Plane of Focus
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Alexi Hobbs’ “Instincts and Convictions”
“Constellations”, from Alexi Hobbs series Instincts and ConvictionsI’m deliberately posting this after yesterday’s quote from Joerg Colberg’s thoughts on Photography and Trust. Hobbs’ wonderful series Instincts and Convictions reinforces Colberg’s main claim: if a photographer trusts in his images he can keep them simple and let them speak (or, I think, in Hobbs’ case, sing) for themselves.
“Release”, 2011, from Alexi Hobbs series Instincts and ConvictionsEverything in Instincts and Convictions is direct and simple: the color palettes, the compositions, the lighting. But each image feels somewhat like a furtive glance: a brief but knowing glimpse of something greater, something we feel is implied but we don’t quite see or understand. And that is probably the great pleasure of this series, that Hobbs has charged such seemingly simple photos with the tensions of many layers of possible meaning.
from Alexi Hobbs series Instincts and ConvictionsI’m not sure where my current theory on dreams comes from — I read it somewhere, maybe Sartre. (To me) dreams are the random firings of our brains, which can encompass whatever happens to be in our short term or long term memory. The overwhelming randomness of what our brain can conjure up would drive us insane every night if it weren’t for a neat trick: our minds are very, very good at forming narratives around fragmented information. It is these on-the-fly narratives that we think of as dreaming.
To me, I guess, when I look at Hobbs’ work the images become the brain’s collection of memories and it is up to me as the viewer to create a narrative around them. There’s something about this that gives them the enchanting, friendly (or sometimes ominous) feeling of dreams.(Source: featureshoot.com)
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