Year:
1992 – 2006
Info:
Life, often to our discomfort, but at times to our joy is perilously chaotic.
As Einstein once concluded, unplanned elements play as large a role in any final outcome as things planned.
In the same sense, photographs like memories are selective. They often serve only to affirm or contradict what we already believe subconsciously. They are by nature, randomly captured, transient moments, and the truth of their origin and connection to reality fades, as they become the past.
My earliest work with this camera (a Kodak Diana – 1989) was a release from the theoretical restraints I felt while completing my degree; a self imposed doctrine for simplicity to counteract the academic theory, an effort to regain the naivety and magic I’d felt as I began and a chance to further my experiments in painting with light.
The work had no boundaries set. In this respect, the work has taken its own time. It has chartered a life’s journey, but not necessarily my own. The pictures were always found, never constructed and never re-shot. Motivated by the idea to render an object by filling the surrounding space, I let the work complete itself. It found its’ completion together in agreement with a gallerist from London and later with the closing passage from Grahame Greene, again, a chance discovery.
In contrast to the works poetic imagery and order lies a random and chaotic shooting and selection process.A trust in instinct and openness for chance, mistakes and accidental discoveries has been present from start to finish. A mixture of old and new technologies throughout, echoes the theme of a past rediscovered in a new light.
The work, in it’s completion, stands as an analogy to the haphazard effects of randomness in everyday life, which always succeeds in undermining illusions of control. As such, the work remains open for personal definitions and explanations. Narratives can be found or disregarded. Reality, as in life, ebbs in and out of the subjective view.
Dan Wesker, 2006
