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After 40 years of austerity and globalization by Neoliberalism,
we now have Trump’s America and to a large degree his poodle,
the UK to live within. They continue to eviscerate western culture
and morality with their bureaucratization of everything.
Their suppression of meaning, their homogenization of culture and place, and their endless stream of a corrupted reality is day-by-day imposed upon us
by the sleepwalking media which has forgotten the meaning of servicing the truth
and confronting the heavy arm of oppression and intimidation.
Many of us are left wandering on our own, emptied, frightened, exhausted.
GOD AND LOST SOULS
Combine a godless and therefore an ethically aimless life[i]*
with the popular culture’s continual emphasis on the benefits of individualism
the supposed spiritual uplift of consumption
and add to these the difficulty for individuals to formulate
a personal and generous humane morality,
it begins to become more understandable
why our world is cruel, aimless and self-indulgent.
As I have recognised in my life, it is all but impossible
to live a moral life in an immoral world.
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STEALING FROM THE YOUNG
If nihilism is about one thing, it is hopelessness**[i].
Today, after these many years of Neoliberal and then Trump/fascist policies
gutting beauty and intelligence from our culture and traditions,
swamping them with empty materialism and an infantile popular culture,
they have constructed a mental/emotional landscape without meaningful goals,
without inspiring heroes, and without hope for a better,
relevant and fulfilling life. This crime of stealing from all of us,
but particularly from stealing the dreams of the young,
is compounded by the extension of their ideas
into the sphere of international politics.
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NEO IMPERIALISM AND OPPOSITION
Greenland? Ukraine? Venezuela? Mexico?
or perhaps a little nibble at Romania or of Taiwan?
Layering the hierarchy in this way
provides the Establishment complete control
while projecting an outer appearance of openness.
The attempt by an outsider to offer real stories, relevant stories, exposing stories
can always be dismissed as inadequate, one-sided,
judgemental, poorly researched, or of insufficient quality and so on.
This is how the cultural canon*** is constructed and maintained
and how it attempts to break the confidence
of the dissident writer, painter, photographer, film-maker and producer.
The political, religious, cultural institutions have a hold on people
because they address our deepest needs, urges,
fears and our wants through their stories and images.
Of this there is little doubt,
because without that connection to our psychological needs,
religion would not have meaning for us.
Churches wrap us in their fantasies and reduce us to dependence
while they calm our fears of death with their lure of a hereafter.
This seduction makes us dependent on their myths.
We must come to understand why,
we must not forget to remember the stories of individuals and groups
who have suffered as a consequence of the ruling elite’s obsession
with power and greed.
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The challenge in life for us all is to make sense of our existence. Making pictures has always helped me to make sense and to create some meaning out of living.
I hope you will realise that content emerges from your own work and experiences and that there is a process by which you can discover many things about who you are, what your voice (visual language) is, how you may reveal the underlying themes and content in your earlier work and how you may continue to evolve your self-knowledge, your ways of seeing and your engagement between who you really are, how you make pictures and how you make visual choices.****
The psychoanalyst Karl Jung said, “To discover one’s self, one must be willing to ask questions” - one must be truly curious. He said, the first question must be, “What is the first question I must ask”, hence I have asked: “why photograph?”