yyt

So in asking how I like the new Dayanita Singh, “Amy” Bowbeens mentions that she has just purchased the Zoë Leonard book Analogue. Intrigued – and not going to have a girl buy a book that I know nothing about – head over to addall.com and buy it. In truth bought it as she mentioned that the work was like mine but not a good.

Head swelling, I await the package from a bookseller in Florida.

Opening the high tech packing, and leafing through the book, I like the images, I think Atget, I think Friedlander, I like that she mixes black and white and colour but I also don’t feel so bad about my lulu and blurb books as the printing of this isn’t all that much better - blacks on top of the other colours, whites leaving a bare page and the colours are quite brittle.

Since the comparison was made I look and realise what I do wrong and realise I am not anal enough. The approach that she has taken borders on the obsessive – let me say now that all that I am saying is not a dig on the artist as I don’t know how she works I have only seen the finished product. I am talking about editing and marketing.

On one hand I don’t take anything to it conclusion – in my case it would be say photographing every ball park that I come across – which I don’t and showing them in some as if it were a ball park catalogue. While I am interested in ball parks I am interested in them on what they are socially. I wouldn’t never – well not never but… - want to show them together but would incorporate them with work that deals with meeting places, places for rituals etc.

This is one of the problems with Clarke’s Beach, I want the people to be individuals and while I do try to photograph everyone who speaks to me it is more about the people I run into and why more than some strange urge to photograph everyone from Cape Spear to L’Anse aux Meadows and Channel Port-aux-Basques.

So I realise that I don’t follow through in a contemporary sense. And lo and behold reading the introduction, I am correct. I liked the fact that she uses film, that it is an old twin lens – but in reality this is all irrelevant. What I realise is that I don’t go far enough in the opposite direction either I am too engaged don’t distance myself at all and pass geekdom when I am curious about something.

In the introduction, the Bechers are mentioned, those ikons of detachment. All of a sudden I see some editor turning work that shows an engagement – to the point that she heads to Africa to continue the project – into a 21st century detachment as if engagement with what one does is somehow gauche. The passage made sure that a distance was maintained cooling off what I saw as an obsessive investigation – an overused art word that is rapidly becoming meaningless – which would have made earlier photographers – not artists who use photography – jealous weakened by placing it in a 21st century context.