Photos of Thomas Wågström

[samstevens]

The author of this photo “review” in The New Yorker, Karl Ove Knausgård, is an acclaimed Norwegian writer known for a series of autobiographical novels (which are on my list but I haven’t yet read). I think it’s a case of a writing accompaniment to photos that doesn’t need or try to pump up the photos with words. The writing provides interesting thoughts (and imagined imagery itself) inspired by them.

The photographer is Thomas Wågstrōm

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/thomas-wagstroms-pictures-of-the-living-and-the-lifeless

 

Quote

Daily life does not invite such questions. Instead, it breaks them down and denies them space, for although mystery is all around us it doesn’t take the form of mystery. It is disguised, for instance, as the rubbish you take out to the rubbish bin on a spring evening, as the margarine you put back in the fridge and the knife you try to rinse the yellow remains off of while the tap water is still cold and the water just slides off the butter instead of carrying it down into the drain, as a pubic hair stuck to your skin which causes your piss to divide so that one stream hits the porcelain rim and a sprinkle of tiny drops of urine settles on the bathroom floor, or as the bedsheet you know you ought to change, but can’t be bothered to, remains yet another night, rank and crinkled and somehow saturated with carnality. That our lives are made up of such minor occurrences, which take place, as it were, close to the ground, with no room for an external gaze, is the main reason that I have had this picture, of the black water with the seal pushing its way up through it, hanging on the wall above my desk—it opens up a different space, and lets me breathe.

[c_watson1]

Saw those and thought "cryptic for cryptic's sake."

Much more impressed by the article on Kwame Braithwate simply for the number of people it influenced:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/afterword/the-photographer-of-the-black-is-beautiful-movement

 

 

 

[samstevens]

40 minutes ago, c_watson1 said:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/afterword/the-photographer-of-the-black-is-beautiful-movement

Appreciate the link. 

Glad both exist.

Cryptic for cryptic’s sake? Not necessarily. But also not necessarily a negative.

“Vision is the art of seeing what’s invisible to others.”
—Jonathan Swift

“Comes the tipping point in life, when we decide to a ‘stop and search’ and our emotional police bring us to a standstill. This allows us to scan all the little details in the spectrum of our being; scour all fuzzy or cryptic elements that are floating around in our mind and restore the fault lines in the cluttered tale of our life.” 
—Erik Pevernagie, Belgian painter/writer