GAMES OF MADNESS

“The point is that you can’t get at the thing itself, the real nature of the sitter, by stripping away the surface, the surface is all you’ve got. All you can do is to manipulate that surface — gesture, costume, expression — radically and correctly.” The above quote by Richard Avedon.
The above image, of his collection.

ONLY FROM HERE: THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE PRESENT MOMENT

 

 

Did you see the August 18th edition of the New York Times Magazine?
To accompany a photographic re-visitation of famous images, A.O. Scott wrote something about the nature of photography I quite liked.   It was this:
Every photograph stops time. This is the most banal, technical fact about the medium and also the source of its uncanny and remarkably durable power. The relentless momentum of mundane existence is stilled by the shutter, and some of the mysteries implicit in everyday life open up. A moment — of high artifice or raw candor, of posed elegance or composed chaos — is captured and then, later, delivered to our contemplative gaze.
We, the beholders, are always late to the scene, which makes looking at a photograph a species of time travel. We look back, aware, at least unconsciously, that the world has moved on. After a while, so do we, turning the page and returning the image to its natural state as a permanent piece of ephemera. But sometimes we wonder: What happened next?

Rineke Dijkstra's Almerisa series pictured above, to my mind, answers this question.