Postcards

Beaminster, 2009

As I sift through my old posts in search of thematic bronze, silver, and the occasional nugget of gold, I can't help but notice the large quantity of eye-catching but uncollected photographs scattered liberally throughout this blog. Given that I have generally added at least one, and quite often several photos to each post, there must be hundreds of pictures that I thought worthy of sharing at the time, but which have never made it into any more considered sequence or book. Quite often, these have been precisely the sort of acts of "creative noticing" that I most value in photography, with perhaps the only connection between them being that it was me who did the noticing.

One of my all-time favourite photo-books is Kodachrome, by Luigi Ghirri (originally published in 1978, but still available in its Mack reprint). I suppose the outstanding feature of Ghirri's work is the way he elevates the humble snapshot glimpsed and grabbed in passing into an art medium, partly by subtle sequencing and juxtaposition, but also by consistently pointing towards certain confluences of signification that can only exist in the sort of transient, visual samples from real life that the camera excels in capturing. In fact, he exemplifies that attitude towards art-making that photographer Todd Hido expressed in an interview: "As an artist I have always felt that my task is not to create meaning but to charge the air so that meaning can occur."

Inevitably, perhaps, I have now conceived the ambition to make my own "Kodachrome" out of these uncollected photographs. I did do something of the sort with a previous book, Boundary Elements, but that sequence sat within some fairly tight and artificial parameters of time, place, and format. I'm imagining this new project as a set of "postcards" from the whole range, temporal and geographic, of my photographic life. Its very randomness will, I hope, be its main virtue: charging the air so that meaning can occur, rather than me attempting to create and control any meaning. It's a subtle distinction, but a real one. The result could be a baggy monster, or it could be the best thing I've ever done. We'll see.

Winchester, 2011