Research- Boltanski

Christian Boltanski is a French sculptor, painter, and film maker. However, it is his photography work that most interests me, especially his ideologies and use of connotation within still image.
He began working exclusively with photography for exploring the forms of consciousness and remembering, something similar to the work I am producing today. Whilst Boltanski's work contained "objets trouvés" (found objects), my work is still found object however more invloving the use of the readymade- for example, the use of already developed film photos- they are found and readymade (the two overlap a certain extent).

I also took other insightful quotes from the interview with Tamar Garb (Durning Lawrence Professor in the History of Art) that I thought were relevant and useful to be read and understood in context with the way I feel towards my own work:

"For exmample I often work on pieces that include clothes, and for me there is a direct relationship between a piece of clothing, and a dead body, in that someone once existed but is no longer there.. Someone has actually chosen them, loved them, but the life in them is now dead. Exhibiting them in a show is like giving the clothes a new life- like resurrecting them"
- This was of importance to note as in the previous development work running up to the FMP, I had considered using clothing within my work as a component of a possible installation or final piece of work.

"I don't feel like a photographer, more like a recycler"
- I would have thought the connection here to be pretty obvious, however needs must... This directly relates back to my own work in terms of the use of the readymade photograph- I purposely am not taking photos due to the use of nostalgia and the found image. It all collates together to create cohesion in the development and final work. Plus I find that although I already have the photographs, I can edit, chop, change and manipulate these images to fit my own ideologies.

"I have no childhood memories up to my 12th year or thereabouts... For years, I took comfort in such absence of history; its objective crispness, its apparent obviousness, its innocence protected me, but what did they protect me from"
- I guess you have to read further into this one. When reading this, I began to think about whether we truly remember our younger years, or are our memories sewn into our minds from anecdotes, stories and memorabilia that others have influenced into our minds? Do we actually remember the first time we fell off a bike? It is said that a picture paints a thousand words, but how many of those words are truth? This is where the context of images become evidently important to my work; I have worked on the idea of changing the connotation of images to feed the mind into believing something else.