Perching, posing. Again, these
angles, when you start to think about the causal chains that led you
to take this exact photograph it seems so unlikely that anything
could ever happen at all.
Are you really closer to the shore?
Or is it the camera? These aren't questions I want answering.
I've thought about shadows and about
how sometimes shiny things leave shadows of light. But they aren't
shadows are they? That's just a misappropriation of the term.
(I want to address this as a sensual
experience. Travel, photography, writing. Photographs are sensual
anyway, the depiction of light bouncing off objects. It seems obvious
when you write it down. All photography is sensual, the shining skin
of the world.)
In the darkness, photographs are
always the product of a battle between light sources. Which one will
make its mark?
There is a separation, in these,
between you as a pair. To be the subject of the photograph is to be
separated off from the photographer by the camera. Space split by the
shutter. You travel together, but the camera keeps you apart.
(I always thought that taking a
photograph of someone in a place makes it obvious that you can't
experience that place in the same way at the same time. It would be
wonderful to be able to somehow forget that either of you ever
travelled as individuals, because once you've left a place, you
aren't there any more, but the things you saw might still be.)
In bed, or under fluorescent light;
carved off spaces, like petrol stations in the night. Driving past.
They spin by. Windows of trains that aren't your train. You can't see
your own window, or you don't think about the glass as you look out.
The above excerpt is taken from a specially commissioned text for
KEEM's publication
A Chain of Wooded Mountains, written by artist and writer Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau.
We are currently trying to raise funds to publish a limited edition print-run of the book - to help us do this, whilst getting your hands on a beautiful
limited edition print (all proceeds go towards publishing the book), please click
here. Plus you'll then be able to read the above text in full!