A history of touching - Cork

Those crazy kids and their car parks

The idea of it

Cork, December 2010

Digital photographs of slide projections of photographs of Cork, when I was there for Black Sun back in December. Cork's got so much crumbling architecture and peeling paint, it can look mildly apocalyptic in places, especially when small parts of it are photographed out of context. The weather was perfect the couple of days I was there, and it's an eminently walk-round-able city, one of my favourite places in which to get lost.

Homelights

The front of this house catches such good light.

Atlast

I feel like every time I look at these photos I'm a little surprised, I don't know why. They're the last photographs I took while still living in Dublin, my last couple of weeks there, though some are from home also.

My most recent, long suffering pair of shoes, donated to the side of the river and the world, generally.

A long walk and a high place.

Towards the end of the course I started taking the sort of photographs I was taking before; at least, it felt that way. Photographs that were not connected necessarily by theme, but more by mood or function; namely, these things I saw made me feel something and photographing them was an attempt to record that feeling. Or maybe an attempt to articulate that feeling in some way. Though I know it's inevitably futile, my response to these scenes now is, through the filter of memory, irrevocably changed. Still, what else can I do? I'd forget it completely otherwise.

One last trip to the Tesco down the road. Soon after taking this, the last frame of the roll of film, I saw a beautiful fox roaming the streets of an estate near my house. I stopped and watched him for a while, he spotted me at one point and stared hungrily back for a few seconds before slinking off behind a wall. I went home and ate whatever awful food I had, went to sleep and moved out the next day. I felt pretty good about that.

Jaunt 3: Ways

                                      

Sometimes I wonder about how I come across when other people look at my photographs. Whether people see something in them that relates to me as a person and how they react to that. Probably someone looking at these assumes I'm comfortable with showing them off, that I'm aware of all the symbols in them because how could I put them here for anyone to see otherwise?

I'm not aware of everything in the photographs I take; I'm sure there are patterns in them that I don't see, and only an objective observer would see (if they were bothered to look that closely). This small series-thing is mostly about verticality, but in terms of content I think the word I had in my head while taking them was "Ways". Which could refer to an infinite number of things, but if I really limited my thinking on it the next sentence would have something to do with escaping, ways out. Definitely, I like drawing comparisons between seemingly unrelated things ie canals and alleys and windows.

I like the orientation also, I like tall photographs; I think partly because it's an unnatural viewpoint in relation to how the human eye perceives things, which sort of refers to photography's inherent falseness, even as it tries to be accurate and faithful. A photograph will always fail to be a true representation of the thing seen because  the thing seen can never be summed up by just one person's view of it, or maybe because what one person leaves out of a composition another would leave in. Take into account the time of day something is happened upon; the photographer's mood, the weather, any number of permutations. In the end it comes down to the photographer's reaction to the thing seen at the time it's seen. I think. Maybe.

                    "We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are."