In the Eye of the Mind


W J. T. Mitchell questions what pictures want; images not only existing as inert objects but possessing an animate being of their own. He describes the peculiar tendency of images to be both absorbing of and absorbed by the human subject (Mitchell. W. J. T.  What do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images. University of Chicago Press. 2005.) So what do photographs want, or, specifically, what do Rich Cameron’s photographs want? Encountering his images is an invitation into a sensual world that is constantly folding, unfolding and refolding. The synesthesia inherent in many of his works evokes senses beyond the merely visual. Simple curiosity is replaced by a more empathetic desire both to understand their meaning for him, the artist, as well as one’s own subjective feelings towards them. He offers the chance to “ maybe catch glimpses of one’s own personality, subconscious and emotions”.
Text accompanies many of the images; Rich’s solitude together with his wish to share the reasoning behind the questions he dares provoke, are consumed in his often fragile and ethereal visual cosmology of desire and depth; confusion and coolness. His works are a remaking of the dialectic between speech and silence, emotion and intellect.
For myself, simple appreciation of their beauty evolves in to a deeper, sometimes darker, relationship between what is seen and what is felt. One image may lead the mind in to spaces of light, airiness and translucency; another may bite and scratch, like a graffito wherein the pigments of memory are revealed not merely as layered but bleeding in to one another. These are works to meditate upon and be seduced by.

Kate Daum MRes University College London.