Picture Post #36 A postcard from Taroudant

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'


Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

A postcard from Taroudant, Maroc

One piece of advice offered is to lower the gaze, to not allow it to dwell, as if the eye serves distraction.

The woman seated in front of the painting is possibly homeless. Her posture dissolves with the two figures on the wall, characterised by their carved-out eyes, and urge us to imagine where this woman can put her gaze.

Eyes and hearts, their combination invites a myriad of symbolic attributions. One of them is that a woman with her eyes can reach the man in his heart. The carved-out eyes suggest that women, even when veiled, still look (and distract), which they should not... Or is the image saying something quite different, that the time for women to be veiled is consigned to history and that these days we can 'forget about the eyes’?

An eye is connected with light, and light with reflection. The ‘seduction’ begins with the question of where the reflection should pose its attention.

Picture Post No. 11 The Playground

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

'Playing'. Original photo, title and date unknown, by Alexsandr Malin

In this deceptively simple image a simple gesture accentuates not only a perception of an optical play about reality, but also leads on to a vision about a virtual world.

We enter the paradox of pick and choose.

The shift between figure and background position produces contradictory responses. The object - the car being used as a kind of toy - transforms and breaks the coherence between the object and ourselves. Evidently, one value must have another value.

We can be flexible: the playground is free to enter. Humour has the capacity to reveal ‘our will of absence’ - to guide things beyond their ascribed function. We laugh alongside our own rigidity.

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The Difficulty of Change

Posted by Tessa den Uyl 

We often use the word 'change' in our conversation. Everybody seems to understand such expressions as: change yourself, we have to change, things are changing, change is needed, or if only something would change.

Change presupposes a certain kind of disruption in the way we think. We guide our perceptions through the creation of conceptual relations, which we think of as stable, of which we are consciously aware, and of which we recognise certain qualities within.

Upon such conceptual relations we act and react. And yet we desire change. This would not be so but for the fact that we question these relations.

In a world of myriad relations, we tend to extract only a few as valuable for the pattern of our proper life. And where we ascribe everything to specific relations in our life, desiring change signals trouble. Yet without change, we have no descriptive material. Without the stream of constant sensory change, how can we perceive life?