David Lurie – Dreaming the Street

Lurie's new collection strikes at the very heart of the dilemma of unequal access to the technological means of production - the digital sphere usually reached via the ubiquitous smartphone.

- By Daniel Herwitz Frederick G. L. Huetwell

Having such access is a non-negotiable to act within a global economy and socius - and yet the technological system is subject to autocratic control, which turns people's desire to connect into their personal data to be commodified and sold.

DREAMING THE STREET

Photography is the perfect instrument for capturing the urban street as a place of dreams because of its P dreamlike character. Roland Barthes put the matter well in Camera Lucida. Studying a photo of his dearly beloved, recently-dead mother, madness takes him over (as he puts it). Barthes feels she has emerged from the photo ghostlike or spectral and is there before him as if he could speak to her. Yet as soon as he reaches out to touch her or opens his mouth to speak to her, the experience of her presence, the seeming presentness of her, gives rise to its deflationary opposite. She is only an image on paper; she is not really there.

David Lurie © All Rights Reserved

This double experience of figures and things appearing from the photo or film screen before us, seeming to be there while we know all we really see is an image or projected light, is central to the unearthly character of the photograph, even when it is of documentary value, capturing the hard facts of real life. This explains why photography was perhaps the most successful medium of the Surrealists, with geniuses like Man Ray turning women into apparitions, their bodies into the stuff of dreams. Voyeuristic, no doubt, and worthy of criticism, but astonishing all the same. In Ray's hands, the camera is a lens into the unconscious, the allure of the unknown, the spectral presence of those neither here nor there but in some strange netherworld; this is the artifact of the photographic medium.

David Lurie © All Rights Reserved