Picture Post #36 A postcard from Taroudant

---

'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'


Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

A postcard from Taroudant, Maroc

One piece of advice offered is to lower the gaze, to not allow it to dwell, as if the eye serves distraction.

The woman seated in front of the painting is possibly homeless. Her posture dissolves with the two figures on the wall, characterised by their carved-out eyes, and urge us to imagine where this woman can put her gaze.

Eyes and hearts, their combination invites a myriad of symbolic attributions. One of them is that a woman with her eyes can reach the man in his heart. The carved-out eyes suggest that women, even when veiled, still look (and distract), which they should not... Or is the image saying something quite different, that the time for women to be veiled is consigned to history and that these days we can 'forget about the eyes’?

An eye is connected with light, and light with reflection. The ‘seduction’ begins with the question of where the reflection should pose its attention.

Picture Post # 31: Small Chains and Big Chains

---

'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'


Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

Picture credit: 'We Buy Gold' by Robert Saltzman

In the mirror, hanging on the right wall inside the shop, the salesman is physically reflected. He examines a piece of jewellery. Our eyes are then led diagonally to the hand of the woman in the foreground, who touches her face. And then we discover the girl in the midst holding her hand on her left shoulder. In this way, a triangle is drawn by the gestures of three persons, or rather four, because the man reflected in the mirror is diagonally redrawing a line with the two women and vertically with himself.

The image binds its three main characters in a particular way. Each gesture links in a long chain with another. Similarly one may say that a smaller circuit chains a bigger one.

In the foreground, the woman looks as if she is looking into a mirror of memories. In the midst, the younger woman looks at us through the camera lens, which forms ‘a mirror’ through which we can see her, and she can see ‘us’. The shop window mirrors reflections of the merchandise. The merchant ‘mirrors’ the value of a piece of jewellery.

In this landscape of glittering tokens, of symbols and expressions concerning desire, in these obvious links, there are gaps. We have to move towards the unseen within the image to skip the self-evidence of the trust in our sight.

 For where do we start or end?

Do we end in the outline of our body, or in the ring on our finger, or perhaps in the person who gave that ring to you? Or maybe in looking at this picture, in the depicted person’s or in the merchandise made by other hands, other gestures, in other living materials?

An image moves between an inner and outer world and backwards in time and presents a chain of messages in which we might, if we could follow them all, discover a vaster world.

Picture Post No. 11 The Playground

---

'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

'Playing'. Original photo, title and date unknown, by Alexsandr Malin

In this deceptively simple image a simple gesture accentuates not only a perception of an optical play about reality, but also leads on to a vision about a virtual world.

We enter the paradox of pick and choose.

The shift between figure and background position produces contradictory responses. The object - the car being used as a kind of toy - transforms and breaks the coherence between the object and ourselves. Evidently, one value must have another value.

We can be flexible: the playground is free to enter. Humour has the capacity to reveal ‘our will of absence’ - to guide things beyond their ascribed function. We laugh alongside our own rigidity.

---

Picture Post No. 11 The Playground

---

'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

'Playing'. Original photo, title and date unknown, by Alexsandr Malin

In this deceptively simple image a simple gesture accentuates not only a perception of an optical play about reality, but also leads on to a vision about a virtual world.

We enter the paradox of pick and choose.

The shift between figure and background position produces contradictory responses. The object - the car being used as a kind of toy - transforms and breaks the coherence between the object and ourselves. Evidently, one value must have another value.

We can be flexible: the playground is free to enter. Humour has the capacity to reveal ‘our will of absence’ - to guide things beyond their ascribed function. We laugh alongside our own rigidity.

---

The Difficulty of Change

Posted by Tessa den Uyl 

We often use the word 'change' in our conversation. Everybody seems to understand such expressions as: change yourself, we have to change, things are changing, change is needed, or if only something would change.

Change presupposes a certain kind of disruption in the way we think. We guide our perceptions through the creation of conceptual relations, which we think of as stable, of which we are consciously aware, and of which we recognise certain qualities within.

Upon such conceptual relations we act and react. And yet we desire change. This would not be so but for the fact that we question these relations.

In a world of myriad relations, we tend to extract only a few as valuable for the pattern of our proper life. And where we ascribe everything to specific relations in our life, desiring change signals trouble. Yet without change, we have no descriptive material. Without the stream of constant sensory change, how can we perceive life? 



This morning, in a small village in Morocco, I go out to buy a washing powder called Tide. My friend Ilias understands not Tide but tête, meaning 'head'. Ilias does not understand what I want. With the help of a description of laundry, and pointing to the package, eventually we arrive at 'Oh, you want Tide.' Now why would one buy a 'head' in a shop which sells products for the home?

Over the past two years, Ilias and I have conducted a dialogue over many such misunderstandings regarding pronunciation. I try to apprehend his pronunciation, to speak slowly, but today we’re still at the same place where we started.

We are stuck. Ilias thinks that I should learn to speak better French – or from my point of view, I should learn to speak his kind of French. We are caught in a no-man's-land, where there is a problem about who will leave their territory to risk entering another – in which proper communication becomes possible.

What do we learn from this situation, about change? We learn that, in attempting to communicate, both parties need to reconsider the relations which lie behind the words and concepts of their communication. The problem was never really about Tide or tête, but rather about different cultures and perceptions, different languages and foci.

Ilias and I have no 'common ground' where we may place our verbal misunderstandings. His change is not my change. 
My interests are not his, and the relations which he traces in this world are not mine.

However simple this example might seem, it illustrates the difficulty of finding the mutual understandings which are essential before we try to change something in the understanding of another: my lack must become his lack, and his lack must become mine. To be able to act for change, we have to be willing to change the descriptions of the world which we ourselves possess.

In arguments about words, there is always a defence of a supposed norm. And so it is with all change. Change challenges ideas of truth which each one of us carries about with us inside. Psychological change always trespasses on property in this sense – the property of truth. Could it be, then, that change can only come about when we are aware of the diversity among us?

Consider another example. A Yemeni woman exclaims: 'Sometimes I hope that a missile would just blow us all away' – meaning: destroy herself and her family. What the woman desires is her liberation by that same force which took the old, recognisable relations from her.

Often we desire change without having to let go of ideas we have previously used to describe and make sense of the world. We want to continue to recognise something, while (impossibly) including within that old recognition a new, unlived experience of change. This may be why the Yemeni woman 'desires' death – which is the most logical change we can imagine. Although death itself does not change.

Change poses the problem and risk of being reconstructed inside of previously constructed ideas, which are thought upon the logic of some existing principle. Change, then, will eventually serve the function of that principle. If there is to be true change, apart from the irreversibility of death, then this change is not found in adapting to previous notions.

Yet if change is something that does not conform to a previous pattern, then where does change live? Can change then be thought? In a certain way, change can only live in a space unknown to our psyche.

We long for change, knowing that change is about a combination of more things than we can consider. These unconsidered things create not only linguistic difficulties when we talk together, but muddy all of our living together. In whatever way we may use the word 'change', perhaps change truly means the inability to point to ourselves.

The Difficulty of Change

Posted by Tessa den Uyl 

We often use the word 'change' in our conversation. Everybody seems to understand such expressions as: change yourself, we have to change, things are changing, change is needed, or if only something would change.

Change presupposes a certain kind of disruption in the way we think. We guide our perceptions through the creation of conceptual relations, which we think of as stable, of which we are consciously aware, and of which we recognise certain qualities within.

Upon such conceptual relations we act and react. And yet we desire change. This would not be so but for the fact that we question these relations.

In a world of myriad relations, we tend to extract only a few as valuable for the pattern of our proper life. And where we ascribe everything to specific relations in our life, desiring change signals trouble. Yet without change, we have no descriptive material. Without the stream of constant sensory change, how can we perceive life? 

This morning, in a small village in Morocco, I go out to buy a washing powder called Tide. My friend Ilias understands not Tide but tête, meaning 'head'. Ilias does not understand what I want. With the help of a description of laundry, and pointing to the package, eventually we arrive at 'Oh, you want Tide.' Now why would one buy a 'head' in a shop which sells products for the home?

Over the past two years, Ilias and I have conducted a dialogue over many such misunderstandings regarding pronunciation. I try to apprehend his pronunciation, to speak slowly, but today we’re still at the same place where we started.

We are stuck. Ilias thinks that I should learn to speak better French – or from my point of view, I should learn to speak his kind of French. We are caught in a no-man's-land, where there is a problem about who will leave their territory to risk entering another – in which proper communication becomes possible.

What do we learn from this situation, about change? We learn that, in attempting to communicate, both parties need to reconsider the relations which lie behind the words and concepts of their communication. The problem was never really about Tide or tête, but rather about different cultures and perceptions, different languages and foci.

Ilias and I have no 'common ground' where we may place our verbal misunderstandings. His change is not my change. 
My interests are not his, and the relations which he traces in this world are not mine.

However simple this example might seem, it illustrates the difficulty of finding the mutual understandings which are essential before we try to change something in the understanding of another: my lack must become his lack, and his lack must become mine. To be able to act for change, we have to be willing to change the descriptions of the world which we ourselves possess.

In arguments about words, there is always a defence of a supposed norm. And so it is with all change. Change challenges ideas of truth which each one of us carries about with us inside. Psychological change always trespasses on property in this sense – the property of truth. Could it be, then, that change can only come about when we are aware of the diversity among us?

Consider another example. A Yemeni woman exclaims: 'Sometimes I hope that a missile would just blow us all away' – meaning: destroy herself and her family. What the woman desires is her liberation by that same force which took the old, recognisable relations from her.

Often we desire change without having to let go of ideas we have previously used to describe and make sense of the world. We want to continue to recognise something, while (impossibly) including within that old recognition a new, unlived experience of change. This may be why the Yemeni woman 'desires' death – which is the most logical change we can imagine. Although death itself does not change.

Change poses the problem and risk of being reconstructed inside of previously constructed ideas, which are thought upon the logic of some existing principle. Change, then, will eventually serve the function of that principle. If there is to be true change, apart from the irreversibility of death, then this change is not found in adapting to previous notions.

Yet if change is something that does not conform to a previous pattern, then where does change live? Can change then be thought? In a certain way, change can only live in a space unknown to our psyche.

We long for change, knowing that change is about a combination of more things than we can consider. These unconsidered things create not only linguistic difficulties when we talk together, but muddy all of our living together. In whatever way we may use the word 'change', perhaps change truly means the inability to point to ourselves.