RM: What is “home“ to you? Maybe also talk about where and how you grew up and where you feel your roots are. MDG: This is a question I’ve been asking myself many times in the last few years and – to be frank – I still don’t have a definitive answer. I’m more prone […]
“Earlier this year, there were some high-profile twitterstorms, in which particular left-identifying figures were ‘called out’ and condemned. What these figures had said was sometimes objectionable; but nevertheless, the way in which they were personally vilified and hounded left a horrible residue: the stench of bad conscience and witch-hunting moralism” This […]
“There is an emphasis on banality, but also the whispered markings of the south with dead deer and hand-painted signage” William Eggleston 414 is a compelling book for what it is and what it is not. At first, when I saw the title in the Steidl catalogue, I simply thought it was a […]
“I proceed in conversation with the camera, with other photographs, with other photographers, I forget about what writing can do, I think about what photography can do.”
“There is noise, distortion, grain and the magnetic tape in my mind completely fails in parts to distribute any information at all. The images are dark, stained by the passing of time and the incredulous weight of dry heat. Throughout the song “Blackened” by Metallica plays over and over…” When I look at […]
“So, when we consider respect in the medium, we can limit our discussion by looking at who is contributing to our world and who is not. Publishers by and large are the unsung heroes of the day”. A friend of mine recently commented on the lack of risk-taking in publishing. I took some […]
“It is to accept that an image, though agreed as unable to achieve absolute status has many interpretive layers and one of these is the age of the viewer and his or her relation to the subject matter within the frame(s) conditioned by history, time and nostalgia…”
“Reading through them, I realised that the best ones seemed to create a kind of mental-image in my mind’s eye – which due to the tone of the text often took the form of a very deadpan, monotone, and even monochrome photograph of a little scene in small-town America; I was imagining a very straightforward picture made by Walker Evans or Lee Friedlander or Diane Arbus or others, of four dogs sitting on top of a car, or a guy standing next to a tree in the middle of the afternoon with bloody knuckles…”
“I think Michael felt the need to discuss the meaning and importance of American photography with a younger generation in Germany who had no experience with these kinds of elderly figures. The National Socialists had either killed or persecuted them in Germany, so for my generation there was no elderly generation in photography.”
“In Vancouver, there is no image of nature that is not at the same time an image of private property.”
“Certainly, Tillmans is enormously curious, yet his works offer surprisingly little insight. All is surface and rarely is it scratched”
“In a sense I was trying to complete a circle: I travelled to the neighbourhoods that had some bearing on the childhood development of my art-heroes and consequently on the art they made as adults, and then I tried to photograph these places through the ‘afterimage’ of the artistic influences these works had imparted on me”