Transference – Frank Horvat


Frank Horvat


Frank Horvat

1976 was the year when I emerged from a long period of self-doubt, which had led me to question my very involvement in photography, both as a photo-journalist and as a fashion photographer. I spent part of that summer in my small property in Provence, pruning trees and putting on paper the few memories of my childhood that I could recollect. At some point, I realized that most of my memories were somehow connected with branches and leaves, and this gave me the idea of a photographic essay about trees. This work wouldn’t be intended for articles in magazines, but for something as personal as a book or an exhibition: for once I would be an author. – Frank Horvat


Frank Horvat


Frank Horvat

I find it interesting how quite easily we seem to be able to transfer an emotional self – to project a symbolic state of being upon nature. Why is that?

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Photographic conventions – Transference of Compassion?

I came across (Notes on) Politics, Theory & Photography, through Conscientious today… a great link to Jim Johnson’s post regarding “Vividness”… See his preliminary e-paper here, and this post Photographic Conventions & Their Vicissitudes: The Irony of “Vividness” .
For me, the notion of the negative potential of “othering” that I’ve been thinking about – and “visual oblivion” that has been rattling around in my brain is articulated quite interesting in Jim Johnson’s post.

Still gnawing at me …

Photographic conventions – Transference of Compassion
Training viewer’s to see / Indoctrination / Perceptual Sensitivity…
“visual oblivion”
“othering”
and now “Vividness”…

Learning from the visual cultural landscape… Somewhere in this a parallel to the problems of empty (draining off) symbolism in the architectural debate contained with in the book “Learning from Las Vegas” … but yet still wanting to embrace “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture”… by Robert Venturi.