In episode 241 UNP founder and curator Grant Scott is in his shed reflecting on photography now and how we got here, whilst suggesting advice on photographic practice from Jack Kerouac and Tony Ray-Jones.
Plus this week, photographer Mitra Tabrizian takes on the challenge of supplying Grant with an audio file no longer than 5 minutes in length in which she answer’s the question ‘What Does Photography Mean to You?’
As mentioned in this week’s episode:
Jack Kerouac’s Belief and Technique for Modern Prose in 30 points:
- Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
- Submissive to everything, open, listening
- Try never get drunk outside yr own house
- Be in love with yr life
- Something that you feel will find its own form
- Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
- Blow as deep as you want to blow
- Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
- The unspeakable visions of the individual
- No time for poetry but exactly what is
- Visionary tics shivering in the chest
- In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
- Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
- Like Proust be an old teahead of time
- Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
- The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
- Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
- Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
- Accept loss forever
- Believe in the holy contour of life
- Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
- Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
- Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
- No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
- Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
- Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
- In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
- Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
- You’re a Genius all the time
- Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
Mitra Tabrizian is an Iranian‐British artist and filmmaker whose photographic work has been exhibited and published widely and represented in major international museums and public collections. Solo museum shows include at Tate Britain in 2008 and the Venice Biennale, Iranian Pavilion in 2015. She was awarded the Royal Academyʼs Rose Award for Photography in 2013 and selected as one of Hundred Heroines: Celebrating Women in Photography Today, by the Royal Photographic Society in 2018. Her short film The Insider was made in collaboration with the Booker Prize Winner, Ben Okri and commissioned to accompany Albert Camus’ The Outsider, adapted for the stage by Okri. Screenings of her film-work include at the British Museum and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington. Tabrizian’s latest photographic book Off Screen was published in 2019. Her critically acclaimed debut feature Gholam had a theatrical release in 2017 and is now available on BFI player, Amazon Prime and Itunes worldwide. Mitra is currently developing her second feature The Far Mountains with the British Film Institute. www.mitratabrizian.com
Dr. Grant Scott is the founder/curator of United Nations of Photography, a Senior Lecturer and Subject Co-ordinator: Photography at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, a working photographer, documentary filmmaker, BBC Radio contributor and the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Routledge 2014), The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Routledge 2015), New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography (Routledge 2019). His film Do Not Bend: The Photographic Life of Bill Jay was first screened in 2018 www.donotbendfilm.com. He is the presenter of the A Photographic Life and In Search of Bill Jay podcasts.
© Grant Scott 2022