ARTIST:
Daniel Gordon
Daniel Gordon describes himself as a photographer, “as straight as you can get”, before throwing a spanner in the works by adding that what he’s photographed never really existed. It’s the act of photographing that brings things into existence.
Gordon admits that the complex assemblages he constructs from stacks of old magazines and internet downloads may also, once he looks through the lens, amount to no more than that lifeless, “shredded cardboardâ€. Writing of the pioneers of the photomontage, Hannah Hoch and Raoul Hausmann, with whom Gordon bears striking similarities, Dawn Ades characterizes the essence of their technique as “subversive ambiguityâ€. That shredded cardboard may still pack a wallop.
Text by William A Ewing It’s his particular version of Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment: it happens, or it doesn’t. Photographing creatively is willing things into life, or as Gordon puts it, “making ordinary moments extraordinaryâ€.
By way of explanation, he relates a story of seeing a woman step on a pile of baby birds, though it turned out to have been a heap of shredded cardboard. The feeling he tries to convey in his work is the one felt in such a moment, when things suddenly turn out to be not what you’d thought they were.