photographic abstraction

One of the delights of digital photography is that you’re freed from the tyranny of having to decide whether something you see is worth using a frame of film, which means that you can take photographs of anything. I wonder how many people do. Take photos of anything, that is. For me, the only criterion is whether I like the image. It doesn’t have to be an intimate snapshot of friends or family; it doesn’t have to be of a ‘picturesque’ landscape; it certainly doesn’t have to be of a famous landmark. I like to take pictures that aren’t of anything.

In other words, I like to photograph images that were they painted and hanging in galleries would be considered ‘art’ by the cognoscenti. I make no such claims for the photographs that follow, although I could promote them as ‘found images’ in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp, who famously exhibited a porcelain urinal as a ‘found object’, claiming that because the world is full of interesting objects, it isn’t necessary to create new ones. The ‘art’ was claimed to be in the simple act of selection, but in fact the statement being made by Duchamp was that it’s art if he said it was. It was probably quite a profound statement when first made, but it sounds trite and banal now, and it opened the door to all manner of mountebanks and charlatans.

I could claim an affinity with abstract expressionism, but these photographs have neither Kandinsky’s vibrancy of colour nor Jackson Pollock’s fluidity of line. They are simply images that I find aesthetically pleasing. They were taken with a cheap six-year-old digital camera, and I have given them fanciful titles; you may feel that they remind you of something else. Let me know if they do.

tattered banners

the big bang, as seen from a nearby universe

the enchanted forest

light and darkness