I do not, of course, believe that photographing reflections in shop windows is a groundbreaking or truly original thing. My contribution to the genre, and to seduction, is a little more subtle and made of a number of elements combined. When extrapolating the images, however, and looking only at them in the context of art, it is quite useful to locate sources. I knew they were there but I could not identify them until Lorens showed me his wonderful Lee Friedlander book. There they were. Friedlander’s series in Like a one-eyed cat:

What was useful about unlocking this piece of my unconscious (the kind Lorens and I chatted about) was that not only the detail of the information was useful for my PhD – as it will inform the analysis of my practice –, it also revealed things about my photos that I hadn’t seen before. Friedlander’s images are often typified as self-portraits. In my photos, the body that appears on them is mine but I don’t relate to it. At least for now; we’ll see what happens in the gallery space. Thinking of them as kind of self-porttraits, of which all art has something, is interesting in relation to certain things on seduction and narcissism I have written about. For this, as well as for showing me the second volume of his thesis and, with it, a way into analysing images where screen and space are central, I have to thank him.

A wonderful moment at the Vicissitudes: Histories and destinies of Psychoanalysis conference’s French panel:

Stéphane le Mercier, artist:

9- …ce á quoi souvent il faut répondre:
«Que faites-vous dans la vie?
- Je reléve des chutes.»

9- … what I often have to answer:
«What do you do for a living?
-I pick up what has fallen down.»

Christine Anzieu-Premmereur, psychoanalyst:

Funny. You and me have the same job.

The analytic vignettes I listened to at the APCS conference were eye openers in relation to a problem I have encountering with my PhD. My sessions are going somewhere (where, I don’t know yet) and my clinical diary. for as long as I kept it, was a useful tool in relation to establishing parallels between artistic and analytic practices.

The trouble began when it was time to think about this endeavour as a public one and I had to conceive of what had gone on as a piece of writing. I did not know where to start. How could I write a PhD involving my own desire without doing written self analysis? How could I avoid replicating what had gone on in the sessions verbatim? How could I be fair to the process without including insights gained post facto? How could I avoid being too personal? How could I avoid being too irrelevant? How could I gain some distance without being objective? How could I keep subjectivity relevant? These and many, many more question I asked while my fingers froze on the keyboard; this has gone on weekly since September and what you are reading are the first words that are typed about it.

The plenary panel ‘Psychoanalysis Under Fire: Kleinian, Winnicottian, Lacanian and Relational Theory and Practice, Part II’ at the last APCS conference, chaired by Esther Rashkin (University of Utah) and comprised by Kate Briggs (University of West Georgia), Marilyn Charles (Austen Riggs Center), Karl Figlio (University of Essex), and Lynne Layton (Editor, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society) was very useful in relation to my blockage. All presenters spoke, during two 5 minutes interventions with question intervals, about a clinical encounter.

In the best Freudian fashion, I felt the genre of case history was alive, ever compelling and relevant. There were insights and thinking (despite Figlio’s concerns with thinking) but also theories, sources, process, engagement, and, often, change. This is not new, though. When Freud wrote Dora, or Ratman these different types of content were intermingled, and he would even tell you were and how. But I must be too used to reading Freud, or must think of Freud as not alive, as cristallised, in terms of writing.

The case histories at APCS made me realise what the structure for the case history is, and what I had been doing wrong when conceiving the writing of my own: all of those encounters, and all of Freud’s histories were the result of transference and counter-transference. That is, they were relational: analyst-analysand-[supervisor].

I realised that, although Dr Sh— met with me weekly in the analytic room, I left him there when writing the PhD thesis, and so I wrote him off the case history. But, if with my photographs I aim to provoke a particular encounter between viewer and artwork, the parallel was not to work in the thesis if I shunted what stands in in the place of the artwork. My analytic process had not been a self analysis and trying to write it as one just wouldn’t work. Perhaps I had been wishing for emotional, artistic and academic independence (we are, after all considering the end of analysis). Still, if I am to write a clinical vignette in the spirit of Dora and with the energy of what I heard at the APCS, the analyst and the artwork must be acknowledged and given voice within the writing.

Throughout the last 2 years, I have built a very extensive image database, collecting visual things I have encountered in a provisory way, as they may be able to help me make my argument in my thesis. In addition to this, I have also accumulated a number of images documenting my work and creative process. To this day, the archive contains 1106 images, 296 of which are mine, dating from 1998 to 2007. The archive is held on my computer, in folders and directories that are regularly backed up. This method, however, is wholly unsatisfactory to the visual researcher: it prevents me encountering my images by chance, stops the opening of memories lost.

To address this shortcoming, I turned to Apple’s iPhoto, a software package that comes with all Mac computers and claims to visually manage archives of images. As I was importing and organising the images, I decided to create a smart album where all the images that weren’t categorised in other folders would go. I did this in order to capture my work, by far the largest category. This meant I went through the process of importing, which took about one hour, without really seeing my images. So when I finished, this is the folder I first clicked on.

What I found took me by surprise, as the visual often does. In front of me was a roadmap of my thinking for the last 9 years, 2 of which belong to my intense PhD, 7 of which are part of the time leading up to it, with its mistakes, its changes of direction, its uncomfortableness. Seeing the process my practice had been through, its journey, was strangely revealing. Progress is not always evident in a research degree –particularly practice-led– but there it was, right in front of my eyes.

Taking photographs in New York’s Fifth Avenue is a completely different experience to taking them in Glasgow’s Argyle Arcade. I know, I know, this statement may seem obvious to any person familiar with both contexts, but in this global world of ours, where Guinness and Starbucks are ubiquitous, the statement is perhaps a little more profound than it seems on the surface.

For a photographer taking snaps of shops and practices of consumption, NYC is heaven. No one minds! I could be as conspicuous as I wanted and that took me by surprise. There is an air of having seen it all, of displays being photographed constantly by tourists, by anyone. In fact, I am almost sure that those displays are especially created to be photographed, taken, visually consumed. They don’t display things to be bought, rather they are enticements to look, and look more, and look again and look inside the shop. Only the Manolo Blahnik security guard got slightly uncomfortable by my constant snapping and ever more daring compositions (my breath left circles on the shop window).

Glasgow, on the other hand, is full of fear: fear of being taken advantage to, fear of losing property. I realised early on I had to ask permission when carrying the Mamiya around, with its presence and clackety-clack shutter sound. the fear manifested itself in the responses I got:
• We can’t let you photograph in the shop, but the street is public, I suppose
• We had a robbery a few moths back and we can’t allow photographs
• Photographing shops is not allowed –(is this legally true?)

This is what was told to me, but apart from that, I am sure there were thoughts around intellectual property, copying designs or shop displays, building a master plan where the shop configuration, where its structural weaknesses showed themselves. I was looked at as if Art and Research were my covers, even though I had all my GSA staff, SHU student credentials, an outline of my research, and was happy to negotiate. Getting shops in Glasgow was hard work, hence why of my bridal shop and Agent Provocateur photos are night shots. I must, however, give credit to Berry’s, from Argyle Arcade, who were not only incredibly helpful, but also told me they were honoured, as if the business I was carrying out was of great importance (which it is). Lucky for me, they had the best display ever, with a black background and incredibly good lighting, which has spawned really interesting images at least from what I can see in the contact sheets and first scans.

New York has seen it all. Glasgow protect all it has. This is no doubt in part due to the fact that Fifth Avenue and Argyle Arcade are not comparable in global or capitalist terms. If I overstepped the line, the Gucci, Louis Vuitton and Manolo Blahnik corporations, would have fallen on to me with their legal team angels as hard as a vengeance. In New York, I was dealing with anonymous people, standing in for a name of someone they haven’t even met. A part from the occasional busybody, they didn’t care. In Glasgow, however, people had interests, were active agents in the bond I was offering. NYC was easier, but Glasgow was more real and that, I think, is reflected in the screen that separated me from my objects of desire and seduction.

I have to train my eye, reader, train it to a new method of working. That way of working is a lot more technical and scientific than what I have been used to, with my little collages, my clay sculptures, my silly objects. Photography has its own way of being, especially if one is interested in a Fine Art photographic practice, rather than journalism, documentation, or plain photo chavving –you know, that mobile phone business. As a way of training these eyes of mine (the physical, the psychical), I am going to take, or at least carefully look at, a picture a day. Those, which will not necessarily constitute of relate to my artwork, will, of course be published online here, at least for the time being.

Hopefully it will inform my actual photographic practice.My new best friend for the summer is a beautiful Mamiya 645, a delight to touch. For this, an many other things that will slowly come up on these pages over the next months, I must warmly thank Vaughan Judge, for his time, his support, and his belief that my images may reveal seduction.

So far we have:

reflexivity and mystery and Object (a) and systems;
screens and layers and me and not-me;
the subject and the object and desire and the fetish;
use value and exchange value and surplus and commodification;
gaze and the fall of gaze and tripping and not quite seeing;
things and wanting to posess them and the impossible, the unattainable;
of course seduction and anxiety and womanhood and woman’s construction;
readings and interpretations and things that can’t be articulated and power;
roundness and innocence an the image and a smile;
the difference between art and design and windows everywhere and play, play;
flesh and need and survival and historical context;
status and objecthood and artefacts and what escapes me;
strategies and che vuoi and not recognizing myself or seing myself as other;
transformation and duality and masculinity and enjoyment;
whips and submission and his desire and the cure;
theatricality and fashion and victims and Frank Sinatra;
the hysteric and attraction and the devil and the Bible;
sexuality and definition and improper conduct and…

All this in just one image.

Funny, that. I just came back from my RF2 (PhD confirmation) presentation in Sheffield. It was very satisfactory, if only because some things were so surprising.I had all my psychoanalytic theory well tied together, even though the task of explaining Lacan’s Discourse of the Analyst in 3.5 minutes was not as easy as it may sound. The first set of questions following my presentation were very fair and valid. I expected them however. Marx, consumer culture, the roles of the seducer and seducee (active-passive). All was as expected apart from the fact that there were no questions about Lacan. There may have been two explanations for this: I may have been speaking pure Lacanese or everything may have made very good sense… But, as I was thinking this, the whole discussion changed. I must tell you that, in order to remind myself to talk about methodologies, I put a picture in my presentation. A picture where I am doing something, a picture I considered documentation more that output or outcome. After a fair amount of questions and discussion around this picture, the conclusion is –more or less– this: if I am capable of deciphering what goes on in that picture (what REALLY is going on), I may have cracked my PhD. I am puzzled. So near yet so far. I now have a mystery to resolve, a la Freud or Sherlock Holmes. I have evidence, I just have to decipher it. How do I do this? Well, my supervisors were, yet again, inspiring. “Relax” they told me, “yield, let things happen”. Have you hear of a tutor telling a student to relax? Yet, I know it is precisely what I need! To stop the rules, the stop the reading lists, the things well done, and to begin to create a methodology to trip myself up. Exciting, uh?

I am not sure what goes on in that picture. I am not even sure yet why it is so important but, suddenly, I can’t get it out of my head. I have to learn to read photos, now. For the last 2 years, I have only been reading Lacan. But Lacan, although an erudite, doesn’t quite know about my specific topic, does he? The photo knows. You may be asking, what the hell is that photo? Well, you have seen it in passing. Here it is again. Anyone up for having a go at deciphering?