LUCAS BLALOCK

Afterimage by Lucas Blalock:

11. In my pictures, I’m always looking for language adequate to my own subjectivity, my own messed-up feelings, and this is something I hope viewers might be able to mirror for themselves. Photography is nothing like a verbal or written language in most respects, but, like language, it is in common use. We all ‘speak’ photography and this makes it a particularly interesting form in which to work. Like language, it changes as our use of it alters, shifting to accommodate new uses, evolving socially, and making space for importations and slang. There is a root system in both, but neither is essentially itself—it becomes by being used.

I’m interested in photography the way a poet might be interested in English or Spanish. What can you do with this thing we use every day? How can it be stretched? What can it accommodate? Although my work does have a lot of intervention and gesture in it, I don’t see it as self-expression. It’s more like co-relation or triangulation—trying to drum up potential relationships we both (you and I) share through photography to the world.

So.

How can I get photography to address the real conditions of my experience?

What can I ask photography to do?

From Why Must the Mounted Messenger be Mounted?, by Lucas Blalock, Objektiv #26. Join Blalock, Carmen Winant and Elle Pérez with Objektiv Press during Paris Photo. On Saturday, November 15, at 11h., Delpire & Co. will host a presentation by Winant, followed by a discussion with her, Pérez and Blalock over coffee and croissants.