A Recap

[poliphilo]

Lets try again.

When I was walking round Ashton the other day taking photographs I went into a light trance where everything I came accross- tired mothers pushing strollers, boarded up buildings, graffiti-covered bus stops- seemed wonderfully interesting and significant and beautiful. It was as if I were seeing beneath the skin of things.

Inevitably the pictures I took didn't convey much of this (though one or two of them were OK).

You can't photograph a state of mind.

But that's what I was on about yesterday when I was saying ugliness equals beauty.

Comments

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Your photographs do capture this, I think. The fact that you can focus in on anything--a different-colored brick, a gob of hair gel--allows you the photographer to say "this means something."

(But I think I know what you mean. Years ago I had one of those moments after seeing The Elephant Man with Anthony Hopkins. I walked out of the theater with a sense of tragedy still with me, and drove home in a daze. When I went into my house, every piece of furniture seemed beautiful, and the light through the window.

That movie, by the way, gave me the horrors. It wasn't about the unfortunate Elephant Man; it was about the director's neurosis, and his dipping into and savoring evil that got to me. But that is off the subject.)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

How odd that a film about "evil" should have brought on such a state.

But I guess that's the theory of tragedy- that it lifts you up even as it casts you down.