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?

Intervention

"Abstract art isn't simply a lack of realism.
It's rather a heightened depiction of what the subject really is"
Curtis Verdun

tail-end