I presented only one body of work - the smiles. Zoe could not get it but in the same time was intrigued, her work also deals with mental states and exaggeration. What she was missing in my work is narrative. We spent about 15-20 minutes talking about that, she added that she does not like photography - photographs only show something and their meaning ends with representation. Really? I did not agree and replied that photographs transform rather than represent, each photographic image is removed from the thing it documented. Objective photo documents can actually create very subjective meaning and it does not have to be a story. She agreed and 30 seconds of silence followed. Isn't that what she does - appropriated images constructing her own reality? During the last 10 minutes Zoe talked about the smile as a historic phenomenon and whether I can incorporate that history in my work.
I don't particularly like her work, however, really respect her. There is plenty to learn and I have been thinking of playing with narrative. What is "history"? A real thing or whatever we want to read/see? I keep thinking to what extent history is created to please the public. Is history fact or myth? Or maybe every fact has become a myth in the instant it was put down on paper. There is a huge power to Zoe's work because of that, making history the way she wants it to be.
I should keep this in mind: a great French TV film I saw long ago about the US moon landings with plenty of facts that they were fake only to discover at the end that the film itself is fake and all the facts fabricated.
I began putting down ideas about fabricating past events. Would anything interesting come out of that?
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