Penzance, Cornwall, UK
10/19/11 3:34 PM
There are already so many photographs, and still so many more to take. Stuart Woodman seems acutely aware of this dilemma, and of just how much individual pictures need to be framed in order for their own framing of the world to have any hope of meaning. His systematic projects include shooting a Polaroid of the sky every day for a year. In another, he made a daily habit of snapping one thing that caught his eye. That was the year Woodman turned thirty when, he explains, so much changes — but how did he know this beforehand? He didn’t need to. Having gambled on it, all he had to do was take those pictures and then wait to see what happened, confident that most individual photographs are flexible enough to react retroactively. As do his, selected after the fact and assembled into manageable and evocative artist books. Oddly enough, it’s his series of abstract Polaroids, blistered, fluid, wondrous accidents, that appear solid enough to need no additional fixing.
—Lori Waxman