Activities create bonds amongst the loose associations between art photographers at Flight Paths. The emphasis is on regional connectivity in making photographs, working on projects, going on fields trips, exhibiting, and posting work.
Activity is the centre of Light Paths because the early 21st century is quite unlike the latter half of the 20th century. The former has no larger framework, no inevitable world-historical orientation, and no commanding narrative that is strong enough in its actual unfolding in the world to guide us in finding our way as art photographers.
We no longer have a linear time, in the sense of the past being followed by the present and then the future. We no longer have any particular aesthetic modality to shape our activities, the way we would, once, describe realism, cubism, modernist formalism or even ‘body art’ or ‘land art.’ What we have in contemporary art discourse is the very slippery meanings of a ‘contemporary art’ that is shaped by three main currents.
Our futures as photographic artists are entirely within the resources available to us now in our contemporary world. Our sense is one of being in, or belonging to, this time, yet at the same time, keeping a critical distance from it. We realise that total immersion in the present—an up-to-dateness–is blindness. Our sense of being in this time, these times, and out of them at the same time, is because we are aware of the darkness of those currents in our contemporary times which cast shadows on both the past and the light of the present.
It is this sense of “uncanny untimeliness”, as distinct from being utterly of and with the times as they present themselves, that is the first and most striking feature of our current contemporaneity.