It was thirty-five years ago that I, like many before me, went through the magical experience of seeing images develop in the tiny bit of solution in a tray in a very very dark, room… Not only was I taken by the slow appearance of the image, and its beauty, but by the actual tracing, the ‘writing’, of the image, and the initial ‘writing’ that had launched it before. Soon enough to realize that there was no need to put the quotation marks: photography, writing with light…
The unDRK umbrella/movement proposes a conception of photography as a grand schematic writing system that allows a liberation of sorts: from photo-narrativities to photo-performativities, from phototextualities of various kinds to new ventures in photoliterature, a plethora of ways of re-seeing and re-making the world can be at our disposal. Through the framing/naming of PhotoPoeticity and Phoems (and the Phoete)–largely disseminated through the ongoing personal movement (and epic) of sorts dubbed PhotoDivan–I have tried to dig deep into the potential of photography as poetry, investigating in rigorous and sometimes technical ways how the photographic endeavor becomes an actual poetic practice–while also articulating what makes for poetic photographs or photographic series or projects! The faux society, The Post-Cameric Photographic Society (PoCa PhoSo) reveals itself though its name!
Ultimately, the photographic body of work is not only about the creation of a narrative about different places, or repeating any one type of approach to image/photo creation, but fashioning new paradigms, exploring the unique parameters of the form and registers of its relationship with reality. Each instance of the photographic venture (they can occur simultaneously) puts into motion queries, research, an adventure of sorts. The photographic works in essence use the registers and the parameters unique to the medium to allow for new fashionings of the world. From the single image to multi-image narratives and bookstills, from the tools and materials used to the modes of production, dissemination and exhibition, they constitute engagements with the formal, structural and stylistic underpinnings of photographic practice, dismantle categories and overcome conventional genres and projects. The overall oeuvre constitutes a theory in motion, a discourse in constant search of the possibilities of photography in relation to its own history and those of image-making and writing in general. Photography becomes a unique language, a system of scriptural intervention, a critique of and meditation on ways of seeing, ways of knowing, and the very poetics of leaving traces – of graphism – itself.