Stachen’s Stills
This one I really like, it's from a party -- I took it at a party in September a few years ago. I liked the red, how it came out. Also it was an image that came out surprisingly sharp considering the conditions. I had been using a very slow lens at the time, I hadn't invested in a tripod. These here are people dancing?And this, it's a nice sort of answer, it's there was a riot against the government, well the government. People were marching. The marchers had a lot of muscles, from work. And I chose this one, it was, you couldn't see anything, this is what I liked. Of course the gases hurt, I was crying and sniveling. They were running after the police on motorcycles. This was after, the mask is pierced and one can see through it slightly.
This one is illegal somehow. Well I guess it was taken in a classroom, on a test. You weren't supposed to take your phone in there.
It was I think right before the previous picture. I didn't take it on purpose, I meant to, but forgot.
When I did remember maybe a few seconds later, I thought that would be funny to put in.
I think sometimes it's funny when an idea is obviously failed. Like a scene where the writer knows that the plan they just did didn't work, but doesn't reveal it to the audience. In many cases the auience will figure it out for themselves, and if they can't then the job of the writer becomes very difficult.
There's red again, it's, I guess it's obvious like a red light. It's pretty blurry because of the motion, the movement, there's lots of movement in that image. It's a reticular movement. This image here it's kind of a motionball, if there is such a thing. It's lots of movement and it's like an eye, in a way. It looks kinda like an eye. This is what I liked about it when I made it. The green at the bottom represents rank, and it goes up to 10. The person you're competing against is right next to you, at your side.
Next... This one is one that I don't like very much, but it is necessary in a way. It has to be there. This is one of the last images I guess you could call it, that we took, in a way. It kind of sets the tone for others that come afterwards, it's maybe a kind of nod to that idea. It was late, after 10 PM. It was raining. I had never driven this way before, actually. It was the first time I was driving at night in Paris, and the rain made it even more scary. It kind of sets the tone for the others if that makes any sense. It's like an introduction if you can imagine that, these characters, so stiff and self controlled, it sets the tone for the fact that we are talking about mental defects here.
This is a disease that makes you so self controlled you cannot speak. This is what it kind of implies.
Here's a portrait. I should make this one bigger. It was taken in Paris I think, or it was in France maybe, I can't be sure. It's an eminent individual, you can see his eyebrows. He wrote me later about the development of genetics, it was all he talked about. His eyebrows are real, it's a good shot. I should have framed that one better. He talked for hours about genetics, as if there had been someone in the car with him and they were both excited by the subject. I felt so lonely. But he had superior knowledge of the matter at hand, which later made my own experience so enlightening.
I should make that one bigger too. It goes from the top to the bottom of my screen here, I think it looks good. There's something weird with that one, I'm not sure what it is exactly, but maybe there are two people in it.
That is a kind of a callback, I made this image with something from another one I haven't shown. I chose a word that was in one of the earlier images. I wanted to see what image it would match up with. This one seemed to work. It's from one of the earliest takes I think. It was hard to choose, I had many images that could match up with the word. I could have used a different image altogether, actually. It's edited a lot. I mean, basically all of these were. I took out a lot of the green in these images.
There are a couple that I re-did entire images because the transfer was terrible and they looked awful.
There are a few images that I did not intend to make, this one is an example. This one was an accident.
Basically, this one is an image of my house. It came out pretty clear and it looks like the sky is night, so I thought "of course this is at night, no doubt about it", but it is actually during the day. Now with editing, you can change the timing and so on, but back then it was a little more complicated. So basically there is my house during the day, but I presented it as if at night.
I also made one of my grandparents, it was tricky because he only had a few pictures ever taken with him, so we found some old family photos and I digitized them. I then painted on those images to simulate the disease, and made 3 or 4 different fake pictures of him. I chose one of his portrait and reverse painted it, then desaturated very far to get an ambiguous result.
I chose the one that looks most like him, I guess you could say. I don't know really, it doesn't look exactly like him but then none of them did either I guess you could say. Well, they are all a little different. But this one is the most similar I think.
So there's kind of a fairy tale about this one too: my grandparents sent me some old family photos, and I showed my dad who recognized himself in one of the pictures as a child.
He said in that part of the picture there was a person walking past, toward the right. So there was my grandpa, walking along in the yard with a really weird umbrella. My dad said that when he was a child, someone used to walk past like every hour or so, holding an umbrella with the same color scheme as my grandpa's umbrella. They never knew who this person was. My dad said that maybe it was one of the Japanese troops who occupied France during the war. My grandparents were born in Tokyo, so who knows.
That's how I know for sure that it looks like him.
I don't even remember this one. I made a little animation of it too, that was funny actually to make so short clips and match them. There was a leaf, and it blew away and came back. This is kind of like a animation I guess but it was so simple to make. You could make these tiny movies with so little work I think, if you don't mind the limitation of it. Or with some sort of rule. Something like "everything has to be drawn with only these two colors" or something. In this one, I colored the frames with blue and yellow mixing them together to make beige, but that's really it. Now it's kind of interesting to see what happens when you restrict the parameters so much. You can get kind of interesting images I think. But it can get really repetitive pretty quick, you know.
A photo of my brother, when he was a baby. It's a childhood photo. I was probably 4, and my little brother 1. There's a toy I remember very well here, it's a bit cropped out but the idea is there. It was a yellow and white spider, I don't know, kind of in the form of a man. He loved it. When he was older, after we lived in Angola for a year or so, when we came back to France my brother didn't recognize this toy right away. He didn't know it was the spider any more. He saw it and he said something like: "Ah, une bête" (an animal or beast in French for children that young), and he pushed it away.
This one is of course my sister, I think it was around the same time as the previous photo. I don't know, maybe a couple of months after. She is holding a toy which I will not name because it belongs to everyone. I changed this photo into a kind of drawing. I drew on it with pencils. It was taken with my mom's camera, we developed the pictures at home. My mom drew on it too with marker to write my name. I scanned it and then desaturated, colorizing some parts back by hand. It took me a while to get used to colorize parts of images the way I wanted. I had to learn how the shadows were generated. I read a lot of books about shadows and how they worked.
This is a historical photograph, perhaps one of the last ever taken by my father, who was an amateur photographer. We are standing in my grandparents' backyard, I can recognize the umbrella. It's not mine, I didn't take the image but I claim it. I stole this photo, in a way. In a way all photos are stolen.
This is just junk. There is some sort of image here somewhere, maybe the face above all others, that comes to me in a moment. It will be the last image. It will be an image with a double movement, forwards and backwards. It's an image that contains many images. It is an eye, and yet it doesn't look like anything. It doesn't look at anything. Maybe this is what the eye is for. To look at nothing.
This is the last image we'll look at today, it was taken at a beach, not so long ago. It's a kind of double image. It's two images really close together in time, but they represent moments maybe a hundred years apart. It's an ambiguous image. I don't know, maybe later when we go further along the path of our destruction you'll be able to make sense of it. For now, I'll stick to the more direct images.
It's a funny image in a way. It's a funny image and at the same time it represents something sad, maybe for both of those reasons I like this image. It's about two things I don't want to be a part of anymore: making money and having a family. I hate the idea of getting richer, and i have basically no desire to procreate. So this image is funny and sad because it represents the world as I see it now, fully grown, in all its unpleasantness.