Photography has been described as comparable to a hallucination – a snapshot or a temporal vision, an instant antique.
Photography was born not as an art but rather as a means of creating an ‘inventory’ of the world – a means to record objects and scenes from everyday life. Since then, an urban photographic art has been born, with photographers increasingly aware that their snapshots provide perceptions rather than fact. The street has become ‘the studio’
Looking through the lens, the photographer can ‘make-strange’ everyday life. Snapshots of the familiar take everyday scenes and objects out of their context by highlighting the sublime within the banal. Some reference the traces of human action and interaction and by reflecting chance juxtapositions provide a sense of surreal encounter.
We decided to take photographs of the places where we took sound recordings. The snapshots give an impression of the colours, textures and detail of small pockets within London. They can work alongside the soundscape to give a rich view of london’s everyday rhythms.
The following photographs are also my readings of particular spaces fixed in time – at what Henri Cartier-Bresson termed ‘the decisive moment’.
Bibliography
Barthes, R. (2000) Camera Lucida. London. Vintage.
Burgin, V. (ed), (1982) Thinking Photography. London. MacMillan.
Jay, M. (1993) Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley. University of California Press.
Sontag, S. (1986 [1977]) On Photography. London. Penguin.