The Clocktower

The idea of the photograph created a new sacred language, 19th century hieroglyphics, each new image became more complex, more expressive, more beautifully nuanced than the last. With each image our range and grasp expanded, our ideas, our certainties, our capacity to contain and conceive ideas enlarged. Beneath the surface of our photographs fascinating new depths appeared,  new coded messages, born in a sophisticated understanding of our possibility to comprehend the real rendered in the abstract.

Photography’s great power is having never been the thing it pretended to be. Photography is no more than the result of the captured energy of reflected light,  it is not a mirror and is hardly a shadow. The image manipulates and distorts, relying on the construction of a fiction using the properties of physics and chemistry that we as a species have subverted. We learn then that these images are capable of a thousand shaded interpretations, a thousand gradations of meaning, we have come to understand where our capacity to encompass the scale of complexity starts and the place where our boundaries may be, the area where our frontiers are found. Our strongest photographs have become the stories we tell ourselves, our personal fictions, the equivalent of the ancient cave painting evoking the return of the herd, or the generations old song, the poems of our ancestors, constantly being told, re-told, re-worked, embellished, discarded, and re-discovered.

Simple gestures made in light, the probability of their occurring incalculable.