Thank you to Andrew McCloskey from the Whiteloupe Photography Blog who asked me to write something for their From the Photographer series. Keep up the good work Guys.
Posted By The WhiteLoupe photography Blog
About a month and a half ago I posted a feature on Teo Ormond-Skeaping and his project In the Fulcrum of Our Dreams (original post). Since then I've had a correspondence with Teo who, after some necessary time for brewing his thoughts, has blessed us with words that make my head churn with ideas and conceptions until I'm scratching. In this edition of "From the Photographer" Teo shares with us his thoughts on what a photograph is and what it can do and what it means to capture experiences. Read through the break, all of you now. Then go check out Teo's website to see the rest off the project along with some of his other work.
All I wish is that I could explain, but I know I would doubt it the moment I did. But what I experience, what I take from not being able explain has become far more important.
I have come to believe that photography may be considered a collection of experiences. That conscious or unconscious, the collection is an acknowledgement of an interaction or process that is considered by the artist to be of a certain value at a certain time.
If that were so we could consider that an experience, and therefore an image, may be valued higher because it is “New” to the individual; assuming there is a base level of experiences that have been collected so often that they no longer hold any value.
This base of experiences would conceivably grow with the pursuit of the valuable “New” experience, the process both condemning the world of available experiences and perpetuating its confrontation. And though it is not possible to have confronted a finite number of experiences the “New” experience would become increasingly rare, as experiences are grouped upon discovery by their similarity’s to avoid the repetitive confrontation of similar occurrences.
We could consider that the highest level of experience would be the metaphysical. This would be an experience that cannot be defined, that in some way an occurrence momentarily represented a semi-conscious understanding of a connected series of preceding and subsequent events that had defined an experience, which the conscious mind cannot retain.
