*Cover Image: A Constructed World, "Treesex", 2010 (detail), costumes, mixed media, dimensions variable, courtesy a constructed world and solang Production Paris and Brussels
Author: S.T. Lore
Client: UN Magazine
Photographer: Zephyr Pavey
Designer: Brad Haylock
Pages: 137
Format: Softcover, Grange Offset 70 GSM, Full Colour, Edition of 1000
Year: 2013, ISSN 1449-6747
KWANON
FLASH HUNTER
AGENT OF MERCY
Entering a sunless stream of obliterated faces, a paper merchant clips a pedestrian one night and barely slows down; but it is uncertain if he was just in a hurry, afraid or sick of the drunks, but while accelerating away, he watches the victim stumble to his feet (framed inside his rear view mirror).
At night, he is haunted again by the reflection of the man's ink-stained hands raised in fury. A salute to subversive journalists of a mutated breed. Now, as a forensic spotlight shines into this vacated space – all that is left are the stains, the flares, and the flashes: the messages from people hooded and hidden.
Blow up. Zoom in. Imagine a primitive future shaped by criminal architects. Black headlines cover a white wall. Typeface. Calculator. Diagram of a pen. Under the faded CANON logo is a love heart stamped in the bottom right corner. Street love and gutter credentials of the Anti-Fascists. Disciples of the pitbull and the greyhound. But the original battle began long ago in Japan, the land of the Rising Sun. The year was 1934 and a humble buddhist man began manufacturing his own selection of bootleg cameras with long, sniper-like lenses. He named these instruments after the goddess of a thousand eyes anfd a thousand arms. She is KWANON – the Bodhisattva of Mercy. This was, of course, at the very beginning of a wholesale photographic era. Witness to the I class submarine. The '92-Type' Airplane. The Kwanon camera. All world leaders. But, nothing was ever manufactured: the advertisements featured models constructed of wood spray-painted black. It was a mystery. A bluff. A battle with the Germans for precision engineering in the war to construct the smallest range-finder. Canon was born street-side from a Japanese Buddhist whose love is stamped in the bottom right hand corner of our documented life. Fringe dwellers now denigrate the faded image of this news agent of mercy. Flash hunters document the scrawls of dirt-bag emperors and thousand armed rulers who form gang religions. Merciful hearts capture the news in a solitary frame where the villains face each other in the circle pit of apathy down under ...'
