The wind The Hill The protest

A camera made to blow with the wind, roll with the land and join a protest. Distilling phenomena to its essence - light.

I wrote the following after Sam’s passing: 

After Sam died 

So did part of I. 

Gone were the endless baleful days of youth 

Replaced by a wistful longing for moments passed. 

Photos are never in the present 

Latent light stealing your moment from a place, 

Captured memories lie dormant. 

Waiting for more time and attention to be brought back into the light of day 

Thinking about it; that maybe explains a lot 

Knowing the instability of things; 

Suddenly aware of the end. 

An entire discipline reliant on the past. 

When that’s too painful and the future too far to see, 

The moment is the only place to be free. 

It seems to explain to some extent why it was so difficult to pick up a camera and go out shooting after his death – I was stuck in the past where there was too much pain, the only positivity being in that which is yet to come… but how can you take photos of the future, or even, the now?... 

This motivated (over the course of my Masters) a much more conceptually grounded experimental undertone formed in elements of my more ‘extreme’ or abstract practice. I have investigated things that are there, but cannot necessarily be seen - certainly not on this temporal plane, or perspective of existence. I have tried to pursue a ‘camera beyond representation’ - a hunt for a ‘lens’ through which to see beyond, or beneath; experience as we know it. Stripping back preconception or quantification, a distilling of phenomena to their essence. 

For the final show, the final output was a series of three 60cm x 290cm images made with the ‘representation-less camera’. At face value, these could simply be read as abstract and dynamic expressions of movement, it might be easy to dismiss the final display as nothing more than concept. However, these final images are as much about the process as they are about what is being depicted. I constructed the camera by hand from materials found on my travels. I tried to put myself into the device for ‘capture’, whilst trying to remove myself from that which will be seen. How could I photograph something that can be felt but not observed? 

I made the camera from an old cylindrical oil tin I found on the street outside the hospital I had been living in, dotted with multiple pinholes to expose the film within. 

For the first panel ‘The Hill’ I rolled the tin down the hill outside the family home where I grew up - a view as familiar to me as any part of my body - yet here depicted as a constant flowing moment, something so ‘close to home’ that should be instantly recognisable stripped back in totality, 

The second panel utilised natural gusts for ‘The Wind’, effectively handing authorship to nature - an insight into its path, or pure energy if not its appearance is revealed. The movement of the tin is shown in the apparently abstract expressions on the panel. 

The final panel, ‘The Protest’, allowed authorship to be shared unknowingly by individuals who kicked the camera between anonymous protestors at a protest. The outcome is an image formed with no intention of representation, something that ‘just is’ - as a result of what has happened to it. There is no expectation of understanding beyond the context of the 

words (‘The Protest’) below the image - to frame the distilled experiences held above to an anthropocentric, comprehensible lens. 

The three different but strangely complementary images are a commentary on the quantum level. Staring up at all three phenomena presented before you, though differing frenetically, they are seemingly almost the same thing. Energy flowing from one image to the next, a recognition of the transience as well as the hidden simplicity of things. 

“Everything is light” - Nikola Tesla