[Draft from 16/2/09: this was sitting on blogger in draft format. I just over-eagerly deleted it before noticing that it had, in fact, never been published properly...so herewith, belatedly.]
Photography very rarely captivates me in the way that paintings often do - I remember being quite struck by Bill Henson's work when I saw a career retrospective of his a few years back, and I do like Gregory Crewdson (and there were also a couple of others in the NGV Guggenheim exhibition which took my fancy), but those are very much the exception rather than the rule. Which is odd, I guess, since the medium ought to appeal to me (I'm ruefully remembering a short story entitled "The Photographer" that I wrote several years ago - tres melodramatic, as was and in some ways remains my wont), but there's no accounting for (one's own) taste. Still, Gursky's work appealed to me a bit, without resonating particularly deeply - they're large in scale in more than one sense, and finely detailed...several are stitched together from multiple shots to create a vague sense that things are just slightly askew (I spent some time wondering what sorts of lenses he'd used to generate that distortive effect, before overhearing a tour leader explaining what had really happened). His subjects are diverse, from large natural landscapes to F1 pitstops and supermarket aisles. [17/5/09 - this no doubt penetrating analysis to remind ever uncompleted now, alas...]
(w/ Kim)
