On Photography

For me, the photographer's organ is not his eye (which terrifies me) but his finger: what is linked to the trigger of the lens, to the metallic shifting of the plates (when the camera still has such things).

I love these mechanical sounds in an almost voluptuous way. For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches - and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.

In the words of Roland Barthes

On Repetition

Outside the window the city is full of its repetitions, the sky full of its greyness. Identical terraced houses stretch left and right, chimney pots sitting on their roofs like top hats. If I had to give one word to the city it would be ‘repetition’.

In the early nineteen twenties John Brabin the Art Nouveau architect put forward a new model of terraced housing aiming to get ride of this repetition. Brabin, a good friend of Gaudi, publically criticised their uniform fronts and proposed that they should be stripped and rebuild. To minimise the vast work load he put forward six different façade designs which would be randomly ordered along the street, the interior of all the buildings would remain the same. He claimed that this would substantially raise the mental wellbeing of city dwellers, especially those living in the grim (his word not mine) industrial cities of Liverpool and Manchester.

He was of course instantly ridiculed; Gaudi or Gaudy as he was referred to at the time was still unpopular in England and was unable to help his friend’s cause. Yet looking out the window I couldn’t help agreeing with Brabin. I am sick of living in London; I feel a kind of nausea from seeing the same buildings day in and day out. Repetition after all has become the form of punishment we use in Britain today. We no longer torture or kill our criminals rather subject them to the repetition of prison. London has in a sense become my prison.

On Irregularity

God, the King of artists, was clumsy.

I propose to found a society. It is to be called 'The society of Irregulars'. The members would have to know that a circle should never be round.

In the words of Pierre-Auguste Renoir

On ageing

Passion doesn’t change, but you change – you become older. The thirst for women becomes more poignant. And there is a power in the pathos of sex it didn’t have before.

In the words of Philip Roth