Scott Bourne ‘I Make Postcards’
Ahead of his upcoming poetry and photography tour of France, HUCK cover alumnus Scott Bourne gives us his statement of intent, and explains why he makes postcards on his travels.
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HUCK#011 cover star Scott Bourne has teamed up with Spacejunk galleries to make a series of stops throughout France to read his poetry and exhibit some of his photography.
The tour begins at Spacejunk in Bayonne on January 28 and will visit Bourg St Maurice, Lyon and Grenoble in the following months.
Ahead of this, he sent HUCK his Artist's Statement for your reading pleasure:
"Ever since my early twenties, I have been travelling and taking pictures of the people and places I’ve seen. The very act of taking a photograph, in itself, is an act of sharing.
I began taking photos for no other reason than to show things to other people. I made small prints, wrote a little something on the back, placed a stamp on it and dropped it in the post. People that have known me through the years have these scattered around their houses. One on the refrigerator or tucked into a mirror, possibly framed on a desk or a nightstand, others have large books filled with them. Some have a small cigar size box where they are kept or a larger one under a bed, and then there are those that literally have hundreds of them. Many of these people have begun to shoot photos themselves and post them back. When one sets out to show another something through the use of a camera, he is not only able to show what he has seen but exactly the way he has seen it. He gets to frame it, control the light or even transform what the human eye sees, into a black and white image.
As one trip came to an end, another would begin. I developed my photos where I could, often printing them on the road. Pretty soon they began to bare different seals from different states and before long stamps from around the world.
Now, whenever I am visiting a friend’s house, I am allowed the privilege of seeing these posts. They all have a special meaning not only to the person that has received them but the man who has sent them. Looking at these postcards I am allowed to remember a time and place in my own life. The pictures themselves document not only my travels but a friendship. They all bear a stamp of which contains the time, date and place...and to look through one of these collections one can see a history.
The internet has destroyed all of this. Digital photography has made the act of sharing valueless. A world filled with mass e-mails, blogs and post, nothing personal or having the actual human touch. On top of that, how many of these files are saved, printed or can be tucked into a mirror. Your baby pictures forever lost when you dropped your iPhone in the toilet. It appears as if modern man is out to erase himself.... meanwhile I make postcards.
I am not a professional photographer; at best, I am a documenter. I often say that I don’t even shoot photographs, that I steal them. I like to catch a moment that is occurring, a moment that is real. I very seldom even look through the lense when I am shooting people. I hold it up at any angle, often trying to make it appear as if I am stretching or simply removing the strap from my neck. I shoot down low in a crowd as if drawing a handgun like an assassin and have even used my point-and-shoot as if it were a cellphone, holding it up to my ear and rotating towards my victim. When I must use a flash I try to make it appear as if it has been an accident. I wear a bummed or baffled face as if to say sorry, but...I am not, I have just stolen your photograph.
I call myself an amateur because I am breaking all the rules and having fun doing it. I shoot in low light, or directly into the sun. I shoot with or with out a flash, indoors or out, 1600 in bright light on a beach, or 100 speed color in the darkness of my apartment. I shoot long exposure shots without a tripod. I barely look through the lense and see no great reason to. I have a careless, reckless abandon of the rules and the greatest reward of this, is the surprises I get when I develop my negatives. The instant gratification of the digital photographer destroys the mind's ability to even recognise when a moment has been captured. He is a bad hunter who peppers the forest with bullets and later chooses the best kill leaving the others behind as a waste to the world. This infinite ability to shoot makes the cameraman into a trigger-happy assassin spraying his bullets across a crowd instead of homing in on his one victim. He has poor judgement, is a poor marksman and is unable to escape unseen.
All the photos in this show are meant to meet with a common theme of darkness as expressed in the pages of Eclipse. They are all hand printed photographs on traditional Baryta paper, which is gelatin based and the most durable of all photographic papers. In the 21st Century, PAPER is still the longest lasting way to store data and yet everything in your world is going out of print and you are helping it. They’ve got you addicted to the instant gratification of the internet; strung out on iPods and MySpace pages.
Soon the post will be out of business but long after your computers collapse and erase all your photographs, my postcards will still exist. I encourage you to stop erasing yourselves. To go out, buy a small, inexpensive film camera, create some postcards of your own and begin a history that will surpass modern technology." - S.H.Bourne, October, 2009, Paris
Scott's work will appear in Eclipse. A Book of Poems by S.H Bourne, published by Carhartt.
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Scott Bourne ‘I Make Postcards’ (text) by Scott Bourne is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.Comments (9)
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Like it's better not to question things we take for granted and look at the wider picture?
I'm gonna start sending postcards too :-P
That is called being pretentious.
The second time we met he grabbed my throat and said "I could kill you now." looking him in the eyes, I said "Why do me a favor?" There were many times he did things that showed how little control you have over your world and situations; when you allow someone else that control. Whether, that’s what he was trying to express, by making his van do 50-50’s half on the road and half up on the embankment, with the van full of us on the way to skate; I am not quite sure…he never said. It seems reading this post in retrospect it fits.
He has his own way of looking at the world, as we all do but we tend to lose sight of what it looks like through the eyes of others expectations of how to be and live. Art is expressing our view, of what the world looks like to us, be it through skating, photography, paint, stick figures farting or whatever. This post is not saying anything other than step outside of those expectations and discover something different about the world of what people want you to see and know.
Taking the camera and holding it as everyone thinks you should and snapping a picture, turns into you not taking the picture at all, but all those people you’ve seen, methods you’ve read or heard about are taking the picture through you, so in reality you didn’t take the picture at all, and there was no art or soul in it. Is doing a strict method art? Where is the uniqueness in copying what everyone else does? Sure he gives you some ideas, try this and see what turns out, it’s not saying, “Copy me I’m awesome“. It’s a starting point, It’s saying look at the world differently than expected, look at it how you want and express it in your own way, and letting you inside his mind as an artist. Let me ask, do you fit into a label or even label yourself? Goth, punk, thug, emo etc? Those are just uniforms; you are always going to be you inside and struggle with fitting into others expectations on the outside.
You’re only going to really start living when you start living for you; inside and out and meeting only your expectations, despite everything and everyone else. That way you’re not lying to yourself or anyone else about, what you want or who you are, and where you are going in life. His post is just a doorway that you can open, close or walk through, he‘s saying experiment and see what happens, being excited at the results can appear as pretense. I’m sure he gets asked ad nauseam; what lens did you use? What was your filter set on? And all sorts of similar questions, it answers that for anyone who wishes to know his methods. Why waste your life trying to follow the crowd or expressing yourself in cyberspace, where you’re constantly being targeted by corporate marketing, getting your dreams, hopes and ideas ripped off or shit on by posting them all over the web for free?
Why not utilize that time by making something profitable, tangible, and lasting in the real world and then use the web to market that? You’re in control of yourself and the path of your life right? So talk shit, praise, ignore or use the post to refocus your own inner vision that gets muddled sometimes as I have, or wipe your ass; make a turd Rorschach test and analyze shit that comes out of you.
Take care
why?
me? i really appreciate what was written, it's made me think..................
Just think a little before some of you shoot from the hip and criticise. You don't have to agree, or even finish what you reading, I nevertheless appreciate that there are others out there with different pov.