A Journey of Seeing & Connecting
Juan Korkie
Teeth
of the Dog
Italy
Rome, 2003
1
I remember a story of Jesus. It is said he stopped by the side of the road to look at the corpse of a dead decaying dog, commenting on the beauty of its teeth. As strange as the story may seem, it expresses my fascination with the unusual and unseen parts of life that surrounds us.
At the same time, it highlights something that I noticed when I started taking photographs, which was that I seemed to be attracted to, and found beautiful, things that were very different to those around me.
In 2003 I attended a family therapy training in Rome with Maurizio Andolfi. It was also the trip that sparked my fascination with photography. Interestingly, looking back, what made the training so significant was that my conversations with Maurizio were about accepting and embracing my own difference from the pack, or at that time, my fellow psychologists.
Walking the streets of Trastavere I fell in love with what I was seeing through the lens. Not the Coloseum or the Vatican, but the mundane streets stinking of cat urine in the middle of summer. The spontaneous juxtaposition of objects and the patterns of decay were what I found beautiful and compelling.
2
Armed with a cheap camera, shooting on “auto” and never having heard of “raw” format I took the pictures that still inspires me today. To me I was witnessing something important, compelling, dramatic. It is difficult to describe how I found beauty in what I saw, a beauty that felt so much more real than the intentional art that otherwise surrounded me.
I remember noticing the slightly bemused and confused glances from tourists who saw me engrossed in front of a tangle of cables, or a water stain against the wall, while ignoring the more obvious “postcard” shots.
To me, photography is about witnessing what is in front of us, yet hidden and ignored. And as such it is less about what I take images of, and more about what I pay attention to, what I notice. And even saying that, I see a parallel to my own professional journey, and of giving voice to the unsaid and the unspoken.
And part of this giving voice, or witnessing, may deviate from the norm and expectation. Photography as art is more tolerant of this than other parts of life, where the unspoken norms of what is important, and ignoring those norms, can have more serious consequences.
3
In the same way that a conversation brings forth a reality through what is focussed on, and the connections created between things (or moments in a person's life, or parts of the person), so I see taking images as an art that brings forth.
And this is essentially a creative act and a dialogue. It brings forth something new that is neither inside nor outside, but emerges in the dialogue between the self the the world. And this dialogue is not only a witnessing of the world, but also a manifestation of what is inside, giving it shape and form.
It is a conversation between the self and the other, and in Rome, very much with the world of cables and water stains. Yet, not less important, or profound. Photography is not about recording what is out there. It starts inside. It starts with how I meet the world, what I see and notice, what I give my attention to.
And in this way my photography has always been something deeply personal, and reflective of my journey of seeing the world. And in doing so, seeing myself.