@house-of-fortitude – Untitled (2014)

This blog gets it’s fair share of garden variety Internet trollery. After that, the most common query I receive is people making reasonably cogent arguments that I present myself as an infallible authority.

Uh… no. I’m wrong. Frequently. However, the frequency is less a function of idiocy and more a matter of the fact that I really do put my ideas out there a lot–which presents more opportunities to be wrong.

(For the record: I encourage everyone to take what I say with a Gibraltar sized grain of salt. Always think for yourself. If you think I get something profoundly wrong, drop me a line. I have zero qualms with substantive disagreement–the point of this project is actually to facilitate dialogue that I find to be currently lacking and which I feel is both vital and important to have within the medium and those who appreciate the medium.)

Case in point: very early on, El Desouky submitted a photo for publication. I don’t really accept submissions–although I have something in the works that won’t necessarily change that but will shift it slightly. (Hoping to make that announcement during the back half of the month. Stay tuned.)

I turned up my nose at it.

Now? Well, now I feel like an arse about it.

I mean I’m super hard pressed to name another photographer with as singular a visual voice, who works in both B&W and color in ways that underscore the necessity of that particular image preferencing one medium over the other and who can be bothered with the notions of melancholy as neither inherently positive or detrimental so much as necessary or perhaps even suggestive of a form of radical self-exploration.

I freaking L<3VE the above photo. It’s partly the simplicity of it. A cluttered kitchen and a woman. Nothing about this is in any way so complicated as to be prohibitive to arrange. Yet, there’s something magical about it. It really does look as if she’s drifted off into quiet reverie as a result of looking at snapshot. The snapshots–splayed as they are on the table, clearly legible as photos but not clear enough to distinctly discern what the portray–suggest a glimpse into the woman’s thoughts in a way that let’s the mystery be.

Then there’s the light–which as far as I can tell comes from two sources. An ugly, bare overhead bulp as well as a single very direct light source just beyond the left edge of the frame angling down on the table, her face, neck, shoulders, back of the chair and the little leak filtering through the shadowed triangle formed between her neck, shoulder, bicep and forearm, drawing attention to her left breast, accentuating the nipple.

The magic of it is that anyone with a camera could have made this image but only El Dosouky could make it in a way that is both insinuating of a narrative and resistant to such interpretation, that feels so vibrantly alive and authentic. It’s a scene that is so mundane, we might overlook it we happened upon it unaware. But now we get to revel in it’s glorious wonderment.