The driving affect of the photograph is magical Roland Barthes
http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/urban-encounters-rethinking-landscape-symposium-audio-recordings#open242764
The keynote for this photography symposium was by Czech photographer Markéta Luskacová.
I listened to it as a podcast whilst driving through the dark Welsh lanes on Friday night.
What I loved was the moment when she started showing images, and went quite quiet, and then recollected and described fragments of the images (unseen to me) in her thick Czech accent. She describes people in urban streets, and her relationships to them, being an outsider, working as a mother, small observations. There was an intimacy in her approach, and in the moment of hearing it, alone in a car travelling through dark single width lanes, headlights illuminating wet leaves and hedge banks.
It made me think of “Photos not taken” Will Steacy’s imageless collection of descriptions of images.
I thought of using this section as part of a film. A readymade voice over for a new collection of images, or for a dark film.
Another way of using text perhaps. I’ve tried finding Anne Carson reading her poem Automat but so far can’t, so I have made a clip, Girl De Luxe using her poem as rolling text over a close handheld pan up and down of the Silk Dress Coming (Ann Rhoney) postcard instead. It’s rough, but I shot it in the desert dust light that came over London a couple of weeks ago, and it has a glow that works with the dress.
