At the start of July 2025, I had begun to arrange photographs which I created with my Rolleicord film camera in pairs – diptychs. The black and white photos were sensuous. I was intrigued by how they modified each other: complementing or contrasting, creating a relation between them and of them.
In July 2025, I visited the Kunstmuseum, Bonn, Germany for their exhibition about the life and work of Susan Sontag.
A gallery notice at the exhibition explains the context of Susan Sontag’s work:
The 1960s were a time of upheaval and revolt. Susan Sontag moved in avant-garde circles, bcoming close friends with painter Paul Thek, the photographer Peter Hujar and artist Jasper Johns. With her collection of essays Against Interpretation (1966), she provided a guide to current art movements such as Nouvelle Vague and Happening, while criticising the interpretative approaches and calling for an unbiased sensual perception of works of art.
At the same time, she re-examined the relationship between high and popular culture. She postulated that the feeling triggered by a Robert Rauschenberg painting could be compared to that evoked by a song by the Supremes [Youtube Baby Love, 1964], provoked a wave of outrage.
Having seen the exhibition then I decided that the diptychs which I’d created could be understood in this light, and hence adopted the title for them with this central idea of feeling and sensation.
Photo series
Each of these diptych is presented with two photographs abutting each other on one side of their square format. The spatial arrangement is best appreciated on this PDF of Feeling and Sensation Composition 0 also shown below.
The photograph of the left shows a crushed stick on a woodland floor. On the right is a photograph of a empty glass vessel with sunlight streaming through and casting a shadow and light on the floor.
The photograph on the left shows a plastic basket used for carrying items or for gardening on wooden decking. In the right photograph is a spiders web caught in the sunlight which is suspended between branches of a tree.
In the left photo are the roots of a coriander plant which are pointing upwards and lent against a well with part of a door in the background. On the right is a black cat in a basket on a bed spread with cushions. There is a socked foot on the bed too.
In the left photo is a bath matt on a tiled floor with a comb on it and a bunch of dried leaves from a spider plant/ In the right photo is a field of sunflower plants.
The left photo shows a dirt road on Otmoor in Oxfordshire, UK. The photo on the right shows the same road in a different place with a slightly different arrangement of stones and aggregates on its surface. This photo is inverted.
This is a selection of the series but not the entire set!