I Second That Emotion 1977-78
- As a mode of production, rephotography can reproduce or "manage"
an already
existing photograph or picture effortlessly.
- You take a camera, load it with film, put the camera on a tripod,
put any picture in front of the camera, light the picture with an ordinary
light bulb, look through the viewfinder, make the proper setting and
snap the shutter.
- By generating what appears to be a "double", (or ghost),
it might be possible to represent what the original photograph or picture
imagined. Appropriation is a theoretical procedure, and like any other
procedure, interesting only to a point. (The point being that we're
all pretty intelligent - but are we smart enough to stop paying attention
to how
intelligent we are?)
- The fact that the picture in front of the camera is already a picture
one might be safe in assuming that the artist is not so much an artist
as an audience and could be seeing pretty much what the next audience
will see
- My feeling about reproducing photographs or "public images",
is that these images could have been observed or unconsciously collected
by persons other than myself and in effect it's this prior availability
that defines the images desires and threats.
- It's as if to say a public image has a reputation and not shall we
say any of that blessed event stuff usually associated with most photographs
or photographic activity.
- By taking a photograph of an existing picture that's
been available to the general public, your in a sense fragmenting, or
better, naturalizing what's already real and attempting to add on or
additionalize this reality on to something more real.
- This overdetermination or psychological afterlife is a result of the
author's or artist's permission in letting him or herself identify and
locate physically with the audience and set up an exchange or receivership,
where a certain percentage of something of another personality or emotion
sign or co-sign what will eventually be referred to as his or her own
work.- The activity of rephotography is essentially an "undesired
fidelity", that is to say the activity has the inability to reproduce
a copy.
- What it proposes to produce is a resemblance, something close, something
almost, (an inheritable form of something), something that's intimate
and general (at the same time) something that has the chances of looking
real, but doesn't have any specific chances of being real.
- More technological than mechanical, more simulation
than an expression, the result is a photograph that's the closest thing
to the real thing. And since I feel a bit more comfortable, perhaps
more reassured around a picture that appears to be truer than it really
is, I find the best way for me to make it real is to make it again,
and making it again is enough for me and certainly, personally speaking,
almost me.
- I want my work to be natural, like any other group, with each other
and in such an attitude and surrounding so as to reproduce a picture
that at least leads one to believe that it is typical and usual in appearance.