Photographing Triangles

This experiment leverages my core practice, photography.

I took inspiration from the photographer and writer TJ Cole in his monograph Blind Spot. The images reflect passages from the Foreword, which the academic and novelist Dr Siri Hustvedt penned, and the postscript, written by Cole.

Hustvedt sets the scene for Cole's work metaphorically, describing an area of the eye between the retina and the optic nerve that creates a blind spot in the vision of every vertebrate. This gap in our vision, reportedly the size of an orange held out at arm’s length is subconsciously filled by our brain so that we are unaware of it. This visual allegory serves Cole’s monograph perfectly.

Cole’s photographic journey takes the reader to locations around the globe, where Cole captures the banal in scenes that appear entirely unconnected. Yet upon linear reading, a subtle narrative appears. First between the photographs as elements of one scene act to reduce the distance to the next, and then from the text, which accompanies every image, that provides an inner narrative, as Cole’s thoughts are redirected to moments far from the contemporaneous mise en scene.

Berlin.– TJ Cole (2016 p.107)

Quote from accompanying text ”If you walk further down Niederkirchnerstasse, you will find a strange complex of buildings….. Evil ground because of what happened here, holy ground because of the innocents it consumed” (Cole, 2016 p.106).

During my reading of Blind Spot, I recollected Robert Frank’s The Americans, where his subtle narrative pervaded the linear reading of his images. I am reminded that when editing the contents of a visual monograph sequencing is all important. Cole’s use of facing pages, to record his thoughts took me back to the writing of Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida.

In Camera Lucida Barthes retells his search for the one photograph of his late mother that captured her aura, in which he can recognise her presence within. He articulates the properties of this photograph as  

“a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest, shared hallucination” (Barthes, 1993 p.115). He goes on to iterate an inner narrative

“I am trying to render the special quality of this hallucination, and I find this: the same evening of a day I had again been looking at photographs of my mother, I went to see Fellini's Casanova with some friends”(Ibid, p.115)

In applying the concepts espoused by Cole and Hustvedt, I used photography to create triangles within my environment that were illusory, marked only by an absence or a fleeting moment in time. I used an iPhone camera to capture images from Town Quay in Southampton docks, using sunset light, the movement of the water, and momentary juxtapositions to conjure triangles, as our brain seeks to interpret the scene.

BARTHES, R., 1993. Camera Lucida. London: Vintage

COLE, T. J., 2016. Blind Spot. London: Faber &Faber