The Bartender Never Gets Killed

Another ‘Exotic’ workprint

I posted yesterday on John Brownlow’s Streetphoto list, a small selection of single images taken as raw material for the ‘Exotic’ multipiles.

I was delighted and suprprised to find that an old shooting partner from London, Jawed Ashraf, had left a crit of the work.

When I first came across Jawed a numbers of years ago, I was slightly awed at the perceptive way he wrote about images. I also saw that visually he was way ahead of me, he was searching for something I wasn’t even ready to look for.

I’ll be writing a response to this later today (I hope if I get time!) , but his comments are things I always take very seriously as the guy is just soooo astute! Anyway, over to Jawed…

Blimey you’ve been busy on your blog recently! I’m one of those people who really can’t be arsed to create an account to comment on a blog, so this will have to do.

I commented before about how much I like your recent triptychs, their jewel-like quality and what I imagine as a guilty pleasure they elicit when you make them.

Today looking at the dips, trips and montage that you’ve posted recently, I’m thinking:

1. you’re working in a very similar way to 5/6 years ago - the shop windows, the urban plant life “intrusions”, the candy-coloured whistlestop tour.

2. I can’t work out why these work so much better than all those prior years’ work (singles or multiples). The montage you posted on 29/6 is seemingly in a whole different category for me. I think I felt there was something arbitrary about your older multiples. My “purely visual” sense never found a way in and a locus of engagement. That work was an effort, and never seemed to afford me a welcome.

I can’t help thinking your pix must be “simpler” than you were once making - it seems like the most straightforward explanation for my ready acceptance of them. Of course the alternative is merely that you’ve mastered what you’re doing, and that includes making your work approachable (to me, at least). I hope you don’t mind me saying I can’t tell which of those it is!

I’m more than a little suspicious that I’m simply falling for some kind of “easy” aesthetic - whoops, “prettiness”. I’m completely befuddled, but not in a bad way, because I genuinely find these engrossing.

3. I’m wondering if the “jazz” has gone. Again, I never felt really committed to the jazz associations that we used to discuss in regard to your work. I could see how they could be made, but they were never my route to meaning or sensibility in your pictures. But again, this could simply be a case of you having mastered the jazz thing.

I’m not sure yet I’m ready to take these pictures on for their meaning - I think I simply like looking at them too much to give much time to meaning. Lazy, I know - but I think they just need time and what I like about them is they graciously offer me that time.

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I’m glad to see you writing at length about strategy, and particularly being dismissive of the typological impulse that photographers seem to entrap themselves with.

I’d be disappointed if you reverted to making single images because the multiples seem so fluid, so instinctive. Also, I can’t help wondering if a collection of separate single images can’t help but being read as an exploded multiple - because you have set the tone. You’ve made your bed…

Also, thinking of process, there’s a gulf (for me as an outsider, the viewer) between your act of taking each single picture and the assembly of these multiples. Maybe it’s just photographer’s instinct, “how pictures are really made”. But I don’t “believe” that the kind of narratives you want to express can be formed from a single image.

But I admit, I’m a weak “narrative reader” when it comes to your work, e.g. I was never engaged by the Scene of the Crime pix.

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This:

http://thebartender.wordpress.com/2007/06/23/trip-7/

is truly surprising. It feels ridiculously new - I’ve never seen anything like that before. Absurdly simple to take in, but pictorially riotous.

These pairings won’t stay together, but another workprint from ‘Exotic’.

Workprint from a new series, working title, ‘on being exotic…’