DROWNING THE MOON
The text Drowning the Moon is a sequence of photographs that have been stripped to the metaphysics of their coding. Extended acts of description, they test the limits imposed by nasty infinity – the photographic quantification of physical time. If photography is duplicitous in its attempts to distort psychological time then Drowning the Moon proposes past and future echoes of the human ability to negotiate the psychosis of civilisation’s song of knowledge and joy.
‘The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk.’ Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 1820.
Drowning the Moon proposes to extend psychological time – what one understands at a given moment – into the seconds of the future to develop an interesting consciousness of clairvoyance (Rimbaud) that can delude the social engineering of symbol linguistic programming. In Drowning the Moon Lesdema proposes an anticipatory hypothesis for photographic practice in response to comments by Stuart Hall and conversations with RL Gregory. Traces of the ant-optic had first emerged in Fortunes of War (UN Nikon World Photography Prize) noted by Hall (Different, Phaidon 2001).
The companion text ‘The Long S’ is a play with two central characters: a crippled civilisation and its interlocutor the omnipotent photographic eye. Practice von Stroheim features as an extra.
Essay contributions include Nasmyth’s Moon, Professor Emeritus RL Gregory (UWE); Ann X, Dr John Harvey (Aberystwyth University); Retaining Images, Dr Peter Lamont (University of Edinburgh). Design by Andrew Slatter.
Launched at FORMAT International Photography Festival 2015.
