So, having relocated to a county (strikeout 'county' long ago i tried to only use one word: REGION as ALL labels of places became bigoted nonsense decades ago for cheap financial gain... ) Surrey-on-Sea, a region maybe five times more densely populated than my previous where there actually was a certain amount of real almost proper 'wilderness' - definition no machinery can be heard...(ohh god April 2020 when even the planes at 35000' stopped even if one rarely heard them! back to paradise! and i spent plenty of that and the next year up in the hills away from all - you cannot for a second do here! and only being away from people, their showoff clothing and stupid walking poles and STARING..[more on that later] ... their now total smallscreen addiction, their showoff dog addiction - all these things 'appetites' a genuine need-nothing person such as myself is fully aware of them being, even if i may be the only one left - but i observe....
bobbing around in my head since July - needing to be in the LIGHT of the coastal places...
Is the glorious Thomas Bernhard passage - but it won't work here: NOTHING works on a screen. You have to BE in his wonderful 350 odd pages with not even a paragraph break one simplest long stream of consciousness that is a battle as if with the only good woman on the planet and she knows it...
One is rewarded maybe 50 or so maybe 100 pages in by this wonderful section... no one else would have dared say.
And the moment i read it i knew how how right he was except he missed something that there is so much more value in keeping the best images in ones minds eye - for example the one i cannot ever forget and there is only one this year, from my thankfully dead father's birthday this June
But back to the hardest job of all - making some sense of this so warped (born) Britisher thing....
Though 100% a REAL rural person wandering real wildernesses and working salvging and looking after and rebuilding to LAST, rotting wood with old man ralph all my real childhood I bought myself up on the superb social realism photography of, among others
Henri Cartier-Bresson was a humanist photographer influenced by surrealism. Below are six tips that show how Bresson was influenced by both humanism and surrealism. Humanist photography is like photojournalism. But it's focused more on human elements than news.
And even sat on E Chambree Hardiman's knee i am told..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Chambr%C3%A9_Hardman
who i believe made SOME effort to look at humanity in a sort of arty farty philosophical mode....
BUt really.... i have landloped some months now ..i had no idea how it had become - absolutely everyone 99% of the time simply taking photos and films and photos .... many an hour i have sat and stared without them knowing i stare...
I will not join in.... but how does one 'say' that it is all an overwhelming end of times...in some ways?
Other than going around taking many photos of everyone stood taking photos, always...
As i may have done...
I wish i was a bit more of an 'artist' as something needs to be said/ shown...
For now.... the words i read in 2005 - courtesy Cecile Le Gal the great intellectual even if she lost her poise and grace and went VERY assumey ....
They made me smile then but you have to read the whole book...
from
https://marcelproust.blogspot.com/2007/09/thomas-bernhard-on-photography.html
Some entertainment from Thomas Bernhard. It is actually his narrator Murau in Extinction. (The Penguin edition of the book has a photograph on the cover which looks strangely like the one he talks about in the book and one of which actually prompted this rant. I wonder whose photograph is this. I have a different edition of the book with a rather drab cover.)
"Basically I detest photographs, and it has never occurred to me to take any, except for the ones taken in London and Sankt Wolfgang, and another that I took in Cannes. I have never owned a camera. I despise people who are forever taking pictures and go around with cameras hanging from their necks, always on the lookout for a subject, snapping anything and everything, however silly. All the time they have nothing in their heads but portraying themselves, in the most distasteful manner, though they are quite oblivious of this. What they capture in their photos is a perversely distorted world that has nothing to do with the real world except this perverse distortion, for which they themselves are responsible. Photography is a vulgar addiction that is gradually taking hold of the whole of humanity, which is not only enamored of such distortion and perversion but completely sold on them, and will in due course, given the proliferation of photography, take the distorted and perverted world of the photograph to be the only real one. Practitioners of of photography are guilty of one of the worst crimes it is possible to commit--of turning nature into a grotesque. The people in their photographs are nothing but pathetic dolls, disfigured beyond recognition, staring in alarm into the pitiless lens, brainless and repellent. Photography is a base passion that has taken hold of every continent and every section of the population, a sickness that afflicts the whole of humanity and is no longer curable. The inventor of the photographic art was the inventor of the most inhumane of all arts. To him we owe the ultimate distortion of nature and the human beings who form part of it, the reduction of human beings to perverse caricatures--his and theirs. I have yet to see a photograph that shows a normal person, a true and genuine person, just as I have yet to see one that gives a true and genuine representation of nature. Photography is the greatest disaster of the twentieth century. Nothing has ever sickened me so much as looking at photographs..."
It goes on for some more...
