This page features work in progress on a Fine Art project with a working title of ‘Detached Territory’. The gallery features selected images which will be subject to updates and editing until the final project selection is exhibited. The project is open-ended, but this page will be the home for the work until the end of my current course of study.
Please click on any image to open in gallery view. The initial proposal document which gives a description of the aims of project follows after the gallery.
This is a pivotal project for my ongoing practice and any feedback/comments/advice would be very much appreciated. All will be answered, thanks in advance.
Project Proposal
A reaction against earlier work, both within my technically driven commercial practice, and studies which have involved a craft driven approach, it is the projects experimental nature that provides its ‘raison d’etre’.
An investigation of the image as a detachment from reality, things ‘cut out’ of the world. The idea isn’t new, ‘Provoke 1’, a 1968 Japanese magazine, by Takanashi, Nakahira, Taki and Okada, stated,
‘The image itself is not an idea. It cannot attain the totality of a concept, nor can it be a commutative sign like a word. Its irreversible materiality- a reality that has been detached by the camera – exists in a world opposite that of language’.
Particularly pertinent now, in Walter Benjamin’s photo ubiquitous future, where:
‘The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph’,
I aim to develop an introspective, purely visual dialogue that might subsequently communicate more widely.
Avoiding restrictive ‘ideas’ or over-arching themes/concepts, but using film to ‘document’ my life/movements in consciously randomised, impressionistic ways, where mood is as important as location, memory and new experience are equally valid. ‘Hunting’ images, that when ‘detached’, become changed/deformed fragments of reality, that communicate intrinsically, without recourse to none visual language.
To remain artistically relevant as opposed to purely ubiquitous, photography must seek to detach those things that would be better understood in solely visual language, thus provoking thought more powerfully than words.
Only by adopting defined parameters might the project succeed. Consequently I am adopting a number of pre-determined practical boundaries to give structure.
Though a very extensive series, a consistent aesthetic is required. Project uses one monochrome film stock Fomapan 400asa, and a single fixed lens camera, an Olympus XA. Film/home developing budget is £250, materials sufficient until end of study. However, I don’t consider the project finite.
Adopting geographic parameters that are already emotional triggers will maximise access to powerful visual stimulus, so locations limited to places I currently live, or have lived. Budget exists for five cities.
Though engaging different geographies, only the emotional relationship to place is pivotal, ‘identity of place’ is irrelevant.
The purpose, to discover/examine personal unconscious sub-texts/themes that might materialise. Journeys will adopt processes of randomisation. No pre-planning routes/periods, or climate restrictions, but actively embracing chance/circumstance.
Process will be a reactive one. Moriyama describes his practice as hunting, an approach I will borrow/adapt. Journeys have a starting point, simply where I slept, but each subsequent route decision will be driven by impulses encountered, what to shoot, what to ignore, purely instinctive. I’m not concerned with the memory of the machine, rather its ability to slice fragments from reality, creating new ‘material’ forms, and I’ll avoid any pre-planned photographic control, simply reacting, with the photographic eye as an extension of my own eye.
Once again, Any feedback would be incredibly helpful in taking this project forward.
Thank you
Stuart Hyde
stuart allan hyde ______ 