november 29, 2022 - Francesca Minini

Simon Dybbroe Møller: Boulevard of Crime

The history of photography is a long street of crime. “Both photography and capital are linked to possession. They both possess what Marx called ‘the property of appropriating all objects’”. Upon invention photography looked out a studio window and saw a path for taking. An accredited pillaging. Perhaps why photography has always been associated with western realty, colonialism, the white guys of “science”. The wunderkammers of society replaced with 35mm armed tourists devouring the land.

Because photography is a jail. A means of capture. Simon rolls in the bars that already existed implicitly. But whereas photography would perpetuate the lie of clear communication, Simon’s is both cage and obstruction. Like shoes claiming gang turf, the chain link might as well be his hand claiming “mine.” The Getty images appropriation. Mark your real estate. In photos crystal ball we see Simon’s hand gently holding, gently smearing grease over illumination.

Early photographers claimed certain cultures believed photography stole their soul. Historical evidence shows it was a fabrication by the photographers who, in the blank screen of their subject’s refusal, projected theft. Because photography is theft. It does steal souls. It turned #people to illustration.

That photography has been conflated with image is a historic mistake. The image precedes photography - it is an old project, 100 years before photography, the “picturesque” was a term invented for painting. (In a real genealogy of artistic genre, photography would be a vestigial irruption in the grander historical trajectory of images, a subsidiary of printmaking, cameras as a niche form of image creation that somehow we all ended up with in our pockets. Photography is merely the sad Gutenberg press to the literature of image).

An image without photography: Mt. Vesuvius explodes, exposing its human to its ash albumen, and awaiting the development by plaster handling archaeologists. Tossing shoes at Bush is the image. (The camera armed press only printmake the reality of the image.) The highway signpost denoting “scenic point” is the artist. Not the countless photographs from that vantage - a photography whose relation to reality is strictly legal. Which is why photography goes hand in hand with property ownership - it is unnatural law, a document. A photograph’s worth in part relies on its veracity to reality, whereas an image need not, it is already a thing in the world. It is the shoes that designate an image. The shoe tosser is the original photographer - the gang actually owns the land, while the camera man, real estate company, their taking is strictly legal. Simon is the tosser.

Because Simon’s lifelong project is retrieving the image from photography. And using it to do evil. Simon himself might be evil, smearing the glass with bars, the lights with deillumination, appropriating realty with its own gun. It’s glass with fingerprints whose whorls are bars, bars spell Getty, or Simon.

For Simon, “photography” is merely the technology of theft, stealing images from a reality they already inhabit. When Simon does photography its to prove how impotent it is to reality. Or realty. Like how you get priced out of a nice loft apartment, this is photography, a technology for gentrification, for encapture, claim history, mine, I took it. Simon conjures images, frozen estates of reality. A light post removed from function instead shines as a dark idea bulb. Like a gang declaring turf, shot out lightposts and birds crashing into the clear window leaving grease like thumbprints, it makes it an image. Shoes tossed prevent rent hikes. Seems important. It’s the same window that photography is stuck with, which again, isn’t real, but strictly legal: “Bruce showed a Moor a picture of a fish, only to have the man respond that the fish would accuse him on Judgement Day for having given him a body but no soul.” A baby in jail.

- Photogallery (10)

BoC 05 300dpi SIMON

2060x2953, 3MB

BoC 06 300dpi

2953x1972, 2MB

BoC 07 300dpi

1969x2953, 2MB

BoC 08 300dpi

1969x2953, 3MB

BoC 09 300dpi

2953x1973, 2MB

BoC 10 300dpi

1969x2953, 2MB

BoC 01 300dpi SIMON

2953x2079, 3MB

BoC 02 300dpi SIMON

2953x2008, 2MB

BoC 03 300dpi

2953x1976, 3MB

BoC 04 300dpi SIMON

2953x1969, 2MB

- Documents (1)

Press release

24KB

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