Silence - so hot right now/ 'Cage against the machine'

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/12/cage-against-the-machine-silence-is-golden-and-going-gold.html

i like it.

WHY - because it looks like fun!

MAC/VAL directed by ARNO BANI
Uploaded by arnobani. - Watch original web videos.

Goethe

"There is a sensitive empiricism which makes itself most inwardly identical with the object and thereby becomes genuine theory".

Thoughts from 'A short history of Photography' by Walter Benjamin

Benjamin writes in this essay about, among other things, the early daguerrotypes taken by a man called Hill taken at the Edinburgh cemetery of Greyfriars.

"...this place could never have achieved its great effect had not its selection been for technical reasons. The lower sensitivity to light of the early plates made necessary a long exposure in the open. This, on the other hand, made it desirable to station the model as well as possible in a place where nothing stood in the way of a quiet exposure. "The synthesis of expression which was achieved through the long immobility of the subject", Orlik says of the early photographs, "is the chief reason besides their simplicity why these photographs, like well drawn or painted likeness, exercise a more penetrating, longer lasting effect on the observer than photographs taken more recently". The procedure itself caused the models to live, not out of the instant, but into it; during the long exposure they grew, as it were, into an image.

It struck me that a comparison could be made between this and the modern ability to make moving portraits via the medium of video. During what might be termed the long exposure of the video, the subject, simply looking at the lens could also be said to live into the instant, to grow into an image of themselves that is arguably difficult/impossible (?) to achieve in a single image. In my recent experiments with this, the synthesis of expression which Benjamin refers to was apparent and was, to me, one of the compelling aspects of it.

Postmodernism

‘I define postmodernism as incredulity towards metanarratives.’ - Lyotard

Graham Lester George

Photographer Graham Lester George has produced portraits of a group of people connected only by being in the same place. He set up a portable studio in a pub and focused entirely on their faces, inviting visitors to "focus exclusively on the subject's unique humanity." It is definitely quite similar in style to what I am doing and formed part of the 'Contemporary Portraiture' exhibition in the Richard Attenborough centre in Leicester last year.