On Dropping Out, if Only for a Moment
E)xistence comes...to be on its own by dropping out of the interminable
public and natural, universal and objective, time, by projecting itself to
its death, by closing in on itself, over the nullity of the past, the nothingness
of its future...
Alphonso Lingis, Deathbound Subjectivity
Photography, like life, is a deathbound activity. Time has been squeezed out of the equation. There is no more time. In the contemporary everyday, time is experienced, in what Alphonso Lingis in his book Deathbound Subjectivity calls ‘the public line’, as a series of ‘nows endlessly succeeding one another.’
© Becky Beasley 2007
Ticklish Spots and Weak Spots
The skin is thus always in part immaterial, ideal,
ecstatic, ‘A Skin
That Walks’.
Steven Connor
In The Book of Skin, Steven Connor, examines the cultural history of skin. Until the 17th century, skin was understood as something which ‘registers other things, primarily the state of health or what was called complexion.’ The politics of the marginalization and silence are already thus in place: It's interesting that our word 'constitution' has taken over from 'complexion': something which is constituted, something which stands, and is as it were in place, rather than something which is folded together out of multiple elements. But the skin stood for that, as if this was written on the skin without the skin being visible, so that the skin is everywhere spoken of, everywhere implicated, but somehow never itself in the frame.
© Becky Beasley 2006
THe sitters
The Necessities of Verticality and The Absurd in Life: The Work of
Ricardo Alcaide
What is important, it seems to me, is not so much to defend a culture whose
existence has never kept a man from going hungry, as to extract, from what
is called culture, ideas whose compelling force is identical to that of hunger.
Antonin Artaud
A tramp’s clothes are bad, but they conceal far
worse things.
Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell
There is no way of knowing why each man makes his choices in life. They call it, making your bed. Reasons may be given or projected, but neither they nor any other kind of silence may provide a real answer to the essential, ultimately unanswerable questions. Each man falls for his own reason, by his own account. The account is the story, and for each there are many. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.
© Becky Beasley 2005