2023 Instagram Galleries
During 2023, I’m posting a photo a day for the whole year.
The photographs are taken over the last 20 years or so and the Instagram project was a way of forcing me to share some of them. As the year has gone on, I’m sometimes regretted it, for the same reasons I’d never done something like this before: images that are actually quite important to me plucked out of context, bodies of work reduced to trite examples of the whole, the arbitrary superficiality of the unit of a week, the anxiety of ‘likes’, and simply the hassle of it. But I’ve enjoyed it and as some followers have been kind enough to ask for more information on the images, I’ve used the website to provide a bit more context on them below.
Week 10: Descent (March 6-12, 2023)
New album on SN Variations. Taken in Falmouth harbours. Focus stacking. Realise that these images are not Instagram friendly
Week 9: Flight (February 27-March 5, 2023)
Bas Ader, Lartique, Decisive moment
Week 8: On Dirt (February 20-26, 2023)
I could fill a lot of galleries with the pictures I have taken of dirty things. I like dirty things. I like dirt.
Week 7: Apertures (from the inside out) (February 13-19, 2023)
Apertures are at the heart of photography. Cameras of all kinds make use of apertures, both for the photographer to conceive the image, and for light to form an image on film, or a digital sensor. To take a photograph we see through. All the WJT Mitchell stuff about seeing. As a musician… every other image is of a sacred, or quasi-sacred context. in many of the images, the frame of the aperture is blurred - a function of the depth of field, in turn a function of the way camera optics work. The absolute darkness of the surrounding image is a conceit of photography. Cameras do this more than our eyes do, and if you want to, you can make a camera do it more than the camera would of its own accord.
Monday: Los Angeles; Tuesday: Church in Sul, Portugal and the site of my film, Of This Parish; Wednesday: Looking out from ?? Castle towards the Great Orm, North Wales; Thursday: grafiti place, Lisbon, Portugal; Friday: looking out from the car deck of the Channel Tunnel, Folkestone, Kent towards the Folkestone White Horse, carved into Cheriton Hill in 2003 by Charlie Newington; Saturday: our utility room window, Cornwall. The red of the drying jumper links to the carpet in Sul and has an ecclesiastical feel to it.
Week 6: Quiet photographs (February 6-12, 2023)
I’m interested in the idea of the sound of a photograph, just as I am in colour in music. Using the adjective in a medium in which it is not usually used can serve to make it all the more powerful because you actually have to think about what it might mean in this context. Quietness if of course, in the eye of the beholder and if it just so happens that there was acoustic quiet at each of the sights at which these photographs were taken, well that’s not the point.
Week 5: Flocking (January 30th - February 5th, 2023)
It was an experiment to post 7 pictures of the same thing. As expected, my Instagram followers appeared to grow weary, liking the photos less as the week went on. I even felt guilt, what will they think. But I experience my own photographs in series most of the time and I like them for it. Were it not for the vicissitudes of these digital platforms, I would probably share them like this more often as it may be, that just as with this feed as a whole, meaning —such as it is— derives from the composite, from the collective, and not from the individual components. There’s something of the OOO in here. These pictures were all taken within 5 minutes of oneanother, on 35mm film in Berlin around 2000.
Week 4: Sight (January 16-22, 2023)
Jesus is from a Church in Sul, Portugal; Tuesday, The Donkey is in the grounds of Berry Pomeroy castle, Devon; Wednesday, my younger son in 3D glasses in Totnes, Devon; Thursday, poet and writer Larry Lynch on the roof of his father’s church in Cornwall. We were filming On What it Might Mean to be Spinning. Friday, what looks like a model is a real kitten, photographed through a pet shop window in Hong Kong; Saturday, This doll was lost property in Haldon Forest, Devon. Sunday, perhaps they look at least as much like twin snorkels, but for the purposes of this week’s theme, they looked like eyes to me, but like the eyes of the donkey, blinkered. These were on the roof of a warehouse in Los Angeles.
Week 3: Pairs (January 23-29, 2023)
Week 2: Colourfield (January 9-15, 2023)
Week 1: Beach Distributions (January 2-8, 2023)
Week 0: Self portrait to start the new year (January 1st, 2023)
