Isle Aux Morts 03

What a day! Finished printing last season’s photographs. All in all, there are about 130-140 eight by ten “work prints”. The time spent in the darkroom is a most interesting place to consider when doing work.


A portion of the time/space spent is within a tightly concentrated space, keeping track of seconds, minutes, time in, time out. Something quite interesting about this duration of time is that, while being intently conscious of seconds and minutes the mind looses track of “watch time”. The idea of loosing track of time by being fully immersed in its minutia is something I need to develop further, maybe video or sound (but that is for another blog).




Another part of this time/space, is where attention is a little more diffused, where something seen in a print in one of the baths stirs a thought, recalls another photograph. This is where the editing begins, and it is not always done in a very deliberate manner; it is simply a question of seeing the prints in the red light and submerged in liquid seems to make certain details, textures or compositions enter into a system of meanings that is absent in “perfect lighting”. It is probably a variation of the old design school trick of studying your compositions upside down in order to see if there are any problems.




Then there is the time/space of imagination. Ideas enter into a free association with the print in the tray. For an instant a multitude of cross-referencing images and sounds fill the imagination, it is the moment of possibility as such it is virtual.

Isle Aux Morts 02

I am presently trying to complete my printing from the 2008 shooting season. This is keeping me quite busy and I am not posting as often as I would like. This post will be mostly images. Writing does not always come easily, at times it is as if I am trying to say everything in one fell swoop; not taking the time to let the narrative unfold, let the idea come through in the words.

As this year’s printing draws to a close, I am starting to think more and more about what the edited suite of photographs will look like. This can serve two purposes; firstly, it encourages me to continue working and plugging away at the subject matter. Secondly, it will make this second season of shooting more efficient as I will hopefully have a quicker sense of what I am looking for as I arrive on a new site.



This second effect can be dangerous. An ever-present risk for an artist is the possibility of getting ahead of an idea. Thinking that one knows what one s looking for can lead to imposing meaning on a subject; effectively taking away the subjects voice in the process. This is something I am constantly struggling with what I am working with a more “documentary” approach.



Contemporary culture’s obsession with “the documentary” is rife with the conflict between “truth” and “opinion”. The concept of objectivity has been central to the discourse of the photographic image since its invention. It has shifted from total objectivity to total subjectivity with very few stops in between. Like in many things, the objective and the subjective are two poles with an infinite number of grey zones in-between. As surfaces they can even overlap as is described in “Mille Plateaux”, Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s landmark exploration of the schizophrenic impulse in contemporary society. But I digress.

The tension between giving voice to the subject and allowing one’s subjectivity to interact with it is often where all the interest lies in a work of art. A truly engaging piece of work will inevitably play the ideas off of each other and invite the viewer to add more levels of interpretation to the mix.

Isle Aux Morts 01

MAP

Isle Aux Morts translates to Isle of the Dead, which is appropriate as, when I photographed it the first time, I was greeted with a rather distinctive odour. A deceased whale, of a type I could not identify seeing as my skills at identifying carcasses are not very developed, had washed up in the small cove behind the plant.


Cars were arriving with loads of teenagers holding their noses, some even feigning retching actions. For a moment, I was wondering if I would be able to stay there and photograph all day. But there was good light (a rare find on the south coast), and I was determined to “experience the space”. Oddly enough, it only took 15 or 20 minutes to habituate to the odour. But I do think this first impression influenced my choices that day and on a subsequent day of shooting.

The plant itself is showing many years of neglect, it is falling apart at the seams and even dangerous to walk around. Again, I was struck by how these places are simply cast off once their initial utility has run its course. It is understandable that politics and some resentment is articulated in this neglect, but at the same time, the politicians and merchants do not usually live in these communities, which is obviously an important problem.

There were still signs of the activities performed at this site strewn about. A roll of green stickers marked “COD/MORUE” found its way into my camera bag, fish tags, disintegrating plastic fish vats, various bits of machinery; it all made the site look as if some small cataclysm happened here. There was an air of violence and it found its way into several of my photographs.