Simplest thing to do— snapshots from life and their accumulation in personal albums, a seemingly intuitive response of modern individuality to photography as commonplace. The essential philosophical thrust of industrial consumerism entails the eventuality of a technology that would ever more simply and convincingly parcel out images from the immediacies of experience for our retention and exchange. For art, reward from the camera phone is unprecedented spontaneity of image, the immensity of its diversity and potential application to life.
Sending a just captured image of a sunset or some-such-thing, my friend says it was “like a postcard.” I think about the discursive situation of social media in relation to photography, and this old cornerstone of the medium, the postcard format, appeared worthy of renewed investigation under contemporary conditions. After many attempts I came upon a standard for my own iteration using thick paper stock and the significant if unremarkable power of a desktop inkjet printer.
Could any art be more approximate to Freud’s theory of sublimation than one born from the habitual reach for our device as reflexive coping mechanism? So a naive use perhaps, but there is also danger in going against inclination, and I’d rather proceed with it (the camera phone and art) as a tool for thinking more fully about life than as a sign of something more sinister. Pruning reality is not simply to steady myself against the passage of time but to enhance its fruiting and flavor. I want to remain ruthless in the edit, while maintaining a generosity towards my life and experience to admit pictures of simple or screwball pleasures, displaced beauty, and specious arguments- the photos amply holding their place as an element in a larger theme of images. I might admit even those whose quality is imperceptible because it doesn’t exist except within the greater context of my art and it relationship to your own individuality. The photograph is always a commodity, but I was always inclined this way.
So if you do take the time to sit with these image cycles, I hope their effect resembles verse composed, and the thoughtful effort required for individuality when constructing from our collective inheritance of language, rather more closely than the group-think demonstrated everywhere in tourist snaps and socials.
