IC w8 Are you a Fan?

https://paulturounetblog.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/good-intentions-by-ingrid-sischy.pdf

About 3 years ago, Salgado had the Genesis exhibition in Rotterdam. I had just seen the movie "the salt of the earth" that week. As an invitee at the opening, I was greeted by the director of the museum who asked:

"Are you a fan too?".

He asked everyone just that. I think some photos are super beautiful. The composition, the frame, the moment. Even if there is something horrible in the image, the photo is still beautiful.

The composition, the frame, the moment. The tones in the print. The digital photos cannot be distinguished from analog. Negatives were made of the digital photos and they were printed on barite paper in the darkroom.

Susan Sontag 1977 ,(p15)

“Now nature, tamed, endangered, mortal needs to be protected from people. When we are afraid, we shoot, but when we are nostalgic, we take pictures.”

I must confess that the photos did evoke a sense of nostalgia. Not so much for nature that way, for me, but for a past photography. A visual language, craftsmanship, an eye for detials, tone, pure photography.

Sontag wrote in 1977, “Making suffering loom larger, by globalising it, may spur people to feel they ought to ‘care’ more. It also incites them to feel that the sufferings and misfortunes are too vast, too irrevocable, too epic to be much changed by any local political intervention” (Sontag, p3)

When an subject becomes to big to grasp it is called a hyperobject. Climate change is a hyperobject. Timothy Morton writes about it.

He also has some quotes:

“Beauty is how objects end. Beauty is death.” Timothy Morton, Realist Magic

Like Tim Urban I get distracted during the lessons, and my intentions keep getting distracted because I discover, find and hear new things that are interesting and that while I have never seen myself, someone shows "procrastination" behavior.

But now I'm listening to Timothy Morton and I'm completely immersed in his theories and trying to figure out if what he's saying is resonating with my project and photography as a hole. It's about the human species. He says we are responsible. Once you can understand something you are responsible but you are not guilty. Being guilty is something on a personal level.

Gentle could be very disturbting

Timothy Morton https://youtu.be/d_5UWI-SEVE?t=375

It is always said that the whole is more like the separate parts; but is that so? Can't it be that the individual parts are more than the whole. is a question Morton asks.

In that case, looking at 1 photo could hit you more than watching a series. Couldn't that be? Wouldn't that be a strong statement? In this time when we are inundated with images, it would not be a great statement to hang just 1 photo in a large room. Or better yet; put a little box in the middle that contains that one photo and where you have to walk, open it, to see what's inside. That large silent space that refers to that one object.

Note:

What struck me during the interview with Salgado in the museum, during the opening is that he regularly referred to his wife. So often, in fact, that I began to wonder how much of the success attributed to Salgado herself is actually his wife's work. For example, the article states that Salgado releases 2 books in a short time. His wife does public relations, arranges exhibitions, takes care of communication, arranges sales and is a graphic designer.

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Sources

• MORTON, Timothy. Being Ecological. Available at: https://youtu.be/d_5UWI-SEVE [Accessed at 13 March 2020]

• SISCHY, Ingrid. 1991 .Good Intentions. The New Yorker, 9 st. 1991. Available at:

• https://paulturounetblog.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/good-intentions-by-ingrid-sischy.pdf [assecced 15 March]

• SALGADO, Sebastião Ribeiro. 2017. the Genesis exhibition, Fotomuseum Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Article Available at: https://www.nederlandsfotomuseum.nl/tentoonstelling/salgado/

• SONTAG, Susan. 2019. Over fotografie. 1ste edn. De Arbeiderspers

• URBAN, Tim, 2016. Inside the mind of a master procrestinator Available at. https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_urban_inside_the_mind_of_a_master_procrastinator?language=en [Accessted 2017]