| dc.description.abstract | It was a few days after 9/11 that I met Marc La a for the rst time. We were
both enrolled in a residency program at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, which
was located on an idyllic estuary in the middle of Florida, oddly enough only
a stone’s throw from where the pilots of the World Trade Center tragedy were
trained. There were about ten of us, and many, like myself, had come down in
a state of shell-shock from NYC. Marc hailed from San Francisco and seemed
like an only child away at camp for the rst time. As we mutated between a
state of disbelief and despair, our evenings were occupied by alcohol-soaked
group critiques, whereby we’d o er up our work to one another. Marc, at his
own bequest, was one of the rst to present. His lm occupied more time than
anyone had patience for and was not only monotonous, hard to understand, and
droning to the brink of being annoying, but also, given the global atmosphere
and my state of mind, brilliantly razor-sharp in message and form.
In the aftermath of 9/11, incessant replaying of destruction footage gave
scholars and the public alike enough fodder to examine our schizophrenic,
subservient, and often submissive relationship to images. What had been
anticipated time and time again in cinema and the public’s visual imagination
had now been actualized. La a’s aptly titled Confessions of an Image consists
of twenty-one short visual and audio essays that interrogate the history,
production, distribution and consumption of the photographic image. A series
of scratchy and often blurry images captured by his Canon Elph – the ultimate
point-and-shoot, which dominated La a’s practice for many years – plods along
to a monologue of the artist himself belligerently ponti cating (from what
sounds like from far out in the universe) about electromagnetic light crisscrossing the planet. | spa |
