Botticelli and Cat Shit

I am having a rather dramatic wave of self doubt if that helps you believe I am human .. it’s part of the process as I move towards sharing the series of works from the very private and intimate creations from the series 'No Place Like Home' by slapping them on the wall for people to judge. The viewer inevitably brings a criteria and motivation to the work often in conflict with my own increasingly lost message, my voice drowned out even in my own space. Hence the statement if you can be arsed to read it.

Our shear unadulterated arrogance mostly masked by social convention occasionally shows itself. I often define what are called mental health issues especially those with depression as a consequence of being connected to the brutal reality, the realisation of a vast, cold, heartless universe, so vast in time and space that nothing matters. What a friend of mine calls my 'Godless gaze'. Fly too close to the sun again and again and it becomes all we know and what was a balanced existence is a fading memory.

So desperate to find our way back from the agony of self-knowledge to the stable ground of denial that has long since departed, a craving nostalgia for a life less complicated and damaged, fuelling an increasing sense of isolation and existential loneliness no longer able to be hidden by an increasingly flimsy persona. The standards set by our ego become the enemy to self love. We can live too long perhaps as to pass through multiple identities of which mine has always been unstable from the start, giving me empathy for anyone less comfortable with this constant and unnerving dislocation. I'm drawn to it like a fly to cat shit, my sub-conscious antennae seeking a parity with the like-minded but the existential loss I carry, I am ashamed too say, always defined 'others' as more complete than myself regardless of their own suffering.

Silence is very important but it can be dangerous to, we can make assumptions of the unspoken and very often a different truth can only come out if the right question is asked. My impertinence that Sierra and I had that unspoken understanding during the capture of these images of their decapitated body both as the reclining muse and here in the twisting female stereotype inherited from the representations of the male gaze of art history. A conventional beauty interrupted by the scars as memories of a recent past too unbearable. A home, if you can call it that, has become an allegory for depression, filth accompanies despair; if you don't intend to live, why hoover. Nothing matters.

The unadulterated documentation is empathy, if I am invited to join my subject in the abyss I feel it is my responsibility  to return with the evidence (if I make it back). It would be a great failure to sanitise such an extraordinary gift in the misguided presumption of dignity that only belongs in the mind of the privileged. I recall, deeply hallucinating from food poisoning in a small village in Kerala; I cling onto the edge of what I perceive to be an abyss, terrified to let go not knowing what awaited me. How disappointing and what an opportunity missed.

I am celebrating survival as beauty. I am celebrating Sierra's beauty because I feel less able to celebrate my own.

Botticelli and Cat Shit #28729 © Richard Ansett 2020

A Mosquito Trapped in Amber

I am aware of the increasingly high production values of both film and television drama and even some reality shows. Many films and television programs now have incorporated incredibly high standards of photography, beautiful light and composition that envelop and support their narrative. This work is equal to the abundance of aesthetically beautiful but ultimately shallow still photography that floods the market presented as fine art photography. It would be fair to say that perhaps there is some element of chicken and the egg going on here, in so far as it is the still image that has inspired film to raise its game incorporating classic and contemporary photographic themes. This is exciting, we can see our work and ideas seeping into the zeitgeist, becoming part of a standardized repertoire to reflect modern life but I feel that many still images defined as fine art now feel like nothing more than a still frame lifted from somewhere else.

So, the challenge now and initial arbiter of quality for any photograph, is whether it is capable of elevating the technical aesthetic to a level that can only be explored by the still image. What defines a great photograph above and beyond a transferable aesthetic to the moving image?

First and foremost there must be an acknowledgement within the work itself that there is a reason for interrupting the timeline, for cutting into the inevitable flow and observing the content 'In stasus''. As a portraitist I am particularly interested in the complexity of emotion expressed by the human face, the 1000s of barely observable muscle movements that betray our emotional state, only fleeting and overlapping in film, barely registered as part of a complex narrative. With the still image there is a frozen moment that can be scrutinised outside of the normative timeline. We can hold an emotion and not let go of it like a mosquito trapped in amber.

I have never found that two dimensional beauty is enough, both in people and art, it is fleeting, seductive and disarming, I want to possess it definitely but once I have consumed it I tire of it quickly, I find myself only seeing the flaws. Beauty is a successful mask that hides that which is most interesting in us; it is more often an instrument of deception than an arbiter of knowledge or truth. Beyond this shiney surface is a seam of complexity that transcends conventional time. Normative beauty has become (and perhaps has always been) part of our medication to assist in our survival as we engage with the complexities of our present, it is the art equivalent of Prozac and many images commercially fulfill this transient criteria, as amyl nitrate hits my brain and floods me with pleasure for a few seconds, so does much work we are exposed to everyday satiate our desire as we drive past a poster or flick through a magazine but it fades quickly and leaves me with a headache only cured by the consumption of more of the same. Further I find myself seeking the flaws in anything presented as perfection hence I cannot spend too long with that which is presented as close to it, the longer I am with it the sooner I become bored, then angered and finally threatened by it as I fail to compete on an existential level with the message of purity. So what elevates an image from the morass of perfectly lovely but ultimately shallow beauty to one of lasting value?

The inclusion of the immediate historic narrative within the image, the cars, clothes, technology, anything which is present in the landscape that is representative of the era within which we are passing through, deliberately or incidentally, is an essential element in increasing an images chances of future value, this may include elements that in the present moment might feel unattractive, especially to the nostalgist; a MacDonalds sign, a rubbish bin, a Toyota Prius. Included in this is the technical make up of the production of the work itself, the very nature of the image can indicate the era of its creation. The addiction to nostalgia as a prop to elevate work in the moment in the pursuit of the transient 'hit' from our audience is my main gripe; we are sacrificing our works' long term value reducing it ultimately to the fish and chip paper of history. I see few reasons to create a photograph that merely replicates an era of photography long dead and this has been my argument against the use of analogue film techniques in my article 'FILM IS DEAD' for Hunger magazine. There are some exceptions that play off these ideas by juxtaposing contemporary content with nostalgic processes but mostly I immediately disregard all works that do not negotiate in some way with the present. 

The path of least resistance is not the solution to great work or work with any sense of legacy, mostly we must explore and celebrate the present and if we find the present to be a place we do not want to explore or that we do not find attractive, we should examine why that is within ourselves but ultimately we should be vigilant to the unique powers of the defining moment, the value of suspending emotion and action in time, creating an immediate history.

Dog Shit UK

Photographers are under no obligation to be kind.

Image_066, Dog Shit, UK, 2009 © Richard Ansett