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?