these photos are all by this guy. i'm not much of a conceptual gal. i think a lot of conceptual shit is smoke and mirrors. and technical perfection. suppose that's where you lose me. i'm a fish, and i'm off frying bigger pieces of myself, you know? (burrrrrrrrrrro!). once, someone explained to me how the object itself could be a beautiful thing and i got that; message, greatness, singularity aside, etc. i have not yet accepted the conceptual as anything beyond conceptual, so in that, i guess i'm right there with you. sometimes you find yourself in the middle of trends and it's hard to get perspective on time and place (the now) and to understand the movement around you, with or without you, etc. this city is a doozy. and by that i mean certain things succeed (we see them more) than others. i like objects for the sake of objects, i like sheen and plants for the sake of sheen and plants, i like mirrors, cigarettes, boxes, rose quartz, banal (pronounced "bay-nal") machines, as much as the next colombian-jew. hey: things are great. hey: i'm not jaded. hey: i, too, see the loneliness of things. i, too, could agree that anything could mean anything. hey: i'm being fucking sincere. really. i love these diamond mirror shapes as the diamond suite appears in cards. are people's faces the penultimate? while objects are the pensubservient? ni idea, tío.
this guy's website is full of stuff. i think he's a whiz. i think he means it. i think most of his photographs are beautiful. i think no one ever likes anyone else entirely. i think he is persistent. i think he takes great pride in his work. i think he's not an impostor, but i don't know what the opposite (or positive) word for that is...i take it he's french, studied at the icp, has some booklets floating around, is involved in group shows, is meticulous, enjoys the process, reads a lot, likes fire, knows his equipment, and gets shit done. there is a photo floating around (a zoom-like, severe close-up from away situation) that works in his case (water). sorry. i like his difference from me; isn't that conveniently egocentric? nothing in my world is perfect. nothing. in his, it seems a few things are. while his goal may not have been to make the objects look more beautiful than they do to our eyes (were we to hover over his toilet, see a face in the bushes, glimpse a squirrel standing on its hind legs, study a candle/fire flickering, stare at a land or water mass from a point in the fields below) he has succeeded there. save one: the bird of paradise. the still life (caravaggio, jan brueghel, van gogh, manet, goya, s. shahbazi, mapplethorpe, ya basta...etc.) is still alive...(pause)...i appreciate this technical take on an orange and green and blue, fuerte pero fuerte stemmed sexy, sensual, punk-rock, anthropormorphic magnificence of flora. it speaks to birds, not to you. its entire design has nothing to do with you, or your camera...but there it is, part of it at least, giving you profile. through its profile we can only gather bright white...most of it is perfectly sharp, ensconced in definitive green...
bueno...
...in colombia i saw this plant 30 feet high, as it were, untouched and therefore more awesome (in the true sense of awe-some), surrounded by emerald greens and coffee plants at its ankles...i had been walking around the finca with a machete in my right hand, pink pants now smeared with rich red mud and i could give a shit. and i thought then, after doing the only weeding i'd ever do (hacking a banana plant with the hacha), that we know nothing...that i haven't seen anything, that so much beauty is better left unseen or just seen by one, and that the original thing (yes, love, a plant, David, the first EVERYTHING) cannot be rendered...we either do first how only we can do, or we copy. conceptualizing something is to attempt (only attempt) at giving the thing a different kind of existence: to behold. hmm. and i was rendered mute, staring at this huge bird, a creation that only i saw of orange and green, fuschia and purple, ascending straight from this paradise...up, parrrrrrrrriba, stretching uniquely into god knows where...the rest, for me, would be just images. the rest, for me, would be just lunch meat.
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