Provisional Arrangements

May 21, 2025

I wandered the streets today hoping that some odd bit of life would pass me by, but it never did. So then panic set in, and I thought, well, this is it, I am doomed, not worth moving forward on this stupid project. Amazing how the highs and lows can swing dramatically. I feel like I am riding a bucking bronco , getting tossed around like a pathetic rag doll made of straw. But just yesterday I had this great insight about how I can use and deploy audio in this work! And today? Not much.

Then I walked some more and this idea of “provisional arrangements” came into my head. This newsletter is provisional. The use of audio is provisional. The bridge itself is provisional, it’s about to be demolished and made into something else. Photography is provisional, especially in how I imagine its use. Perhaps now I share with you my (provisional) idea of what I want to do here.

Trenčín, I have learned, has a thriving photographic scene of amateur photographers. On Monday I went to an event called Fotopondelok (Photo Monday), where they invite photographers to share their work. There is also a local amateur club of photographers that gather and share what they’ve been up to on a monthly basis over coffee.

Andrej Balco, right, showing a photograph from his excellent series Suburbs.

So, my idea: I want to invite a community of local amateur photographers to all join in the making of a simultaneous photograph of the old railway bridge, ideally a couple dozen all turn out and collectively we discover various vantage points throughout the city where the bridge is (somewhat) prominent (or not). Then, at a specified time and date, we all take a picture at the exact same time: a kind of amateur David Hockney where the singular vanishing point is displaced in favour of multiplicity.

David Hockney, Jerry Diving Sunday Feb. 28th 1982, 1982.

I have always been interested in the experience of looking rather than seeing . This is a provisional arrangement, especially in relation to infrastructure , which normally lies to the periphery of our thoughts, a bit of ephemera that only makes itself known when it explodes, collapses, or ceases to function the way it should.

I like this notion of a collective, dispersed act of photographing that is in essence a choreography of perspectives — we assemble for a moment, then disperse. It is a form of distributed vision — the provisional arrangement here is trying to produce an image that is at once situational, incomplete, distributed. Frequent Bureau collaborator Will asked me the other day about my newsletter, does its ephemerality have something to do with the project itself? Provisionality, I think, is also temporal, it is a way to create media gestures that decay.

My bad attempt at thinking through photography this idea of "provisional arrangements." Definitely not my photographic cup of tea, but a helpful exercise.

I have never had an archival impulse; it was in the ambulatory action of walking today (and moping) where this embrace of the transient and provisional came about, although even before I arrived to Trenčín I had this idea of creating a multi-vantage recording of the railway bridge.

And then this newsletter idea. And the role of radio and voices. And, and, and… I realized: not to store, standardize, or circulate endlessly, but rather to assemble briefly, activate locally, and disperse quietly.

Provisional arrangements?