Complicity

I realised that for some time I had been drifting through a miasma of corporate imagery and iconography. Somehow this was not my decision. I was just browsing through the magazine racks like anyone else on the way home after a day at work.

It was just that people who made and sold magazines needed to carry advertising so that their magazines would not go out of business.

All of these publications had been assembled into a Point of Sale vortex which drew me in. First, I casually skimmed and later actually scanned. I decided that every time I bought a magazine I would alter it in some way.

So I bought a second hand DSLR and got to work on the project, not quite knowing what I was doing or where I was going.

But what I did realise is that there is a difference between taking photographs and making pictures. I also saw myself as part of the production process, intervening between purchase and disposal. Some of the more recent images are closer to my original intention,although I had to arrive by practice rather than theory. Some attention was given to technical considerations.

High end publications with good production values tend to have pages which fold well and can take a lot of handling. Newsprint images being softer and less robust are harder to manipulate with any degree of finished clarity. They also have less of an aura. I am a lot more careful now about what I construct and how, before anything is placed before the camera.

The complicity lies in the fact that the viewer is left in little doubt as to the source of the imagery and  therefore is aware of satirical intent,or at least that the image was made from materials cheaply available to all. I say cheaply but in fact a copy of Vogue is, in fact much cheaper than a tube of decent oil paint or acrylic.

I thought I would use the published image as my material, use its specificity in the same way as a painter uses paint; value its qualities, push it and try to intuitively move the material around.

I wasn't interested in collage, the sensibility of which seems to have replaced draftsmanship and a sense of crisp graphic values in the press. Magazines sometimes resemble scrapbooks, that's cool if all you are going to do is throw it away, but I tend to view these publications as some kind of document of our times.