Some say that See/Saw is an illuminating history of how photographs frame and change our perspectives. Geoff Dyer certainly inspired me and my collaborator.
After 'Double Standard' by Dennis Hopper
The rain was torrential during a bus excursion to Carlow with the RSAI (2022). A luxurious Bentley cut in front of our bus, its distinctive lights highlighting unnecessary stress for our driver. How could my collaborator know about such double standards?
After ‘Greta Garbo’ by Ilse Bing
How can we relate a distressed gable-wall-poster of Garbo to the bark of a thriving magnolia tree (2021)? Pattern recognition and not much else assisted my collaborator in this selection.
After ‘Some Things Mean Everything’ by Peter Mitchell
A fake clinker-built boat sitting in a flowerbed (2019) emerged from my catalogue though the dark arts of learnèd machines. Bar flowers, I see almost no similarity to the autobiographical image of inanimate objects silently observed by scarecrows.
After 'Cap Haitien' by Alex Webb
The mirrored surfaces reflect framed maple and rosemary (2011). An interesting composition that resembles 'Cap Haitien'. Maybe that was enough as far as my collaborator is concerned, the scene being no more than ten metres from where the virtual collaborator dwells ten years later.
After 'Saint-Cloud' by Eugène Atget
Walking over a bridge in Stratford-upon-Avon (2017) en route to hearing from the bard dead for 401 years. My collaborator couldn't have known there are 1000 images taken by one of my great-grandfathers in first half of an era around Paris memorialised by Atgèt.
After ‘Fatescapes’ by Prava Maria Smejkal (after Stuart Franklin)
Without my collaborator, I might never have thought to take a packed train in London to represent an empty road in Beijing. Fate may be what you make it.
After ‘Space for Rent’ by Lynn Saville
This was one of my favourite selections by my collaborator who can't have comprehended what I see in either of these pictures. There was space for everyone that day in 2019 at the thermal baths in Bagnères-de-Luchon in the long shadows of both the Pyrenees and a great-grandfather who photographed his wife outside in 1880 (and I caught my wife too).
After ‘Formigine’ by Luigi Ghirri
Twin spires over abandoned Victorian baths, a colonial artefact haunting a modern republic. One spire Catholic, another Protestant. Division yet continuity; a great-grandfather designed the former when it was in Kingstown but now it's in Dun Laoghaire. This, curiously, serendipitously, was the fourth link to that same ancestor that emerged from this collaboration. And while I'm on this theme, my wife also features in two. Clever collaborator!
After ‘Los Angeles’ by Beavan Davies
Architecture emerging from London (2014) viewed from a Thames cruiser by Waterloo Bridge. Why did my collaborator replace LA's iconic Mexican Fan Palms (Washingtonia robusta) with temporary skycranes?
After ‘Detroit’ by Doug Rickard
My collaborator being ironic? This was on the road at Ruwaished in Jordan, between Amman and Baghdad (2005). This was not a great place to tarry let alone dwell.
After ‘Taj Mahal’ by Oliver Curtis
From India to Iceland is quite the leap. We had found ourselves at the geothermal Blue Lagoon (2017). We visited this lava field by way of 3D printed box that contained enough money for a trip to see the northern lights. A family gift from ZREPIVEF&? now fully constituted as ZRTEPICVVEFA. These are among facts that my collaborator could not have intuited.
After ’99 Cent’ by Andreas Gursky
That my collaborator brought up a moment from the Rugby World Cup in Wellington (2011) intrigued me. Patterns and colour repetition may have been the appeal but otherwise, aren't stadiums and supermarkets quite unalike?
After ‘New York: Truck and Sign’ by Walker Evans
I see no similarities between my picture and the iconic 'New York: Truck and Sign'. Is it a damaged correlation that relates Chinese New Year 2019 in London's Soho to sometime 1929, somewhere NY? Is there the suggestion of a new Zodiac sign perhaps to link the pig of 2019 and the 1929 snake. Who knows how the digital mind works?
After ‘White Sands Motel / Motel Vegas’ by Fred Sigman
This was how the beach at Madinat Jumeirah looked when I returned after 25 years (2004). My collaborator can't have known that the remarkable Burj al Arab is a hotel in another manmade Vegas-like city, a hotel that didn't exist when I lived in the UAE in 1979.
After ‘Self Portrait’ by Vivian Maier
My collaborator may never understand the difference between self-portaits and portraits. The machine was inspired by Maier's work to choose a scene from Bloom's Day in 2022 in Glasthule, an annual celebration in costumed dining in keeping with James Joyce's Ulysses.
After 'Serena Williams’ by Jason Reed
In this instance, my collaborator seems to have homed in on colour and sparse fish in the London Aquarium (2019) as being similar to the lone tennis player. Odd, yes, but interesting?
After 'Signature Behavior’ by Tomas van Houtryve
October 2019 and Edo Zollo took a group around London's Southbank for a nighttime street photography course. I brought a manual Pentax Auto-Takumar f3.5 35 mm (made in 1959) on a Fuji-X-T3 (made in 2018). I surprised myself with some nice shots of scenes suggested by our teacher. I presume my collaborator used geometries to excavate this example using 'Signature Behavior' as the seed.
All images © Simon Robinson 2022 if not earlier.
https://canongate.co.uk/books/3450-see-saw-looking-at-photographs/
I wasn’t sure how to attribute credit for the pictures that ‘seeded’ those selected for my chapbook. The author had used appropriately credited versions in his book but I failed to contact the author through the publisher. So I created this gallery explaining the relevance to me of the pictures selected for this month’s edition. I included some links (click LOCATOR) to sites where the digital versions of the ‘seeding’ images can be seen as presented by the rights’ owners.