Printing. Capturing. Part One

These past few months have become a re-inquiry into photography for me. In school, when I started making photographs seriously, my primary impetus had grown from listening to the adults in my life lament about the magical time that was their youth. With this in mind I set about imaging everything and everyone I knew in the hope of solidifying some of this apparently fleeting time. Now years later with my archive of images and video I have mixed feelings as to my use of photography. The archive represents a highly unique and personal time but for a long time left me unsure of what good photography was.
My images were not littered with sexy girls and awesome parties like Wolgang Tillmans or Vice Magazine. The images also did little for me except put me in a nostalgic void. By the time my disbelief in photography had fully manifested I was stuck inside the academic machine, learning the peculiar position of photography within art and culture. Now images had to be made with a level of referentiality and to some extent be placable within an understood dialogue surrounding the medium. This was fine until it began to impede things getting done. Why could I not make a 4ft square image of a girl’s anus?

Well I could if I created an accompanying context that fitted the image into a discourse that could be understood by the educational institution I was in. So here I am many years later doing a similar thing. Working out where what I create fits. I find this process to be slow and cumbersome. It almost instantly decays the energy that comes with the desire to make something, unless you are making things that comfortably can be positioned into the explicit framework that your educators enforce. Its hard enough to objectify your own work let alone fighting the reverence that your educators have for there own predilections and knowledge. So I’m at the point where I only offer a cursory nod to their requirements.