Sunday, October 12, 2014

Urban Guerrilla Photography

This album of photographs was shot while I was walking through the Bronx on a clear day, just after the sun had risen over the rambling hills of the neighborhood of Riverdale.  A diaphanous sheen of light stretched across the air, refracting into small spots of glare which stung the eyes.

But the photographs on Facebook's Autonomy! page have this unifying theme:  The digital modifications are meant to draw one's attention visually to the apparent ominous, spectral aura of significance attached to objects of the everyday urban landscape. As we pass these objects and structures in the spaces we inhabit, we seldom consider that each is the congelation of many particular, definite forms of labor brought together in their bodily form as constituent elements of a historically determined social process of living activity. 

The digital negation or accentuation of some of their properties - color, texture, brightness, sharpness, saturation, hue - vis-a-vis their essential existence, presents itself to the subject as something alive, or at least as the offspring of life in which the human beings who existed behind the labor no longer seems to vanish in them. Instead of the fixed object we pass by each day, a flux is assumed in the multiplicity of forms that manifest in the whole of each photograph's being that loosens its rigidity into a fluid Becoming as on a plane in which material bodies spontaneously form constituent assemblages in the production of an nterminable series of images and imaging. 

This endless imaging is simultaneously product and producer of the real and symbolic, the actual and virtual possibilities and their subjective content in the imagination of the unconscious awakened partly in these new ways of seeing and thinking about the ordinary things that make up, as Foucault once intoned, 'the humanistic world of reified labor.' - Ras

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