I have updated the website with shiny new lightboxes and have uploaded some of the new photographs I took over the summer. In preparation for the printing work I have ahead of me (and the exhibition in April/May), I thought I should publish them in order to gain some distance, and to encounter them in some form.

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.

Today, I began the lengthy process of scanning the medium format negatives of the images I took with the Mamiya 645. In order to produce life-size images, I need to scan the negatives at 4,000 d.p.i., which, of course, requires top of the range equipment. The technicians at the GSA Photography department were very helpful and explained the process extremely clearly. The problem was that each image was going to be 340MB and would take 15 minutes to scan and over 10 to save on to my ever-loyal iPod! After a lovely morning lecture (Harry Benson) and an hour and a half in the library browsing books about writing theses, I wish I had been more prompt in going to the studio (so that is why they are open until 9pm Mon to Thu).

From 2 to 5, I managed to scan 5 images and re-read a few pages of Baudrillard’s Seduction. I also had to think carefully about which images to scan, since it is obvious I am not going to be able to work on all 130. That’s for the better, although, once I scanned the first one, I realised that the images did not operate similarly on the contact sheets as in the screen. Colours were duller and unfocused surfaces, were scary, and I was viewing them a fraction of the size I have in my head. That, of course, provoked the third re-think of the day and a further selection was made. I have about 30 on my list, which amounts to 6-7 days of work in the studio. My only relief is that, when I got home and tried opening them in Photoshop, it worked –with the caveat of having nothing else open, working on one image at a time, arming myself with all my rendering patience and saving constantly to avoid system crashes. At 340MB a pop and a 4 year old laptop computer with 1.33 GHz Power and 768MB RAM, I wasn’t counting my chickens.

After scanning and touching up (carefully annotating all my moves on a notebook, for data purposes, but also to be able to understand what I am doing), I will make some preliminary printouts. Something tells me I am going to be surprised at every step of the way and the quicker I get to understand how the end product will operate the better, as that will be what matters in the end, what will hopefully seduce the viewer by showing seduction. Tom was right. This definitely feels like an investigation.

Meret Oppenheim, Ma Gouvernante, 1936, Moderna Museet Collection, Sweden

Salvador Dali, Surrealist Object Functioning Symbolically, 1974, Teatre-Museu Dali

Elsa Schiaparelli, Shoe hat, (collaboration with Salvador Dal??), 1937-38, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Elsa Schiaparelli, Monkey Fur Shoes, 1938.

… from Susanna Hesselberg

… from Melanie Pullen

… from Sylvie Fleury

… from Pilar Albarracin

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.

What would I do without my peer groups? A very interesting discussion on that foto here, here and here. In Spanish though, and with bad language, as it should be…

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?