i’ve been thinking back on my years at art school, and it occurs to me that i must have spent quite a large proportion of time, endless afternoons it seems now, lightly smashed in friends’ front rooms, drinking endless cups of tea and listening to ecm records. jan garbarek, keith jarrett, pat metheny bobo stenson. those who know won’t need to ask.
i think it was as much the cool album covers and their photographs (this was pre-CD vinyl only), as much as the music contained inside. we were all photographers and the cover photos were minimalist ice.
often we’d talk about photography, and, as wise old 3rd years, having heavily ingested swathes of roland barthes’ writings, together with rosalind krauss and screen magazine as well as susan sontag’s “on photography”. ‘why is this a set book’, someone inquired petulantly, ‘she doesn’t even like photography’. so there we were so engrossed in the ethics and morality of photography that some of us had spent most of the second and third years with our fingers permanently frozen over our cameras’ shutter releases we couldn’t take any photographs.
