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