I have a coming sense that the tide is waxing. The inference that I'm drawing a circle around is the inevitability of photographs produced to co-join. These works attempt to describe a narrative or to support each other as sequential, perhaps as a tip of the hat to the genre? Are they simply exposures from a roll or choices from say a Flickr set (evidence of concoction or observation)? What have we here? It seems we have a pattern that can only best be explained by its correlation to what has long been admired in prose, poetry and other print mediums. We have the ubiquitous desire to collate or collect.
The purpose of images seems to have been mystified again. Historically the medium has been pulled here and there, its project seized by any number of applied photographers/visual artists in an attempt to pin photography down, to ground it in its essence. Photography is of course not much else but a means to make. It is not of the object to describe its purpose. Culturally it is neither one object nor another it’s a matrix of parts. It is perhaps this proximity to fluidity, any camera anybody, that makes photography so special.
The art historical motives for the almost counter intuitive procedure of making bodies or sequences of photos seems unclear. Typically you could assert that photography was in its project still mitigating its own technology. Imitation of say print editions, joining in the fallacy of limited print runs artist print, printers print etc though perhaps this goes deeper? Sociologically we arrange, in the arrangement there is order in the order there is value. Bodies and sequences archive well and speak of history and perpetuity. Though the project of photography is often described as a pursuit of the ephemeral, the fleeting or happen stance. How can two such contradictory positions be reconciled? In order to investigate this we need to realise our parameters.
The purpose of this piece is to work towards a better understanding, of the purpose of a photograph.
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