Triggered: Josh Tarplin

Because a Photograph Is Like an Hourglass Sometimes, Josh Tarplin

By Josh Tarplin

When I took this image, I was working on a project (Sealegs, 2019) exploring the way that one’s worldview and conception of oneself owes determination to interactions with photographic images. I was growing to understand how living in collaboration with photography could afford an attitude of consciousness under which to see the world in a less contingent, more holistically ambiguous light.

I always had difficulty exploring the history of photographic images within this project because of my mixed feelings about it in general: who is that history by and for and why do we need it now? By chance, in the American West, I found this mirror containing an odalisque-style image of a woman. The whole situation of the western vista and the woman and the male gaze and the metaphor of the mirror and me a grubby boy with a little digital camera seemed to tease at how I saw photographic history: a kind of non-linear timeline constantly moving in all directions and devoid of hierarchy (in terms of chronology at least). The image felt like a view backward to that history that both acknowledged its arbitrary fundamentality and remained a celebration.

Check out more of Josh Tarplin’s work here and on Instagram (@tarpln)