Words

Included in this section are samples of my writing, from artist statements to lectures, speeches, research and technical papers. Most are extracts from larger works and include a brief outline of their purpose or context. While writing is important for me, it remains in the service of my images or image making, rather than for its own sake. For example, the following entry from my 2001 research notes clarifies my relationship between words and images.

‘Though images exist for which there are no words, without words images remain mere latent possibilities, suspended between faith and the unknown. An inversion of Wittgenstein’s picture theory of language if you like. Thinking through pictures brings us closer to their image origins, but antecedence on its own can not resolve the past. Images live in our presence. Their apprehension takes us on a journey, into imaginative portals. How this happens we still don’t understand much beyond an image’s aesthetic presence, and even this gets confusing. Rather, it is words that lead us to new possibilities, it is words that breath life into our pictures. Without words our pictures would struggle to exist. To experience an image without words would be a very privileged thing.’

Though I have never considered myself a writer, as an image maker I nevertheless need to, and also enjoy writing about what I do. While the ‘inherent ambiguity’ of images remains central to my love of images and acknowledgment of the inexhaustible possibilities of great works of art, the strictures words place on interpretation can also be either assistants or prison bars. My hope is that my words function more as guides or suggestions, rather than barriers. Frederick Sommer, after Giambattista Vico defined poetic logic as the marriage of pictorial logic and linguistic logic. This is not photography, but something more interesting than photography, though of course it would be less interesting without the photography. But this is also how words function for me, and is the spirit in which I offer them for your consideration.

Les Walkling