It’s been a while…a long while. I finally sat down and started looking at my photography work again, to edit, post-process, and try and make sense of what I’ve been observing. It took me a few weeks to really grasp what I’ve been doing:
Provoke as Concept
Across the various genres of photography, one question tends to link them all together: can a photograph objectively represent reality? While that remains to be seen, it was certainly a topic of interest for Kōji Taki, the Japanese critic and philosopher who founded the now infamous three-part photographic magazine series Provoke. Obsessed with the notion that photography in the 1950s and 1960s was driven by American and Japanese capitalist ideology, Taki strove to strip away these influences in an attempt to create what he considered to be ‘real’ documentary photography. Provoke, which was considered to be politically radical at the time of its release in the late 1960s, has received a lot of attention among academic scholars due to its timing and distinctive photographic style comprising rough, blurred, and out-of-focus (are-bure-boke) images, which have since become a trademark unique to Japanese photography.
EXPERIENCE ≠ GROWTH
The guy came into the room, but I avoided eye contact. I only saw his tattooed arms and the piercing gun in his gloved-hand. I took off my shirt and lied on my back as instructed, the cold leather immediately adhering to my bare skin. As the piercer sanitized his equipment and opened a new needle, I blurted out, “you’re gonna numb it first, right?”
“That kinda defeats the purpose,” he retorted snidely.
I’m ready to die, mentally bracing myself for some serious pain.
“Ready?”
“Fuck no, I’m not ready for this,” I thought to myself. “Yeah, I guess,” I answered in a shaky voice.
He positioned the gun around my right nipple, and I felt the cold steel sting as it touched my skin.
“Am I really doing this shit?” I thought.
“Here we go. One, two—” he said.
There was no three.
TOMATO JUICE
Maybe it makes us realize just how much time has passed.
That, in turn, sends the mind into shock and we unconsciously align ourselves up with how we’re ‘supposed’ to act and think.
That in itself is a lot to think about.
YOU SMELL LIKE PISS, I SMELL LIKE PUKE
No matter what I went through or what I did, she never asked any questions and yet always seemed to understand exactly what I was going through. I knew I could always confide in her without fear of repercussion, and that in itself is invaluable in such a judgmental world as is this. Fuck, I could only aspire to be like that.
HONESTY
As I venture out each day to school and see the same fucking streets and same fucking people; if I were to artistically interpret that via photography, what would I do? That’s been my new question. But luckily, I didn’t have to search far because my answer came from a fellow classmate: honest[y].