109- Dissolve

109- Dissolve
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

This image has been surprisingly popular. For me it was both an experiment in texture and an example of what happens when you attempt to model society's moires rather than caring for what is needed.

I used to think it was just the toil of life that wore our bodies out, now I realize many other things can as well. For example, my psoriasis and arthritus ages my body while for others living the life of a model member of society gently erases their minds.

108 - God is Light

108 - God is Light
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

Many people believe that their god lives in specific buildings or objects, rather than suffusing the very environment. I do not believe that we can trap gods in bricks and mortar, paint, carved wood or worked metal - just as I do not believe in being only able to invoke the past by living lives that are some replica of past lives. As a result I do not have to live to feel guilty passing from the traditional to the modern, or vice versa, everything is human expression.

A big block for my local religion is the reliance on rote - the same old images, the same old words, and no potential for much to be added to the sum. I am looking for some fresh images, ones which speak to people like me rather than having to live with those that speak to other people.

107 -Memories

107 -Memories
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

Not being able to participate in a former era is no reason why we cannot attempt to recreate it. That's recreate, not replace our current reality with a former reality. Imagine remembering a food that you used to have when you were a child, we might decide to recreate it in our kitchen, sell it even. It is not the original, but we can refresh that part of our mind which recorded the flavors.

There is nothing wrong in this, but there would be a problem if we began to pressurize other people into having this dish simply because that would make them more real by engaging in a 'tradition'.

You are not more real, more genuine by replicating a past activity, you are simply at risk of becoming an overbearing tyrant sapping the will of other people to engage in activities which might be more appropriate to the current and future realities.

I enjoyed producing two images in one that took their inspiration from two eras that my wife lived through. I too, of course.

106 - Style Power

106 - Style Power
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

I just love strong colours, and the use of high contrast to filter out unwanted data. Some people love to fill their homes with bits and pieces, swaths of material and intricately moulded furniture, often to make their surroundings 'homey' or 'comfortable', or even 'traditional'.

Let's take each of these in turn:

Homey. Does surrounding oneself with an excess of blurred print, line and carving make a place more like home? Is this like the fluff on the inside of a nest? Or, is this an image of a country life idealized in books? I do not mind people finding homey in these surroundings, I object to the snooty way they put down any other kind of homey. When I look around the world I see homey in all kinds of situations, many of them having no relation to a North European chintz dream. Our flat is quite minimal, we feel fully relaxed and at home - and the issue of having high-maintenance flounces and carvings does not exist. We rarely have to iron, and as a result we can find the repose in reading a book that others find working over the ironing board. Homey for me is my wife dozing off in the evening under a blanket and a cat on our reclining sofa in front of the television with a book beside her.

Comfortable. Comfort something solely detected by the skin, or do the eyes and ears also play a part. Perhaps we can define homey as comfort for the eye, and assume we are going to be considering the skin here? How many square yards or metres of padded surface do I and my family and friends need? A larger sofa might make our room more crowded or push us to buying a larger property, neither of which appeals as crowded is less homey and more space means more money and time invested in something we do not really need. Comfortable should not interfere with homey, they must compromise somewhere.

Traditional. If we all organized a huge baby swop with other couples around the world for each new-born child, one would find that, for example, a Polish-born baby brought up in the Amazon region would have no Polish but all Amazonian ideals - whatever they might be. Traditional is our local take on what is possible, largely absorbed as children. In terms of homey and comfortable in the home, traditional is impossible to achieve because the society and technology have changed - we can only seek to replicate a part, often only on a visual level. We have to make a choice between the potentially worn antique and the new replica, neither of which are 'true' as in being the actual conditions that occurred, say, 150 years ago Since tradition is a replica of the random place our family lived in when we were born, what locks us into continuing it?

Anyway this image has no chintz, it has no sop for a tradition that requires the total image area to include whatever information was present on the scene. This is an image intended to allow you mind to fill in the missing chintz - your chintz, not my chintz or the chintz of that person who lives on the other side of town or just across the road or around the other side of the planet. Your chintz.

105 - A Fear of Falling Forward

105 - A Fear of Falling Forward
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

Still, divergence or not, I still had some images to process. This one captures for me, deliberately, some of the sense of growing up in the 1970s in Britain with that background threat of world destruction combined with the knowledge that the world was about to be changed.

The world did change for us, but not in the way we expected.

The Soviet threat and bombings to do with Northern Ireland - just what we needed while growing up. As an aside I wonder how many Irish Americans who helped pay for weapons for Northern Ireland raged impotently when the World Trade Centre was attacked - perhaps the fear they felt then can help them understand what they were doing to innocent children like me in a distant country.

104 - Blue John

104 - Blue John
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

If the previous image diverged in terms of the apparent and actual, this one used a new technique to achieve this. The original was very dark and poorly focussed - nothing more than one might expect from using a camera in a dark bar with no flash. However, the guy in the image I had not seen in a couple of years as he has moved back to Britain, and from that point having this image of him in an environment he is so familiar with seemed important.

While I achieved a composition that satisfied me, there seemed little else I could salvage. Anything I tried resulted in a darker image that quickly bleached if brightened. The information I was interested in was there, but the tools I was using could not differentiate between what I wanted and what I did not.

So, I decided to use the smear tool under the control of the mouse to resolve some of the problems, but quickly realized that I could apply the technique to the whole image. No pixel remains in its original place, and yet what is left is an image that contained only the information that I was interested in - the composition, plus an adequately bright image with no bleaching.

If the previous image was the first step on my latest divergence, this one was to establish the technique I would rely on to continue that divergence.

103 - Old Poland

103 - Old Poland
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

I played around with an image from the local village museum to create what at first looks like a replica of one of those old postcards - except a closer examination reveals that it has a very much different textture close up.

The past is a playground for our minds, material that people believe they understand and which we can use to convey meaning. This is the first in a digression away from my path, although like so often I can only recognise it as such now that some time has passed since I worked on this image. Here the apparent and the actual images diverge, are separated. Being distant and far from the image are no longer so strongly related.