unexpected encounters: introduction

Photography has long been one of my passions. I have a website devoted entirely to my photographs called (after Roland Barthes) Camera lucida.

Over the next few months I hope to intersperse writings with photography-based posts under the collective title unexpected encounters. The project is inspired by Max Ernst’s reflections on collage, in which he suggested that:

A complete transmutation followed by a pure act such as love will necessarily be produced every time that the given facts—the coupling of two realities which apparently cannot be coupled on a plane which apparently is not appropriate to them—render conditions favorable.

This experiment in coupling texts and images started with a workshop titled EX SITU: (Un)making Space out of Place, held at Concordia University, Montréal in January 2019.  This was one of a series of EX SITU events over the previous five years held in the US, the UK, and Greece, involving art and media practitioners, academics, and research students from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds.  The brief of the Montréal workshop, organized by Craig Campbell and Yoke-Sum Wong, was to "explore techniques for camera-led ethnographic writing" as "an experimental writing practice ... aimed at exploring creative acts of description and evocation." 

Participants were asked to create photoessays that paired up to six images with the same number of texts, each of no more than 100 words, on any topic of their choosing.  I found the form an interesting one to work with.  My intention was to set up layers of open-ended resonance and signification within a limited set of texts and images, rather than have the images illustrate the texts or the texts caption the images.  I was hoping to capitalize on what Milan Kundera, following the surrealists, calls “the density of unexpected encounters.”  Implicit in this is an assumption that there can be no singular, "correct" way of reading the resulting assemblages.  Their job is to provoke questions rather than provide answers.

unexpected encounters takes the idea one stage further, in that it allows for cross-fertilization not only within but across the individual photoessays, so that emerging motifs are illuminated from a multiplicity of angles.  The photographs were taken in a wide variety of locations over a period of more than twenty years