We are proud to present issue 13 of 1000 Words, “Uncertainty”, our first release of 2012. To view it please go to www.1000wordsmag.com
“I can make no statement about reality clearer than my own relationship to reality; and this has a great deal to do with imprecision, uncertainty, transience, incompleteness, or whatever. But this doesn’t explain the pictures. At best it explains what led to their being painted.” So said Gerhard Richter whose paintings have taught us a thing or two about such matters.
Photography’s own intriguing relationship to uncertainty is what we have set out to enact within the current edition of 1000 Words. Featuring Roger Ballen, Natasha Caruana, Viviane Sassen, Raymond Meeks and Deborah Luster, Christer Strömholm and W.M. Hunt alongside essays, reviews and interviews by Gerry Badger, Sue Steward, Peggy Sue Amison, Louise Clements, Michael Grieve and Brad Feuerhelm, the bodies of work in this issue tap into a fundamental mood of uncertainty and reveal some of its dimensions of expression: the mystery caused by a lack of knowledge on the part of the observer or the fraught politics of representation when portraying ‘the other’; the unnerving combination of a documentary approach with staging and construction or the ambiguity between fact, fiction and stories; the experimental inaccuracies of an image or the fragmented and indeterminate narratives that typify many of today's photobooks are all but a few examples.
In the dedicated Books section, we cover Christian Patterson, Morten Anderson and Ori Gerhst’s recently released titles with reviews from Michael Grieve, Sean Stoker and Oliver Whitehead.
At best, photography should embrace the most difficult things of our world - the dissonant, the awkward, the unclassifiable - in order to help us posit new understandings of what it means to be a human being. It could be said that photography which is analogous with existentialism, an investigation of subjectivity, is the kind of photography that has the most beauty, poetry and truth, especially at a time when the world seems all too unsure of itself.
Once again, 1000 thanks to all the photographers, writers, editorial and art departments as well as of course our advertisers for making this magazine possible.
