“The final reason for the need to photograph everything lies in the very logic of consumption itself. To consume means to burn, to use up – and therefore, to need to be replenished. As we make images and consume them, we need still more images, and still more. But images are not a treasure for which the world must be ransacked; they are precisely what is at hand wherever the eye falls.”
Susan Sontag
“It seems positively unnatural to travel for pleasure without taking a camera along. Photographs will offer indisputable evidence that the trip was made.”
Susan Sontag, On Photography
“Real time suggests that represented time (whether mechanical, electronic or digital) can be asymptotic to the instantaneous – with no delay, no distance, no deferral. (…) An extraordinary extended technical reproducibility serves to mimic living flux, the irreversible, spontaneity, that which carries singularity away in the movement of existence without return.”
Susan Sontag, On Photography
“Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision.”
“The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past. Aesthetic distance seems built into the very experience of looking at photographs, if not right away, then certainly with the passage of time. Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.”
Susan Sontag, On Photography
“To photograph is to frame. And to frame is to exclude.”
Susan Sontag, On Photography
“Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera responds to it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks.”
Susan Sontag
“I cannot describe anything more clearly about reality than my own relation to reality. And this has always something to do with haziness, insecurity, inconsistency, fragmentation or what have you.”
Gerhard Richter
My name is Ian Talbot and I am an artist and photographer living in London.
This blog is intended as an insight into the research, thinking and connections that precede the projects I undertake. I will also show new and experimental work. Naturally, not all of the work shown here will eventually make the cut. These are very much 'works in progress'...
You can see a complete collection of my work at my website:
Ian Talbot :: Objectively Speaking