From: Victor Subramanium [victorsubramanium@yahoo.com.sg]
To:Justin Loke Kian Whee
CC:
Subject:A project on Anti-photography[Scanned]
Hi Justin,
How are you? How's Fiona and Joshua doing? Have not heard from you guys lately. Just want to share something with you, an idea that has been brewing for many years, and finally, after attending my friend's wedding it was the last straw, I must let it get off my chest and stop thinking about it.
From our conversation I know you always have a dislike for photographers, not personally I believe, but just general, like how society hates trigger happy people. I have an idea for a project for you guys, to add to your already unattended shelves of ideas, I won't be disappointed if it isn't materialised.
A Project that dedicates itself to the anti-photography cause: Truth, Immortality and Banality
Parties and Individuals to attack:
1. Event photgraphers/camera man for weddings, formal dinners, parties, event etc. To me they are human beings that behaves like you say outside the situation, the moment, like the incidents you mentioned to me moving around, talking, adjusting their cables during the solemn moment of silence of the memorial for the deceases of 911 in order to telecst the 'event'. And the photographer who went in to the bride's room before the bridegroom to photographed that moment of greatest significance. To me this is the most lowbrow of attention seeking. Actually I feel that you are like them, because you are not that involved, not paying attention to the wedding ceremony or the moment of silence. But that is another story on documentation in general I guess.
2. As usual, heard and read it often in books and drama series: the attitude or belief in using photos as documents and evidence. But besides the suspicion of Photoshop manipulation, there is something I noticed recently. In last saturday's 'live' telecast of an EPL match a player was foul by another, as always, we can't really see what happened. Should the penalty be given? After replaying from 5 angles, the sixth did show contact between them, whereas the other 5 looked like the player being foul dived. The commentator upon seeing the sixth angle, in clipped British accent said 'Yes indeed, there was a foul', I was wondering why when we have 5 angles (of no foul) against 1 angle (of foul) we deem the last as factual. I know it isn't judged on quanity, but there is something undemocratic, unfair about the rationale, something that's too inductive, they are all points of view, but why that is decisive. It;s like a faulting act than judgment.
3. The lousy photos that pretends to be art. But only lousy ones where the medium did not function beyond itself. Narcisstic posturing. Banal.
4. Tourist, be they hip backpackers or tour group aunties, slr or dummy digital, they are crazy about trapping moments once they step out of their own country. And the self-obsessed teens who love to photograph themselves. This are down right banal creativity.
5. Our over reliance on photography, for existence, traces, memories etc. For example, if this event/project were to actually happend out of habit and neccessity we would photographed it for docmentation or memory, for further fundings, like how I was impressed by VS's portfolio; photograph art works for catalogues. This point is important because if you were to allow photography for this project, for any purpose, then the whole idea is ruined.
Lastly, I would like to add, that photograph is the instrument that creates the illusion of the never never gone land, eternity, immortality etc. The device that uses light to colour the superficial sense of eternity. I belong to those who believe Time is finity, infnity is non-time, and Time is experience etc. Embracing photography is anti-Time, anti- progression. Photo-graph, or light, the anti-thesis is vulgar abstraction, cowardice, cheap thrill (porno), non-experential (compare viewing the scenery from busy taking pictures of it), non-intervention (think war photographer, busy taking pictures of the wounded while others are busy helping the wounded, or the quasi-God's view of camera man for documentrary who uses the excuse of 'letting nature takes it cause' while the lion tears the deer, we don't do that we see man to man assualt we call 'murder') I think this is an ethical issue which affects the Aesthetic of not just art but LIFE!
Man is finity, and woman is infinity. We understand this proposition once we understand how the sexual organs of the male and female function.
- Lance Lesslar, (1745-98)
The Anatomy of Discontentment
I think this guy is right, I can't erect the whole day but woman can fuck thru' the night. If capitalism feminises the society, then I think photography is one instrument that help perpetuate this eradication of masculinity. For the celebration of infinity, through photography, is a feminine activity.
The equation:
If photography=eternity, and eternity=infinity, and inifinity=feminity
then photography is feminine.
Only females or the feminised want to 'stay young forever', or believe 'diamonds are forever'.
I think I am too long winded, must be your bad influence. Let me know what you guys think.
Best Regards,
Victor
Showing posts with label Victor Subramaniam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Victor Subramaniam. Show all posts
Monday, April 6, 2009
Charity, my friend
Most charitable acts require one to ‘give’ than to ‘take’: giving time through voluntary social work, if one could not afford the philanthropist’s limelight of donating a larger than life cardboard cheque in glamorous charity event, or during another flag day, unwilling to drop a few shillings into the tin cans (the tin cans which are the essential anatomical distinction of many good, obedient students). The latter act of giving – to perform varying degrees of monetary Providence – is especially hard for misers and selfish-big spenders, of various social ranks, with traces of sympathetic feelings, to follow.
Of late, I have noticed one opposite act of ‘taking’ from this culture itself that could help balance the morality-conscience guilt scales of all misers and selfish-big spenders -scales that are tilt, too much, to the metaphysical security of having fat bank accounts and the material comfort of excessive wasteful consumption, respectively. But before I introduce this group that we could perform the act on, let us give this group of people a name (a name which definitely isn’t their ‘true names’ in the Joubertian sense): the leaflet distributors.
The leaflet distributors are noticeable in the busy train stations and shopping malls. Much too noticeable, in fact, that we can detect and circumvent them like the many other obstacles to the commuter-ant movement algorithm during the rush hours in bus interchanges and train stations –
or like misplaced decorative rocks, getting in the way of those leisure Sunday strolls of families, friends or couples in their chosen commodity gardens. Sharing the public space, more or less, as stationery objects with handicap buskers or tissue-peddlers, the leaflet distributors, like the taxi-drivers – who, ironically, are always on the move – are not homogenous. They are made up of individual from all walks of life. The leaflet distributors includes students, delinquents, housewives, retirees, jobless middles age men, most probably suffering from mid-life crisis. (Here, homogeneity, instead, would be attributed to other groups such as the contra-band cigarette-peddlers with common profile amongst them: male, of a certain age range, and social statuses of either foreign workers or illegal immigrants - that are just foreign workers who have reached ‘expiry dates’ on their work permits. This explains their role as social bacteria and germs that threaten the health of the rest of the social body upon interaction or exchange. In other words, they are the pseudo-cause of the pseudo-diarrhoea from consuming pseudo-milk that has pseudo-expired.)
Like the commuters and shoppers, the chief occupation of the leaflet distributors are ‘perfunctory’, the configuration is hardly complex. Although we are not interested in the advertisement in the leaflet; and although from the amount of paper litters, we have every reason to hate or despise them as part of the gang who cut trees or bulldozed rainforests, but by ‘taking’ one or two leaflets from them, we are definitely assisting them to end the banal existence where movement is reduced to that of a mechanical dolls in malls. By accepting the leaflet and crushing it into the next rubbish bin, it is more or less equivalent to clearing your own rubbish on the table of a fast food restaurant. From what I know they are not paid by the hours but by the amount of leaflets distributed, therefore by helping them, we are shortening their torture of standing under the sun outside the mall or suffocated by the lack of air or bad air in the station.
However, by introducing ‘taking’ (receiving or accepting) to those who are not susceptible to ‘giving’ (and rejecting), another problem arises: lazy bums who are too lazy to even do this minor task, of taking and throwing the leaflet since the distributors are not allow to do it themselves, to alleviate somebody else’s pain. But before we move on to the problematic of laziness, its pros and cons to be dealt in depth in the next section, I would like to briefly mention the consequences of laziness. A case in point, it is because we are lazy to walk, and we came up with the excuse that we need to move faster and other big reasons that has got to do with civilisation, that car was eventually invented. Therefore, we must be reminded that fatal car crash, one of the most ignoble ways to leave the world has laziness as one of its primary causes. It is because we are lazy that car crash existed!
Of late, I have noticed one opposite act of ‘taking’ from this culture itself that could help balance the morality-conscience guilt scales of all misers and selfish-big spenders -scales that are tilt, too much, to the metaphysical security of having fat bank accounts and the material comfort of excessive wasteful consumption, respectively. But before I introduce this group that we could perform the act on, let us give this group of people a name (a name which definitely isn’t their ‘true names’ in the Joubertian sense): the leaflet distributors.
The leaflet distributors are noticeable in the busy train stations and shopping malls. Much too noticeable, in fact, that we can detect and circumvent them like the many other obstacles to the commuter-ant movement algorithm during the rush hours in bus interchanges and train stations –
or like misplaced decorative rocks, getting in the way of those leisure Sunday strolls of families, friends or couples in their chosen commodity gardens. Sharing the public space, more or less, as stationery objects with handicap buskers or tissue-peddlers, the leaflet distributors, like the taxi-drivers – who, ironically, are always on the move – are not homogenous. They are made up of individual from all walks of life. The leaflet distributors includes students, delinquents, housewives, retirees, jobless middles age men, most probably suffering from mid-life crisis. (Here, homogeneity, instead, would be attributed to other groups such as the contra-band cigarette-peddlers with common profile amongst them: male, of a certain age range, and social statuses of either foreign workers or illegal immigrants - that are just foreign workers who have reached ‘expiry dates’ on their work permits. This explains their role as social bacteria and germs that threaten the health of the rest of the social body upon interaction or exchange. In other words, they are the pseudo-cause of the pseudo-diarrhoea from consuming pseudo-milk that has pseudo-expired.)
Like the commuters and shoppers, the chief occupation of the leaflet distributors are ‘perfunctory’, the configuration is hardly complex. Although we are not interested in the advertisement in the leaflet; and although from the amount of paper litters, we have every reason to hate or despise them as part of the gang who cut trees or bulldozed rainforests, but by ‘taking’ one or two leaflets from them, we are definitely assisting them to end the banal existence where movement is reduced to that of a mechanical dolls in malls. By accepting the leaflet and crushing it into the next rubbish bin, it is more or less equivalent to clearing your own rubbish on the table of a fast food restaurant. From what I know they are not paid by the hours but by the amount of leaflets distributed, therefore by helping them, we are shortening their torture of standing under the sun outside the mall or suffocated by the lack of air or bad air in the station.
However, by introducing ‘taking’ (receiving or accepting) to those who are not susceptible to ‘giving’ (and rejecting), another problem arises: lazy bums who are too lazy to even do this minor task, of taking and throwing the leaflet since the distributors are not allow to do it themselves, to alleviate somebody else’s pain. But before we move on to the problematic of laziness, its pros and cons to be dealt in depth in the next section, I would like to briefly mention the consequences of laziness. A case in point, it is because we are lazy to walk, and we came up with the excuse that we need to move faster and other big reasons that has got to do with civilisation, that car was eventually invented. Therefore, we must be reminded that fatal car crash, one of the most ignoble ways to leave the world has laziness as one of its primary causes. It is because we are lazy that car crash existed!
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