"life's a beach"_

A few months ago I took a photograph in a hospital. It is unremarkable; a dull image of an uninviting room. But I wanted to write about this photograph, more specifically, about the photograph contained within it: a small print, unframed, taped onto the wall of this otherwise bare space. The dark image stands out against the pale but recognisable features of the room: white fissured ceiling tiles, fluorescent tube lighting, speckled pastel blue PVC flooring and a well-worn, sand-coloured leather reclining chair. It is a photograph of windswept coastal dunes, a common motif in care settings, where images of sandy beaches and mostly calm, sunny skies fill lonely waiting areas, long hallways and sterile rooms. This image was different. There is the print’s curious position on the wall, which I initially thought was incredibly clumsy, if not careless. It hangs some way above eye level, placed just above a flat rectangular protrusion with similar dimensions to a door that reaches down to the ground. The print appears to rest, ever so slightly off centre, on its narrow ledge. Two loose cables, one black, the other light grey, emerge from a socket in the ceiling above the print. Rather than hanging straight down, they trail off to the left where they cut across the top corner of the print and sit improbably on the protruding panel in an upside-down ‘y’ formation. Perhaps it was the cables, drawn to the side like curtains to offer an unobstructed view of the coastal scene, that made me want to reconsider the print and its singular presentation. The image is framed by a bright white border, betraying a home printer. Ordinarily these types of scenes are printed onto large canvases, where they wrap around the sides of and disappear behind the underlying frame, a presentation that in all its coarseness is much more true to its subject. Often installed in series, these photographs are available in large numbers in homeware stores, where they are sold next to artificial plants and word art. They are also usually bright and cheerful, including the sun in one way or the other, coming up, going down, shining bright. This small photograph is dominated by an inky sky. The beach grasses in the foreground have been pulled violently off to the right, flattened over time by strong gales. At the horizon the sea is almost black, mirroring the colour of a landmass to the left. Wispy elongated clouds sweep across the top of the print, running, in opposite direction to the grasses, from what comes next. There is a foreboding quality to this photograph, making its presence in this hospital room even more incongruous. Almost cruel. Almost. There is also something very honest about this photograph, the stormy landscape beyond it, and the way it has been attached to the wall, with the cables thoughtfully draped to one side, to give us a clear view of the way thing really are. 

"a difficult beginning"_

“A story is attempting to take place and is making what can only be called a difficult beginning. Is an event going to happen? The question stirs something within me. And then, amid the difficulty, an idea comes to me: it is with the event — and the question of its timing — that I want to start.¹”

When I thought about writing my first entry for this blog I remembered the feeling of anticipation described by the artist and writer Yves Lomax in the first chapter of her book Sounding the Event: Escapades in Dialogue and Matters of Art, Nature and Time (2006). ‘A difficult beginning’ is an essay about waiting and wondering. It is about false starts (‘one has already started but the event is not yet to happen’) and false dawns (‘the start is full of promise but the fulfilment of the event never comes’). It is a record of time (‘I want to move in the direction of this not yet’) and thought (‘She asks how this movement is to be grasped’). To write is to experience countless false starts and false dawns. Between the words of the most accomplished texts lie innumerable invisible actions, considerations and omissions. I have always been fascinated and overwhelmed by these gaps, spaces of infinite potential that have the power to paralyse the most seasoned writers, who at one point or another must have asked themselves, ‘where do I begin?’ Lomax begins by asking what it is that she is beginning with (‘Do I have any idea, any vision or concept of the event with which I want to start?’), which materialises the moment she asks whether it is already happening. There is no limit to the ‘event’ that is writing, just like there is no beginning or end to thought. If there ever was ‘any idea, any vision or concept’ behind this blog it was a gradual unfolding, what Lomax refers to as a ‘coming-to-mind’, which does not happen suddenly; rather it is a ‘slow burning thought that has flickered here and there’. Starting this blog was about creating space and, more importantly, time, for this unfolding.

“When, for instance, does a photographic image start? And when does it finish? Stupid questions you may well think, but I wonder: when is the event of the photographic image? Indeed, what constitutes an event and how can this be said of the still photographic image?²”

Much of my writing for this blog will be informed by my research into the relationship between thought and the photographic image. My interest in looking at and thinking about photographs is rooted in my curiosity and my desire to understand the world around me. Like any piece of writing, a photograph is incomplete, and I have always been equally if not more interested in what an image does not show, more specifically the thought process(es) that inform the photograph, the creative potential of photography, of which the image is merely a byproduct, on one hand, and the role of context, of construction or fabrication, in determining our understanding of the photograph, on the other. One could say, as Lomax does, that it is a matter of timing, that when it comes to photography it is not a question of ‘what’ but ‘when’. Is the photograph the moment just before we press the shutter button? Or is it the instant the image is recorded? Is the photograph the moment it is seen or accompanied by text? The question of timing speaks to photography in the expanded field and provided a fitting introduction to this blog, in which I wanted to write about the various fields and knowledges that photography (has) become(s) entangled with, or what Lomax might refer to as ‘photographies’.³ However, the numerous photographies we encounter every day and how they inform our way of seeing are just one of many subjects I wanted to explore – alternative text was first and foremost about the event that is writing.

“I do not produce meaning, or knowledge, or thought, on my own. I do not produce my life alone. It is always ‘with’. So often, however, this ‘with’ becomes forgotten. Indeed, so often, far too often, this ‘with’ becomes annihilated ... ⁴”

I chose the name alternative text because the process of describing images in a digital setting exemplifies the complex relationship between image and text, one that is further complicated when applying it to works of art. The idea that one or two brief sentences could not only accompany a painting or a photograph but substitute it completely can seem like an impossible one. At times an unexpectedly difficult and time-consuming task, this seemingly simple act of description, of interpretation, of translation, has also reminded me of the practice of writing as a whole. When we want to communicate an idea, how do we distinguish between the ‘key elements’ and the ’small unnecessary details’? When I find myself weighed down by these questions, by myriad possibilities, missed opportunities and misunderstandings, I remind myself, as Lomax does, that ‘I do not produce meaning, or knowledge, or thought, on my own … It is always with’. I am very much writing this text ‘with’ Lomax, my meaning, knowledge and thoughts emerging from the spaces between her words. I have come to believe that what a piece of writing does not convey is equally important as what it does, and it is with this belief in mind that I want to keep this blog. I want it to be a space for experimentation and for developing my practice. Most of all, I want this blog to be a space of acceptance, always keeping in mind Lomax‘s words that ‘I may be sitting still, very still, but my being is not static. On the contrary, my being is continually moving in time. Indeed, even as I rest in the stillness of the night my being is ceaselessly being made “with” time. And it is this ceaselessness that makes me come to say: I am not already made but always incomplete.’⁵

¹ Yves Lomax, Sounding the Event: Escapades in Dialogue with Matters of Art, Nature and Time (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 3–4.

² Ibid. 5.

³ Yves Lomax, Writing the Image: An Adventure with Art and Theory (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2000), 78.

⁴ Yves Lomax, Sounding the Event: Escapades in Dialogue with Matters of Art, Nature and Time (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 6.

⁵ Ibid. 7.