Photography, which is, relatively speaking, a pure and simple act of looking and of capturing an image, speaks about relationships. It captures moments of interaction between people and places and between the photographer and those apprehended in these moments. So called pure photography is always provocative and enlivening because it gives a structure and is a voice for evocative moments and interactions.

Dick Scott Stewart, in at odds, and sods shows a series of moments in the marginal pursuit of wrestling, at the zoo and travelling abroad. His photographs are odds and sods in that they can only give us fleeting, though engaging, points of reference. They give us something that seems fixed and yet is more than that, a split second which starts to make us think about ourselves in relation to it. The wrestling may be experienced as repulsive or amusing, the horse’s head may be a wise monument or a frightening skull, each image stirs up something about our own relationship to the deeper aspects of our own experience.

The old reading of pure photography was as a truthful, essential exchange. This was a humanistic perspective. If, instead, (like Baudrillard) we choose to see ourselves as not fixed but as fluid subjects, who are constantly re-making ourselves through images, the relationship to the photographs becomes clearer. Then it is possible to see work like these images by Dick Scott Stewart as moments that constantly work on the way we see others and the way we see ourselves. It is then possible to understand why they provoke feelings of curiosity, hope, sadness, longing, anger, excitement, loneliness and desire.

Dick Scott Stewart has exhibited in London, France and America, notably with Cartier Bresson and Brassai in New York, in an exhibition of pictures of dance. He has taken portraits for the Sunday Telegraph newspaper and works mainly for design and corporate companies while amassing, alongside this professional work, the odds and sods of his encounters exhibited here.

Mog Johnstone 2000