Untitled (Work  In Progress)

I have kept these images singularly archived as individual pieces of interest. Photographs that I picked out from a negative with the rest of its narrative. These stood out as needles piercing through my memory.

I struggled to find words to describe these. Talking to friends and colleagues about what I was doing did not allow me to get into specific terms - not that I could. Instead, I was limited by my patchy knowledge of language and my capacity to verbally describe something.

I found myself repeating the same phrase: “They don’t look real”.

What doesn’t look real? Is it the photograph, is it the subject, is it the colour? What is it? It is easy to expect a banal photograph to be a truthful depiction and to question its reality is far from being the first thing someone dares to do. Could possibly refer to it as a Glitch - as David Campany mentions - a break in a flux. Roughly a break in expectations. As if for a moment you catch a glimpse of the roots of the tree that fell in that empty forest.

I think of it as a deception of reality and the expectations that come with it. The photograph I am looking at does not change the photographs I continue to see before or after it or make me reconsider seeing, for that matter. But it does make me question myself, question what I know and what could I be expecting by just gazing a bit longer, gazing curiously, gazing involuntarily.

You cannot successfully explain a term that your grandparents used to say in your small village. But you can give a sense of it to someone - after a long, unnecessary, excruciating explanation. How can anyone but you remember how your grandmother used to pick up the flowers, peel the potatoes and flick through pages?

There is no fair way to grasp what you are looking at. It is an amplified photograph. It is in a way what makes a photograph itself.

Perhaps this is about loss, about thoughts and encounters. About hunting, finding, rummaging and discarding. Maybe it touches on longing and yearning. But there is more to consider. There is something else in these. Not all of them will have the same effect on everyone - that is simply true.

But they all act in a self-referencing way.

You are looking at photographs