The works of the once Brussels based Surrealist artist are great to review, while creating my Photomontages as they offer a wonderful insight into the minds eye. Magritte’s work offers me a very important historical contextualisation and provides me with additional inspiration and education into why some of the photomontages work better than others.
If you wish to contact me please do so on the following email address
studio.melindajgibson@gmail.com
“Photography has broken free from being secondary and imitating the techniques of etching, painting or carpet-making. Having found its own way it is blossoming and fresh breezes bring a scent that is particular only to photography. New possibilities lie ahead.”
Alexander Rodchenko, for the Soviertskoye foto, 31st October 1934.
“It is the artist’s job to stay ahead of the curve, producing complex and nuanced worked that advance discourse. And it is the critic’s job to see the contained, not the container, and to produce a more accurate and generative framework for understanding the diversity and complexity of contemporary photographic practices.”
Carter Mull, notes in reponse to "foRm" by Kevin Moore.
“Farewell to my only friend
You've been so good to me
Now the carnival has ended
Let's set the tigers free”
Lyrics by Villagers
“Spanning many years, this epic tale of determination leaves a rousing message: be true to yourself and your dreams and one day, you shall succeed. Even if success means merely taking a decent picture of your best friend.”
Erik Kessels
“ a vast methodical fragment of an unknown planet’s entire history, with its architecture and its playing cards, with the dread of its mythologies and the murmur of its languages.”
Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius – Jorge Luis Borges
“To live,’ wrote Pessoa in his posthumously published The Book of Disquiet (1982), ‘is to be someone else.’ Oscar Wilde’s famous dictum is also apt here: ‘Man’, he wrote, ‘is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
Jennifer Higgie, Frieze Editors Blog about Krakow Photomonth.
“ To look up and look out is to look back in time.”
Professor Brian Cox
“We have an internet full of inspiration: The profound, the beautiful, the disturbing, the ridiculous, the trivial, the vernacular and the intimate. We have next-to-nothing cameras that record the lightest light, the darkest dark. This technological potential has creative consequences. It changes our sense of what it means to make. It results in work that feels like play, work that turns old into new elevates the banal...."
"Look after me and I will look after you
That’s something we both forgot to do
I find it hard to see your face,
Cannot remember it well enough, only the details such, then I see it in my head,
When I am with you its familiar and beautiful, and?
As night comes in I know it better, seeing it clear again."
Lyrics by Hot Chip
"I am the servant of my practice, it's an adventure."
“ with its emperors ad its seas, with its minerals and its birds and its fish, with its algebra and its fire, with its theological and metaphysical controversy.”
Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius – Jorge Luis Borges
"Sometimes when I get overexcited about this dematerialized moment, I think, 'Could you consider photography as a way of thinking?"
Charlotte Cotton, from a conversation with Aaron Schuman in What’s Next
“The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”
Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
“If you believe in what you are doing, then let nothing hold you up in your work. Much of the best work of the world has been done against seeming impossibilities. The thing is to get the work done.”
Dale Carnegie (1888-1955)
“And beyond the considered post, there is a need for even slower forms of communication like the research report, the documentary story and even (god forbid!) the academic monograph. These “old media” (a problematic concept, but more on that later) are essential because “new media” (an equally problematic concept) depend upon them for the material they re-mediate and circulate.”
David Campbell, from Twitter test article, 13th May 2009
"The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths."
“I know a way out!
If you catch my drift
"Hold it close to your heart
Let’s just breathe
So just count it off
The worst is over
At worst we standstill
Through the night”
Lyrics by The Morning Benders
Lyrics by Bright Eyes
“With tricky subject matter, there is always a delicacy and often an idiosyncrasy to Wolfgang’s eye that belongs only to him.”
“All meaningful and lasting change starts first in your imagination and then works its way out. Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
“Everybody knows, Everybody knows, Everybody knows, You only live a day
Lyrics by Elliot Smith
“No one ever imagined that Polaroid would go bankrupt,” William Ewing, director of Lausanne’s Musée de l’Elysée,“It’s like imagining Apple [computers] not being with us in 2025.”
“Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.”
William S. Burroughs
“The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.”
Walter Benjamin
“The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea.”
Jean-Luc Godard
“……ontologically, a photograph is a unique kind of picture, but a picture nonetheless, one that has radically transformed the piece of the world it describes, whether for artistic or journalistic or any other ends, but (obviously) has not transported it out of its picture-state into some nebulous truth-state.”
Tod Papageorge and the ‘truth’ of photography, January 8th 2010
"There are moments that I've had some real brilliance, you know, but I think they are moments. And sometimes, in a career, moments are enough."
Dennis Hooper died 29th May 2010.
“Miss me - but let me go
When I come to the end of the road
And the sun has set for me
I want no rites in a gloom-filled room.
Why cry for a soul set free?
Miss me a little--but not too long
And not with your head bowed low.
Remember the love that we once shared
Miss me--but let me go……”
Mary Frye (Proposed authorship as it is contested)
"My painting is visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question 'What does that mean'? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable."
René Magritte
“Why does man not see things? He is himself standing in the way: he conceals things.”
From Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols, ch.3, s.6, Walter Kaufmann translation.
There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad."
Salvador Dali, From Diary of a Genius.
“Modernity radically alters the nature of day-to-day social life and affects the most personal aspects of our experience.”
Anthony Giddens, Introduction, “Modernity and Self Identity”, 1991.
“Now here we are, enjoying this part of his work. Images like clouds of butterflies around the eyes of someone who felt the brevity of life, a perception unconnected with his illness, which as yet lay in the future, but linked to his awareness that everything is made up of fleeting glances, to be kept close at hand for a journey that sometimes get rough.”
Tonino Guerra, “A fond farewell, Instant Light, Tarkovsky Polaroids”, 2004.
“You realise that you can’t represent reality at all- that what you make represents nothing but itself, and therefore is itself reality.”
Gerhard Richter, Exert taken from the Exhibition catalogue from “Gerhard Richter Portraits” at National Portrait Gallery, 2009.
“An artistic image
is one that ensures its own development
its historical viability.
An image is a grain,
A self-evolving retroactive organism.
It is a symbol of the actual life,
As opposed to life itself.
Life contains death.
An image of life, by contrast,
Excludes it, or else sees in it
A unique potential
For the affirmation of life.”
Pg 56, “Instant Light, Tarkovsky Polaroids”, 2004.
“Art becomes a nostalgia for a potential experience, for what we might have had and might have experienced.”
Martin Heidegger, quote taken from an interview with John Stezaker.
“In all arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power……We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts…..”
Paul Valéry, ‘La Conquéte de l’abiquité,’ Paris. Taken from Pg. 211 “The Work of Art in the Age of mechanical reproduction.” Illuminations, Walter Benjamin, 1968.
“as the leaves of the hedge store the light
that the moment thought it had lost
as the nest of her wrists beats like the chest of a wren in the turning air
as the chorus of the earth find their eye in the sky
and unwrap them to each other in the teeming dark
hold everything dear”
Gareth Evans, 19th May 2005, taken from “Hold everything dear; Dispatches on survival and resistance” by John Berger” 2007.
"Don't undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible"
Edwin H. Land, Inventor of Instant Film (May 7th 1901 - March 1st 1991)
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