“I drifted through Haarlem with my wife, my camera, a tripod and a big white flag. Some places made me stop and react with a gesture. I had set the camera and asked my wife to pull the trigger at me while I was holding a white flag. No shots were fatal.“
This images, records/documents of performed gestures accompanied by text are in a way also a drift in my own practice. In researching the landscape my topic of interest as the place of mutual shaping of the land by the people and how the land would shape the people I always placed myself outside of the frame and at distance from my subject, a distant observer. I believe the photographer, photography has the role of raising questions and that way of placing myself would be the way to do it.
The playfulness, the deep personal experience of the drift, but also the idea of objective observations associated with the drift, made me wonder how I could I maintain the same analytical distance to the subject but place myself inside the image, the frame as a document of the drift.
My answer was constructing a gesture in response to a place would complicate in a interesting way the document aspect of the photograph.
The gesture of planting a flag, claiming a territory for another country it gives visceral feelings to the viewer. A white flag is too often confused with giving up, a sign of surrender, ironically with pace although it requires a conflict to take place. No state makes an official white flag, never a white flag is made other than to support an idea. By removing all the colors from a flag, I intended to strip away the political suppressive/partisan, gregarious qualities of a flag. The flag, the gesture it is there to claim the text that accompanies the image. The text is by no means a title replacement, or a redundant description, I use it as an active component of the image, the end result being a duple-edged sword, it’s purpose is to, hopefully, incite the viewer to question his beliefs, his political preferences, his way of relating to life, to reality.
The gestures and the text are the results of my feelings and the thoughts provoked by those places.
It is a ludic experiment, it contains irony, humor, but not to be taken too lightly
The playfulness, the deep personal experience of the drift, but also the idea of objective observations associated with the drift, made me wonder how I could I maintain the same analytical distance to the subject but place myself inside the image, the frame as a document of the drift.
My answer was constructing a gesture in response to a place would complicate in a interesting way the document aspect of the photograph.
The gesture of planting a flag, claiming a territory for another country it gives visceral feelings to the viewer. A white flag is too often confused with giving up, a sign of surrender, ironically with pace although it requires a conflict to take place. No state makes an official white flag, never a white flag is made other than to support an idea. By removing all the colors from a flag, I intended to strip away the political suppressive/partisan, gregarious qualities of a flag. The flag, the gesture it is there to claim the text that accompanies the image. The text is by no means a title replacement, or a redundant description, I use it as an active component of the image, the end result being a duple-edged sword, it’s purpose is to, hopefully, incite the viewer to question his beliefs, his political preferences, his way of relating to life, to reality.
The gestures and the text are the results of my feelings and the thoughts provoked by those places.
It is a ludic experiment, it contains irony, humor, but not to be taken too lightly
