David James Grinly

A series of over-painted stills taken from pornographic films made before the advent of the internet, viagra or readily available amateur film making equipment and bound by European law to include a certain percentage of cinematic narrative and dialogue in relation to scenes of sexual activity.

I thought I should get better at painting things rather than blobs and I had found a site with old porno on it. I combined the two. I had been to visit L’origine du Monde in Paris and was thinking about that paintings amusing history, its shock value and its beauty.
When I started watching the old pornos it seemed very obvious that certain modern standards of obscene film making were missing. I teach lots of texts which talk about obscenity and spectacle and pornography in various ways. The most obvious thing to me was that these older pornographic films were less obscene in the communicative sense, one could rarely see all of what was happening. They were less body specific in that they contained many bodies of many shapes and sizes with various levels of hair and clothing. The films also had relatively obviously been made, photographed, by someone who knew how to frame things, to tell stories with pictures rather than by someone interested only in describing, indexing, events. There were signs, not just documents.  The films were about thought as much as action, thoughts that were betrayed, of course, by the nature of the film, but they were there, as ex-formation.

The pornography that I was looking at here seemed, somehow, sacred, in comparison to the profanity that followed it. It was interesting to see penises starting soft, like little flowers sleeping on scared men’s legs.  

“The profanation of the unprofanable is the political task of the coming generation.”

Giorgio Agamben

In Praise of Profanation

Photographs of stones from the road painted with gloss pink enamel model making paint.

As I was reading and worrying and thinking about Heidegger’s things I started collecting little pieces of stone from the side of the road where they had dug a hole to put in Fibre Optic Super High Speed Broadband. I took these pieces of stone home and cleaned them with soap and a toothbrush. They had a great number of different colours and textures of stone in them, they were what they call in the roadmaking trade ‘conglomerate’.
I knew that these sorts of stones were probably not very interesting to my father, he actually liked rocks, not stones, he was a geology teacher. I liked these roadside stones too. They seemed like collages of histories in the way that perhaps we might try to make sense of a world where ancient things are as useful and ordinary as bricks, or concrete, or anything else. A world in which, one might say, everything that was solid had melted into air, and everything that was holy had been profaned. But here, with my stones, rather than steal from artists I stole from the council, and I also stole ready made collages. I tried to imagine these as photographs, I could make kind of fake evidence photographs of them as I had done years ago for a brief about a very brutal Raymond Carver story, or I could light them very dramatically from the side as though they were some sort of shit photography as copy of Caravaggio that is so popular. I tried various things like this but none seemed to work.
I poured pink paint onto them, allowed them to dry and lit them from above on a table with a red curtain behind because it looked like they were on a puppet stage, rather than a dismal little screen. They are visual mirrors. Not terminals on a network. They are very special to me these stones, because of what paint means as love, what stones mean as conglomerates of historical rocks, what learning photography had not taught me, how much more important to me philosophy as such is than photography as such.

Painted photographs taken on mobile phones.

When I was preparing the book called Ex Studia I had test prints made of all the images that I thought I might use so that I could lay them on the table, put them in order, move them around, think about them and speak to Annie about them.

Now that my father had died, as Freud had told me he must, and now that I was no longer a proper photographer (those who cannot...) I thought I should perhaps move on from photographs– from the method, the language – with which I had chosen to try to become proficient and literate. I found I could not escape the brutal power of failure that is so inherent in the photographic endeavour and medium. I love its degraded mystery and metaphysics.
But I also like colour, as I have said. And I like paint. I like paintings, but feel no inclination towards painting representationally.
I bought a tube of paint called “LIQUITEX HEAVY BODY ACRYLIC”. The colour was “LIGHT FLESH PINK”. I squeezed a blob of the thick paint onto one of the photos and it looked like a Thing (not a thing, a Thing). I was so happy, I remember this. I had not been feeling well since before I found out about my Father being unwell, and globbing this thick, cancerous paint onto the smug surface of these shiny photographs seemed necessary. It seemed like love, an act of love, to me, to add this substance, the pictures sang out now in a way they never had before. The content of the photo became radiant with the addition of the subject, love, paint.
I made about seven hundred of these paintings, on all the small test prints for Ex Studia and any others I could find. I scanned them all, squashing their beautiful love onto the flat glass of the ugly scanner. Then I reprinted them on very shiny paper called ‘FujiFlex’, chopped little sections out and gave them away with copies of a pamphlet I had written.
I change which ones to show, sometimes.

A series of collages made from photocopies of photographs of churches in Vienna on coloured paper.

The people who taught me how to take photographs after art school, the professional photographers that I assisted and learned from taught me many lessons. Two of them were :-

–Never show more than one photograph of the same thing, or show a client the same photograph twice, this looks unprofessional.

– Any idiot can make a black and white photograph look good.

So I decided to make something from exactly the same very grainy pictures from the cold churches in Vienna, but turn them into black and white (a great way to cheat at photography is to make a very bad or grainy or ordinary photograph into a black and white one, then people don’t notice so much. This will change soon though, it will just look ‘retro’). I decided to print the black and white versions onto coloured paper and then chop them up with a knife and play with the pieces (I had been reading some books about colour, a Goethe one and one by Joseph Albers where he had made very beautiful colour experiments with paper). Although they seemed violent on one hand, they seemed very quiet on another.

A series of instant photographs responding to texts on aesthetics.

While I was reading Heidegger for a class I needed a break and read Merleau-Ponty instead. Heidegger was on about Origins and Maurice was on about Cezanne. Both were very good, but one was enjoyable to read and the other boring and felt a bit like slopping through rancid treacle peppered with harling stones.

When I was making them I couldn’t think of anything proper to make so I bought an instant camera and 300 sheets of film.
I was, and had been, feeling physically and emotionally unwell for around three years by this stage so going outside was a challenge, of sorts. I wanted very badly to be able to understand or see objects and things and experience them as a means to satisfaction or beauty or pleasure. I was trying to do that seemingly simple thing that photography most spectacularly fails to do, record things that I saw that I liked. Of course, I didn’t really like these things at this stage and the enterprise is more one of illustrating concepts than actually recording an experience of beauty or pleasure or anything like that. But lots of students and friends liked these more than other things that I have made because the photographs seemed happier and easier to understand. I am glad that they liked them despite this fundamental misunderstanding, so here they are. Perhaps the fundamental misunderstanding is interesting. I don’t understand.  

Photographs from inside an educational institution.

In January 2014 I started working in a college in Edinburgh. I teach philosophy and critical studies. Working in the college was strange for me on various levels. I had never had a proper permanent contracted job since before I went to university, this was the first one in fifteen years. Soon after I started the man who had given me the job was forced to leave the college by a strange system of changing his job into not being a job or alternatively being a job but a really shit one with no holidays etc. He left, anyway.

I didn’t really understand (and still do not) the way that photography is taught as a professional activity. You can learn photography in a week or two really, it is the ‘being a professional’ bit which takes longer to learn, longer to grind into people. I am not a terribly professional professional. So when they had staff meetings and so on about how much money each student is worth and how it is the teacher’s responsibility to pass all the students and hand out their bursary money and things I would often question things and very often be sent out of the meetings. After a while I wasn’t invited anymore. So I walked around and thought about things that I could see in the building. I was determined to find meaning or beauty somewhere as I didn’t really understand what it was that I was supposed to be doing there anyway so thought that it would be best if I could send a message, a telegram of sorts, about the types of beauty that were available in an alien environment. Like Tralfamadore.

Photographs in the shower at 7a Gloucester Lane, Edinburgh.

I like very ordinary things. I like to try to make myself able to experience some feeling of beauty or pleasure or enjoyment about ordinary things. The diaphanous ordinariness of things.

I like colours too, when you notice that they change, when the light changes colour, and the colour of things changes because of the changed colour of the light.

Sometimes in the shower at 7a Gloucester Lane people would come with me into the shower, or sometimes they would watch me shower, or I would watch them shower. There was a mirror all along one side of the room, it was a sort of pale brown smoked glass mirror, and there was a lot of wood paneling as though one were in a Northern European pornographic film. Sometimes this was really pleasurable, to watch or listen or talk or watch someone piss or have sex in the shower.
But I find I can only really experience pleasure when I am on my own, visual pleasure I mean. It is nice to miss someone, maybe nicer. I liked thinking and watching the colours change in the mornings as it became summer or winter or whatever it was becoming and I was happy that I didn’t have to worry whether or not the other person thought the same thing or wanted me to look more at them or less, or talk more or less or say something about how much I liked the colours or not or what. It was all just very peaceful, just me and the colours, me and God.

“What follows is a gelatinous job done in a dark room, like photography”

Jean Paul Sartre

Portraits of lovers, friends, family and work colleagues.
Having worked as a portrait photographer for ten years I had met some of my heroes, and every time I found them to be far less heroic than I had hoped they might be. I decided to photograph ordinary, meaningless people; my lovers and friends. I made these ordinary people the same tone as the ordinary background, so that they blended into it. I sent an email to around fifty people, I think twenty of them came along.

I realised at this point that I was not interested in photography as such, and particularly in the idea that photography, as they say, ‘captures the extraordinary in the ordinary’. I am not interested in capturing anything but I am very interested in the ordinary in the ordinary. In the ordinary, in the ordinary. I will go on.  This, for me, is the power of photography.

A series of photographs taken at a very high film speed on an old digital camera from inside churches in Vienna.

On what would have been my Father’s 66th birthday my mother and sister and I went for a trip to Vienna for three days. The temperature was very high when we were there, thirty nine degrees centigrade. I walked around in my spare time and went into churches to try to be cooler than outside where it wasn’t pleasant.

I was taking pictures with an old, small, light camera that I used to like. I also used to hate it because when you put the film speed up very high the grain overpowered the content of the picture. There were all these little coloured dots everywhere and the picture looked like it had been made from coloured sand, like in those framed beach scenes made from dyed sand that people would bring home from Spain.
I decided for some reason that I liked it. I watched a YouTube video with David Lynch (a hero that I had later discovered was unforgivably dull and rubbish by the privilege of taking his photograph) talking about how he liked digital cameras because they had strange patterns in them sometimes, that looked like the mysterious black bits you would have in film cameras, and that soon we would like the grainy bits in digital just like we liked the black bits in film films. I thought this seemed funny and out of date a little bit, the new digital cameras don’t have so much of the strange sand effect, they are much better at hiding it, pretending it isn’t there. I began to miss the grainy digital look of things, it existed for too short a time. So I decided only to use this. And take pictures of things I did not believe in and that had offered no solace.
We visited a lot of art galleries in Vienna and my mother and sister liked when I told them stories about why art happened and what it meant and things. Art galleries are more beautiful in content, churches are more beautiful in form, perhaps?

Photographs of the weeds in a tarmac garden behind the Royal Mile.

In summer 2014 I moved into a rented flat in the Canongate: 123 Canongate, at the bottom of the Royal Mile. It is a lovely little flat. It is very noisy though, with a lot of traffic all the time, and tourists buying tartan hats at the three Scottish shops I can see from my window.
When I first lived here an American tour guide would quite often lead tours down the close next to the building my flat is in, where the bins are, to tell his tourist clients about Adam Smith and point to the old building behind mine. The old building behind mine is a workers tenement building. Adam Smith’s rather grand house is behind this building. I was never sure whether the tour guide was lying for his own amusement or not, but I did like the idea that Adam might have lived in a little flat, looking out onto a completely covered, cracked, overgrown with weeds and moss, patch of filthy tarmac. Maybe it wasn’t like that though when he didn’t live there.
I made photographs of the flowers on the weeds that grew in this version of Adam Smith’s back garden.