Friday 28 December 2018

HAFNY





























In good company in this quirky math-centric collection curated by HAFNY. Thanks to Jon Feinstein and Roula Seikaly.

‘I'm taken by Robin Cracknell’s alpha-numeric intervention that attempts to quantify a moment of adolescent reverie. Ali Kate Cherkis' composition of three identically dressed Hasidic Jewish girls also thrills me for capturing one of those fleeting moments when discrete elements magically align. And then there’s Paul Berger’s iconic chalkboard scribbles which, made in the analog 1970s, are an eerie premonition to today’s digital data quantifying world’.

Wednesday 19 December 2018

3 Years of Subtitle Poetry





























This project is now over. From January 2016 to December 2018, breaking down dialogue from films and manually typing out those fragments and collaging them together has been part of my daily routine. After 400 films, the project has reached its natural conclusion. I ended with the right movie.

Wednesday 12 December 2018

A Glass Partition































image: 'La Belle et La Bete' (Cocteau)
text fragments: 'Last Year at Marienbad' (Resnais)
combined algorithmically. print size approx 28 x 35 cms

Saturday 8 December 2018

Small Fires































image: 'Sleepless Night' (Jang Kun-jai)
text fragments: 'A Man and a Woman' (Claude Lelouch)
combined algorithmically. print size approx 25 x 20 cms

Friday 7 December 2018

God































image: 'Tengoku to Jigoku' (Kurosawa)
text fragments: 'Diary of a Country Priest' (Bresson)
combined algorithmically. print size approx 25 x 20 cms

Tuesday 4 December 2018

Tissues































image: 'Alps' (Yorgos Lanthimos)
text fragments: 'Nostalghia' (A. Tarkovsky)
combined algorithmically. print size approx 30 x 40 cms

Saturday 1 December 2018

A Glass Chamber






























image: 'Through a Glass, Darkly' (Ingmar Bergman)
text fragments: 'Nayak' (S. Shankar)
combined algorithmically. print size approx 30 x 40 cms

Friday 30 November 2018

the atmosphere of mystery


image: 'Turin Horse' (Bela Tarr)
text fragments: 'Voyage in Time' (Andrei Tarkovsky)
combined algorithmically. print size approx 25 x 30 cms

Thursday 29 November 2018

Then I wake ... and find you close.
































image: 'On Body and Soul' (Ildikó Enyedi)
text fragments: 'The Devil, Probably' (Robert Bresson)
combined algorithmically. print size approx 25 x 30 cms

Wednesday 28 November 2018

... your mother. All covered with dew.





























Stories of never-ending love.  Walt Disney / Takeshi Kitano. 12 x 16 inches.

Monday 26 November 2018

My pillow is soaked






























Bresson film still printed with Mizoguchi dialogue fragments. 11 x 14 inches.

Thursday 15 November 2018

Wednesday 17 October 2018

Der Greif



























Thank you again to Monica Allende and Der Greif for selecting this for Guest Room.

Saturday 13 October 2018

Pinked






































“(Medical photography) may be viewed from the artistic standpoint. Errors can be glossed over in artistic photography, but medical photography is objective, and the patients being photographed are authentic.” *

My introduction to pornography was finding a neat stack of Playboy magazines tucked in the back of a cupboard in a rarely-visited room my parents referred to simply as ‘the den’.  My mother was a nurse and, next to the Playboys, were her medical journals sharing the same shameful corner. I visited that room often; always careful to return the magazines to their exact places in their exact order. I wonder sometimes what effect that had on me; to gaze for hours at all those pictures of flesh; the glorious Ursula Andress floating naked on her back one moment and deformed bodies and suppurating wounds the next. In some way, desire and disgust became conjoined. I thought my secret was safe until one day my mother said rather obliquely, ‘Robin. Be careful what you see.’ The next day, the cupboard was empty. Years later, ironically, ‘the den’ became my darkroom and I kept my photographs in the same cupboard that had held such mysteries years before.

 “... every work of photographic art has its lurking objectifying inverse in the archives of the police... every proper portrait of ‘a man of genius’ made by a ‘man of genius’ has its counterpart in a mug shot ... every romantic landscape finds its deadly echo in the aerial view of a targeted terrain. And to the extent that modern sexuality has been invented and channeled by organized medicine, every eroticized view of the body bears a covert relation to the clinical depiction of anatomy”. **

The blurred boundaries between amateurish pornography and medical photography remain a fascination with me. The positioning of bodies, the harsh, flat lighting, the lazy cropping, the willful lack of composition or artistry, the sheer ‘just-get-it-on-film-ness’ of them! No pretensions to artistry. These are qualities that I admire and aspire to in my own work. I appreciate forensic photography for the same reasons. This is photography doing what it does best: documenting facts, recording events, creating visual evidence in a reliable, easily reproducible way. Truths in a world of lies. That promise still remains thrilling to me today, as thrilled as I was as a boy reaching beyond the Playboys to those journals of wounded, ruined flesh.

“The most common emotions in disorders of the skin were ... the need for love, anxiety, hostility, inferiority, ambivalence, guilt, ambition, and envy. All of these characteristics have a common source, namely fear of the loss of love and recognition”. *

My current project, ‘Pinked’, explores the murky connections between amateur pornography, medical and forensic photography. As a collector of these sorts of pictures, I’ve noticed that there is rarely a discernible difference between a ‘reader’s wives’ snapshot of a naked woman lying on the floor or a police photograph of a lifeless corpse. When cataloguing my archives, I often have to check whether the picture of a woman’s disembodied legs on a field of grass is forensic or porn. Close-ups of breasts against a shadowy curtain are identical whether stamped in blue ‘St. Mary’s Hospital’ or lurid pink ‘GIRLS’. What this says about ‘the male gaze’ ... I do not know. We all bring our own prejudices to these questions and I do not feel qualified to argue either philosophically or politically. My interest is only in gathering information; re-shooting, cropping, fashioning my ‘x’ from a found collection of ‘y’ and leaving others to find their own connections. Like my parents’ stacks of magazines, the naked body is an ambiguous hybrid of lust and pain, often hiding together in the dark interiors of cupboards and ourselves.


* 'Medical Photography: Documentation, Art, and the Expression of Human Emotions'. E. Arberer 2016.

** ‘The Traffic in Photographs’ Allan Sekula (1984)

Der Greif




























Very pleased to have new work selected for Der Greif by Monica Allende.

Wednesday 10 October 2018

Murakami

























'There was always something very close and delicate between us, you and me. It was there from the very beginning. But now it has been lost forever. That perfect meshing of the gears. That mythical something, has been destroyed. Because I destroyed it.' Murakami, 'The Wind-up Bird Chronicle'.

Wednesday 26 September 2018

Tuesday 25 September 2018

forensic (detail)






































finding the nexus: crime scene photographs, medical photographs, and 'glamour'.

Monday 17 September 2018

Sunday 16 September 2018

la petite mort






































the montagne noir, just emptiness.
approx 7 x 14 ins (test print). ink on perforated negative.

Wednesday 12 September 2018

La Sapienza






































Although this project ended last month with the book dummy, this thought-provoking film crept up on me and I had to document it -- one to keep for myself.

15 cms x 33.5 cms. typed on reverse of Victorian print illustration: 'Good and Bad Meat'

Friday 31 August 2018

Wednesday 29 August 2018

so long tenderness!



 

























Book dummy for 'so long tenderness!' 30 months work finally coming together ...

Monday 20 August 2018

CANADA






































never got over his wife's death  mixed materials, 22 cms x 27 cms

Sunday 19 August 2018

The Love/Sex Mirage



 Every reference to 'fuck' in Gaspar Noé's  'Love'. 
300 cms x 245 cms. Typed on 2 prints /ships/mirage

Friday 17 August 2018

untitled project 2016 - 2018


























This project began in January 2016 and has been part of my daily routine for over 30 months.
Approximately 400 scripts, 12,000+ pages of dialogue dissected, 140 finished 'pieces'.

Saturday 4 August 2018

jealousy / love / leave




























Every reference to loving or leaving in Garrel's 2013 film, La Jalousie.