By now, you know I hate my birthday. I have always done so and every year, I go on a self-questioning journey, trying to find out why, to make amends. I have decided that this year will be different. I have a strange relationship to gifts, to presents, not letting myself be pampered and always wondering if I deserve it, if I will be required to give in the same way. I worry too much and I am not grateful enough. I love but don’t let myself be loved very well. This year, my birthday has reached its peak of spoiling-ness (no, it is not a real word but it will work).
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I had a retail impulse and went for the Nikon D40. A strange choice, as this camera was not in any of the shortlists, but, in hindsight, it makes sense. I do not want whatever piece of kit I buy for my photography work to end up like my video camera, having not seen the day of light for about 3 years now. And when I bought it, I went as top of the range I could. What for? SO, with the D40, I bought time to test my commitment to digital photography. It is the right machine for that, lightweight and entry level, so I have no excuses to take it out everywhere.
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The first realisation I had during my PhD was the fact that what I was looking for, the objects of seduction I longed for, were already out there. I did not need to spend unfruitful hours trying to re-create, imitate what industrialization, and capitalism had already achieved. To compete, in terms of seduction, what I had to devise was a way to capture the relationship, to apprehend what was going on, to replicate it in order to study it in depth. Photography was my discovery.
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The talk at MFIT went very well. I realised afterwards that this is the very first time I have talked about seduction without any of the padding that you usually have to put together for conferences, in order to fit into the overall theme. I confronted seduction in a public way for the first time, and it was fantastic. I was motivated, enlivened by the subject and its curious manifestations, by its contradictions, by the philosophies that try to study it.
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This looks exquisite:
Traumfrauen: Haus der Photographie in den Deichtorhallen, Hamburg 20.09.08 – 09.11.08
More information here, here and here (all in German). Traumfrauen… Dream women… Trauma
Images: Albert Watson, Breaunna Las Vegas Hilton, 2001 / Miles Aldridge, Homeworks, 2008 / Dan Martensen, “Looking out the window”, from “LowLuv”, Los Angeles, 2005 / Donna Trope, Mood 1, [...]
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A reflexive week, as if by last week’s post I was trying to draw attention to myself, or bend back my writing. My google alerts entry returned to me by the logical, but unexpected medium of… Google alerts and Drugs in Milk, who recommended me links, continuing this never-ending network of references. What did [...]
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The Sartorialist is one of the regular blogs I read/look at. To me Scott Schuman’s work is a real celebration of garments, objects, people and how they construct their identities. His work is astonishing. The close ups, people’s faces, the way they fill in, or not, the clothes they are wearing, their nationality, their beliefs [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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