I'm back with another gallery from Rome. I spent six days in Rome and when I was there I was really frustrated about not having enough time to shoot on the street. But that is nothing out of the ordinary, I think it's hard for me to shrug off that feeling. When we where about to go home I had shot about 22 rolls of film, which is not bad at all for me.
Walking around in any city I always take pictures of mostly everything, it's a bit of a compulsive behaviour. But I feel it is such a privilige to take pictures of nothing. To me it's liberating to just shoot by intuition and allow one self to be drawn by the weird details of the city. To me photography can contain the same mystic as much poetry does. It can initially seem like the picture is rejecting meaning. I then always somehow feel the urge to figure out some deeper meaning or secret code. But some pictures are just pleasing to look at and some of the most interesting pictures doesn't require to be figured out it's not about meaning at all, it's much more simple than that. It's solely a question about how you feel about it. Do you like it or not, basically, for me it's as simple as that.
Some of my most boring photographs are actually the ones that I tend to cherish most over time. I just enjoy looking at them again and again. They are not a representation of meaning but a bouquet of connotations, as Roland Barthes coined it. So instead of conveying meaning and intend some photographs allows the viewer to figure out and create a personal meaning and feel about the work. When we look at photographs we all have different experiences that we draw upon that define our feelings about certain pictures. But it's important to look at pictures with a certain attention and openness to be able to feel anything.
The structure of most social media platforms inherently works against facilitating this kind of presence when appreciating work. The gamification of viewing and sharing content has, for me, resulted in a sort of blase where my attentionspan is being reduced to split seconds. I don't know how many times I have scrolled through absolutely fantastic work and granted it less than a second of attention. To me it's very frustrating to experience this kind of pacification by not being able to pay the attention that the work deserves. It's as if the saturation point has been met and massive quantity is no longer satisfying for my part anyway. I don't want to get bores with a massive amount of content, I wan't to be able to get inspired by granting boring work attention.