Stating/Showing

The adventures of Kim-bob and me [part 1]

I slid open my phone to access saved contacts; under favourites I find Kimbal’s number and press dial. The phone nears on connection and then fails – I lift the phone away from my ear and press re-dial, this time it connects, but alas to a foreign dial-tone: he is on his travels again but still he answers:

Hi Richard how are you, I am currently in a queue for a bus in Athens having being scolded by the police for attempting to hitch a ride to the shore, I’m not island hopping I am undergoing a performative exercise that will result in an exhibition in Manchester at the end of June. It’ll be more like the end of July at this rate. Hi Kim, is this costing me a bom? No it is me though, I have to pay to accept calls – oh and that reminds me, I have little credit: but how are you? I’m good – I just wanted to touch base on the project we discussed last month forwarding the residency we underwent last year. Oh okay. Well, can we speak when I am back in the UK? Okay. Will call you beginning July. Good luck.

It is now July and I get around to calling again just before my journey to London from Edinburgh with East Coast, after tracking Kim’s location on Facebook I map his current capacity on the road back to London from Manchester. Whether he is on a bus or as passenger in someone’s car I’m not so sure, but I slide open my phone to access saved contacts; under recent conversations I find Kim’s number and press dial – I anticipate a foreign dial tone but it never comes, instead it connects to UK fluidity: it dials, and dials some more. I get to the point of counting the dials as if I am counting the turns in the road as I chase Kim on his bike around South Tottenham. I say to myself only two more rings and then I am done – I don’t like leaving voice messages so instead I draft a text message in my head: a sort of haiku in place of prolonged conversation:

My hotel is near
Greenwich is that too far for
You to come meet me?

Kim answers a few seconds in to the first draft. Hi how are you I am currently on a bus back to London the exhibition went well. Not so bad thanks the weather is shit here in Scotland. I heard the storms will meet me in London on my arrival. Are you hitching? Yes. Okay, can you speak? Erm, not for long don’t have too much battery can you email me instead? Okay.

Email to Kimbal:

Hi Kim,

I am about to walk down to the train station for the 3.30pm East Coast train to London Kings Cross, I arrive I think around 8pm. Are you around this evening to catch up? We could do with talking about this in person and get our ideas together.

I have to find my hotel first, which is in Greenwich – is that near where you are in terms of transport? If it is lets meet up for a beer and get this ball rolling.

Also, I think we should build a schedule to get drawings and written texts sent to one another – start building up a dialogue and a library of one another’s ideas. How about once every two weeks on the Friday we post something to each other. I will take your address down later…

I will be at my emails on the train as I have editorial work to do, so will catch anything you send back.

Cheers

Richard

Fourteen days later dually image

[a nod to handstand technique]

I am heading backwards in to the south again, for the second time in a week. Soon I will hit England with the North Sea on my right hand side and the track towards Cumbria on my left. As the breadth of the country matures pasts its bottleneck the coast will slowly disappear as the train heads inland. The clouds, according to the weather report, will close in on the train to the eventual point in time where relativity excludes itself from our spearheaded location. If the earth stopped moving the atmosphere would maintain its viscosity across the surface of land and sea: high winds would rip us from the earth at speeds beyond macro-recognition and the skies would blur between you and the next solid object. Instant death would hit you in a matter of milliseconds. 

————————-

In editing these two trains of thought I would have to extract one from the other and place them side-by-side. This editing would efface any tautological misreading allowing the reader to cross-reference one narrative with the other. But on a whole one stream of access to the idea is relative to the other. 

—————————

If I had your speed and you borrowed mine for a second or two we could work out what displacement lay between us: as your window seat catches up with mine we get to enjoy an expanded lapse in time where visual contact is exposed and slowed. Your face flickers gently with recognition. Mine probably makes the same involuntary contortion as always, and for a brief calculation we stare in to one another’s eyes with exacting measure. 

“Image directories. One image holds the centre of the next image. This image gives away its centre as it knows its own centre will have space on the image that comes after…”

To opt-in and opt-out: on image conference and directories

Question: How many times can you cut and how many times can you paste? And which tools do you use to defy the appropriation of an image, bypass its content and connotations – how much does it become about ‘cut’ and then ‘paste’.

I think we cut and paste from conversations we have.

Mild chats to full blown heightened infused arguments – afterwards and during reflection, we tend to cut and paste elements. Try a conversation you have with your camera. You have a direct dictation of the image’s content in terms of the still-life in front of you, and your conversation is to have this still-life recorded using the correct lighting, the right sort of angle – I suppose this can be widened to a conversation (or a conference) between the camera and the tripod and then you, the eye’s and the fingers that press the shutter release.

The conversation is then exposed. And there is a direct, then, cutting and pasting that happens in your mind as you say, “I will photograph this with a 5:7 ratio, but I will edit it square not rectangular… so I can cut this bit out, and this bit and the next bit using this next bit as the centre of the image. The centre of the conversation… the centre of the conference.”

You then stand up right, hands placed carefully on hips, and you stare back at the still-life in front of you questioning its content: you decide to take another two or three shots, one or two maybe with flash, using the camera as your conversing tool.

But what then of the post-production process. What then of ‘non-wet’ photography and its apparent freedom and its actuality in ratios and measurability? A quick change from one size to another, attributing printing quality and deriving web capability. One colour mode to the next colour mode and then back.

So you finally have two images that you are both happy with, both the camera and yourself that is. But in terms of the installed composition – you want to excerpt more of a collaged framing. So… you take one tool and place it in one hand… and you take another tool (something with a straight edge) and place it in the other hand: the camera sits there and watches, just as always, documenting your approach and your changing and shifting of an image.

You take one tool to the image: cut.
You take the next tool to the image: cut again. You take the other image, which matches the prior-image in size and ratio exactly, and on this image you paste from the other.

You then do the same to second image, opting-in to a mirrored affect. Following the same movements You take on tool to the image: cut. You take the next tool to the image: cut again.

You then end up with two image that speak to one another. Or two images that have the affect of you, and your camera, staring in to a mirror… asking a question of the reflected inspection.