I’ve been thinking about Luigi Ghirri again. Christine sent me a video about him, seeing something in his work that would resonate with me, not knowing that I’d already noticed that affinity a couple years ago.
It was nice to have validation of my hubris.
Here’s what Ghirri had to say about photography: “Beyond all critical and intellectual explanations, beyond all negative aspects it might posses, photography is, I think, a formidable visual language tor fostering this desire for the infinite that inhabits each of us. As I have said before, it is a great adventure in the world of thinking and looking, a great magical toy that succeeds in miraculously bringing together our adult awareness and the fairy-tale world of childhood, a continuous journey in the great and the small, into variations, through the realm of illusions and appearances, in the labyrinthine and mirror-like place of the profusion and of simulations.” (The Open Work, 1984)
To miraculously reconcile the grownup with his inner child. I don’t think I’ve read a more generative definition of the photographic act.
I’ll try to remember that when I get annoyed with myself and question why I even bother.
‘Strange Food.’ Cornish BFA exhibit by @til.deathmyhandscreate.
One of the annual rituals that I’ve tried to stick to since moving to Seattle is visiting the @cornish_artdept graduation show; sometimes I make it, sometimes I don’t.
It started because @christine.bingham.art’s an alum and we lived in the neighborhood, but now that we’ve moved, and now that I find myself going by myself, I wonder why I still do it. Is it to take pretty pictures? To pretend like I have something to add to the conversation?
Pacing the space on 9th Avenue yesterday, I had the gallery almost to myself, save for the invigilators who kindly let me do my thing. I moved deliberately and had a lot of time to deliberate on that question. The answer that welled up in me had something to do with hope.
Hope in youth. Hope in that over-the-top rococo sort of fecundity. Hope in fearlessness.
Now, I have to stop and add that hope is not optimism. Hope with guarantees is no hope at all. No, hope only matters in the midst of hopelessness. When everything unravels, but we keep showing up anyway. That’s hope at the foot of the cross, with no resurrection in sight.
(Now that Cornish is part of SU, I might get away with a religious metaphor.)
It’s fair to say that I’ve been hoping against hope lately. And when I squeeze every frustration out of every space and project I’m involved in, I find only the arts left in my white-knuckled grip.
“I have turned my attention to an enormous quantity of subjects, not out of a desire to understand everything, but out of curiosity to understand everything that was possible for me. I might list the subjects that recur with greatest frequency, those that are a bit like a leitmotif in my work, just as I might list my ways of building the image – but instead I am more interested in stressing a constant in my work, what I might call an invariable.
I have always felt that photography is a language for seeing and not for transforming, hiding, or modifying reality. I allow its intrinsic magic to reveal to our gaze the spaces, objects, and landscapes I want to represent – confident that a gaze free of formal acrobatics, forms of coercion, or intensive efforts manages to find a balance between awareness and simplicity. And thus finding, within the geometry and fixity of the space of the dark-room, the sense of measure for a representation of the outside world.
This is no violence, or a visual-emotional shock, or a stretch, but silence, lightness, the rigor that enables you to enter into a relationship with things, objects and places.”
Luigi Ghirri, The Open Work (1984)
“How Things Stand.” Jed Judt @wormsinmycrocs at the @cornish_artdept BFA exhibit.
Eerie and altogether ooky, I was very drawn to the strong color palette here: the pinks and various glows of incandescent light, in multimedia assemblages that capture the claustrophobia of childhood.
Interstitiality. The loading and unloading space right next to 9th Avenue gallery.
“Little Maker.” Seher Taj @seher3i3 at the @cornish_artdept BFA exhibit.
A restrained but no less menacing examination of the inner child, I was struck by the strong forms and their sharp juxtaposition. I got up real close to that hook. The threaded details on the metal make me wince.