Mountainfield Studies

Getting ready to head to the Banff Centre in Alberta later this week, after attending the College Art Association Conference in NYC.  I plan to continue working on the most recent segment of my "field studies" series that I began while in Iceland last June - tentatively titled, Mountainfield Studies, although this may branch off into Snowfield and Icefield studies (it kind of already has) depending on how I respond to the topography of the Canadian Rockies - and whether or not I decide to bust out the rolls of plastic and tinfoil again, or if I end up working with other materials that I come across or seek out.  I won't know until I get there, I suppose, but I've definitely got ice and mist on the brain, having just finish a little sci-fi novella by H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness.  Still sorting through some other readings on mountains as well, and heading back into François Laruelle's writing to revisit some thinking around the photograph(ic) as elemental impulse.

I plan to post a bit from Banff, and will write more about my thought process as well, most likely. For now, I've posted a group of working studies - a bit of a (potential) new direction that uses composite imagery rather than sequential (or partial) multiples.

But in closing, why not have a few words from Laruelle?  The following passages are excerpted from The Concept of Non-Photography:

What really happens in the framing of a shot? 

There is an a priori photographic intuition that gives not such and such a determinate image, but the very dimension or the sphere as such of the image in its excess or its transcendence in principle over its technical ingredients. The photographer 'images' from the outset beyond perception, albeit with the index and the support of perception - [s]he intuits from the very beginning an ultra-perceptual image, irreducible to perception's powers of analysis and resolution, and of synthesis. 

...a photographic apparatus does not transform one into the other the real and the image, but produces images from other images. 

For the photographer, there are only ever photographic images, an unlimited flux of photos certain of which are virtual, framed without being shot, and others that are technologically effectuated or produced and that now have explicitly as their support the representations of perception, etc.

This is why we shall maintain that the photo is an emergent, novel representation, a discovery, and it precedes photography, that it is given before the operation that manifests it in relation to experience. 

- François Laruelle 

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