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।