Andrew Follows
Missing You II
2015
Digital photograph
[Please click on the image for a larger version]
“You know, it is great to see how he is challenging himself. But as soon as I saw the image, I couldn’t help but think that I was interested in how he saw the world – not how well he can compensate for his eyesight issues.
That’s what was great about those first images you curated Marcus [Density 2013]. In some of them, Andrew won against the world in his own way – not every image, but in some of them. But I suppose to actually explore his own presence in a site – the validity of his own perception is a really, really difficult thing – is there a precedence for limitations visually? Grandma Moses? maybe Ralph Eugene Meatyard in terms of his limited lifespan?
To achieve the creation of his own standards against a medium that will record everything – huge challenge.”
Ian Lobb, photographer
Liminality
In places
The spatial dimension of liminality can include specific places, larger zones or areas, or entire countries and larger regions. Liminal places can range from borders and frontiers to no man’s lands and disputed territories, to crossroads to perhaps airports or hotels, which people pass through but do not live in: arguably indeed all ‘romantic travel enacts the three stages that characterize liminality: separation, marginalization, and reaggregation’. In mythology and religion or esoteric lore liminality can include such realms as Purgatory or Da’at, which, as well as signifying liminality, some theologians deny actually existing, making them, in some cases, doubly liminal. “Between-ness” defines these spaces. For a hotel worker (an insider) or a person passing by with disinterest (a total outsider), the hotel would have a very different connotation. To a traveller staying there, the hotel would function as a liminal zone, just as ‘doors and windows and hallways and gates frame…the definitively liminal condition’.
More conventionally, springs, caves, shores, rivers, volcanic calderas – ‘a huge crater of an extinct volcano…[as] another symbol of transcendence’ – fords, passes, crossroads, bridges, and marshes are all liminal: ‘”edges”, borders or faultlines between the legitimate and the illegitimate’. Oedipus (an adoptee and therefore liminal) met his father at the crossroads and killed him; the bluesman Robert Johnson met the devil at the crossroads, where he is said to have sold his soul. Major transformations occur at crossroads and other liminal places, at least partly because liminality – being so unstable – can pave the way for access to esoteric knowledge or understanding of both sides. Liminality is sacred, alluring, and dangerous.
Text from the Wikipedia website.
Andrew Follows Photographer 