him.

Mapping the Mindscape

I created this map of the space of the bog of Allen as i was undertaking 'Casting Shadows'. At the time i was thinking about the notion of landscapes and mindscapes. Charting the inner pysche through a subjective reflection of the space i was photographing. The idea was initially why would some one want to create a space of the area of the bog, which was a shifting and changing landscape through the nature of it.

In producing it i was also thinking about an original inspiration for this piece, the fiction of Haruki Murakami. His book 'Hard boiled Wonderland, The end of the World' in which the narration is split between the protagonist and his inner reflection of his pysche. The book was produced along with a map the character produced of the inner reality he produced.

The map is rough, and not very well finished, but i think what i like is the imagined space it constructs, a space that is wholly unreal. I believe such an attempt to produce something such as this illustrates the want to fix and record truth. This map is untrue to reality but reflects an inner want to understand the space and record the processes of imagining it.

Doodle

Found this image on the internet, along with a video piece documenting its making. It was really surprising, when i first looked at it i was seeing patterns and shapes in the image, my brain was trying to understand it. Once i viewed the video i realised that the image was created by the frantic action of scribbling on a sheet of paper with a bic pen. Interesting for its very abstract form, and its almost everyday construction. Makes me wonder about people's doodles and maybe collecting some together.

Surrealist Seeing

Lee Miller's, Dead SS Guard in Canal.

I have alway been really interested in the photography of Lee Miller, since before i even began taking images myself. looking now back at those images, it interesting to see something of myself and my own work in the images she created during World War II.

The work i have been undertaking around the site of the boglands in Ireland (Casting Shadows), specifically the site where my father died, seems to connect in a way with my understanding of the images of Lee Miller. Ideas such a terrible beauty, the distance between the living and the dead, the inability for photography to seperate itself from aesthics and realism and reflect something of the forms of the everyday experience.

Thinking about the truths we assume and the truths we construct in order to better cope with everday life, i believe images suchs as Miller provide an interior reflection of the fallacy of photography and truth. Or even the notion of truth against fiction.

"And if there is art enough, a lie can enlighten as well as the truth"
Iris Murdoch

The Cave

Excerpt From Plato's Republic.

And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive some one saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision,what will be his reply? And you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass and requiring him to name them,--will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?

And suppose once more, that he is reluctantly dragged up a steep and rugged ascent, and held fast until he is forced into the presence of the sun himself, is he not likely to be pained and irritated? When he approaches the light his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able to see anything at all of what are now called realities.


He will require to grow accustomed to the sight of the upper world. And first he will see the shadows best, next the reflections of men and other objects in the water, and then the objects themselves; then he will gaze upon the light of the moon and the stars and the spangled heaven; and he will see the sky and the stars by night better than the sun or the light of the sun by day?