One day she will stop loving me and I will die.

Hume

i have to read David Hume's Essays Moral, Political, and Literary for a seminar next Tuesday and so i sit at my desk poring over an online edition which my university provides me with access to. Essay 14 in Part I: Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences:

'You will never want booksellers, while there are buyers of books; But there may frequently be readers where there are no authors.'

Good man. Good man.

Starting is always the hardest part.

i don't really know where this is going yet or where it is coming from, but i think it is time to start whatever journey this is. What better way to start than to rip someone else off? In this case it will be the words of my favourite photographer, Andre Kertesz, who apparently once said ‘a photograph draws its beauty from the truth with which it is marked. For this very reason I refuse all the tricks of the trade and professional virtuosity which could make me betray my canon. As soon as I find a subject which interests me, I leave it to the lens to record truthfully.’ So, i thought i'd begin with a few photographs that i have taken that i quite like.

The eagle-eyed among you - and by that i mean those of you with eyes - will probably have noticed at least one recurring subject - someone who means a great deal to me; sometimes it's easier to take good photos of somebody you care a great deal about - the camera seems to pick up on it, or else our minds make us think that they are better pictures because we care about the subject, which in a way is saying that they are better pictures; a photograph is really only as good as you think it is. i am sure there are many photographers who produce technically accomplished photographs, but for me that doesn't necessarily equal good photographs; there should be something more to it than that and that is why i especially like a few of these photographs.

Aside from the obvious continuities of figures, the other motif which features in three of these images is reflection; in the fourth image you can see her reflected in the glass covering the Wycinanki, in the sixth there is the reflection of the trees on Hampstead Heath opposite Goldfinger's house and in the final image there is the reflection of the interior of the building in which i took the photograph. If you look closely at the right-hand side of the photograph there's a figure sitting on a bench - he's inside but the way the reflection has worked it looks almost as though he is some sort of ethereal figure and the bench he sits on is a part of the the concrete wall which is solid at one end and transparent at the other. i took this photograph the other day and i really like the way the colour has come out; the red of an interior wall appearing on the exterior and the strange blue sky behind the trees in the background; it took me a while to realise - as this isn't in the subsequent photographs i took - that this blue sky is actually on the side of the van you see in the background. Having found a subject which interested me, chance took hold and changed the way i saw it; it's something i could not reproduce even if i tried; i won't ever find that van again and i don't know who that person is.

Kertesz often photographed strangers - the girl from the pictures took me to see an exhibition in London of his photographs from 'On Reading', a series of photographs he took over his career of people in various places reading books, newspapers and any other form of media. i think this is probably my favourite collection of photographs - not that i can claim to know many - and i'm going to buy the book. i just need to find some decent prints of my favourites and all will be well.