BFA candidate, Ian Aleksander Adams' essay, "On Fear and Photography" has been published in Ahorn online magazine. Following is the introduction:
There exists a well worn idea of the photograph as record: the saving of an event, the memory of an event, the indexical recording, a sign or something that has happened. Upon this foundation idea (and it is an idea, as facts are harder to pin down here) a layer of questioning has been placed. Many of these questions deal with the factual nature of the idea, probing, supporting, digging; but the line of questioning I am concerned with now has to do with the idea of the record supplanting, replacing, distorting, removing, or otherwise altering our perception of the original reality (or even reality itself). I will not be going into depth on this line of questioning (as many titans before me have already poked and prodded and I’d be doing you a disservice if I did not instead direct you to their at times overly familiar names: Barthes, Metz, Sontag, etc); I instead wish to use a dialog from a recent article, published in the inaugural issue of Lay Flat: Remain In Light (Edited by Shane Lavalette), as a launching point for some ideas on the persistence of memory based on a (seemingly) captured moment, how fear figures into the act of photographing, and some exercises based upon these ideas.
To read more, go to: http://www.ahornmagazine.com/home.html
