Morocco Photo Essay
Looking at the above image by Peress and looking through many of images as I have been over the past few weeks, I cannot say how, but he seems to have influenced some of my concepts about framing & composition I have adopted in my most recent Morocco Photo Essay. I am not sure how this has happened. But I feel certain that he has now that I have researched more about his work and methodologies. I first looked at his amazing powerful work on the Iran revolution of 1979 Telex Iran about 4-5 years ago and only recently picked it up again about 1 month ago which is after I returned from my Morocco shoots. I can accept that things we see, read and feel have a subliminal effect on us that perhaps surfaces in some other aspect of our lives at some other time. Peress’ images seem to manifest multiple decisive moments in one frame. He is not interested in just one single moment but in what else is occuring in and around the camera lense. In some ways his abrupt, close to the edge cropping actually communicates the limitations of capturing ‘life in one frame’ whilst simultaneously embodying the concept of the simultaneity of life…
Essays and photo essays…
I have been absorbed over the past few week with my Morocco Photo Essay as well as my essay on Gilles Peress. I have found the research I have been doing on Gilles Peress really fascinating. I just wish that he had been available for an interview at some point but it’s a bad time for him at the moment and he said (via Heidi) that he wouldn’t have been able to help me even a month ago as has been away. Maybe next time. It’s just that there isn’t an awful lot out there on him. I guess that’s not a negative thing it just means I can really get stuck into what there is. His interview from the Conversations with History series was especially revealing about who he his, his methodologies, his outlook, concepts and so on. I feel very engaged with some of his theories about photography-that it’s an ‘open text’, that it operates in a language of it’s own that is started by the author-photographer and completed by the recipient-viewer. Telex Iran tears me part each time I look at it. I think it is an amazing body of work and charged with such power. The more I look at it the more it speaks to me.
Gilles Peress, Telex Iran