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