Gnostic Highway: Signs of a New Ministry

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Signs of a New Ministry

This former church – now in private hands – displays a mix of signs and symbols.

Location: Braidwood, New South Wales.

1 comment:

Gaute Michel FerstadApril 23, 2010 at 5:04 PM
So many colors. And so many interesting little items. The bicycle, the writings on the wall, the different color in the windows and the worn look of the building. Trying to imagine how it looked when it was in its prime, and the people that took pride in it. Great shot.
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Welcome to Gnostic Highway

A photo blog inspired by the life and work of Jean Baudrillard with a focus on his passion for photography.

“Perhaps the desire to take photographs arises from the observation that on the broadest view, from the standpoint of reason, the world is a great disappointment. In its details, however, and caught by surprise, the world always has a stunning clarity.”

Baudrillard believed in the mystery and poetry of the photo. The saving power of photography is as allegory or enigma.

“It is not the role of a photograph to illustrate an object or an event, but to be itself an event.”

For Baudrillard, the photograph must:

“be the allegory of something, be a challenge to someone, bring chance into play and produce vertigo.”

In the end, the photograph also shines with the promise of gnosis.

“To rediscover the image as point of convergence between the light from the object and the light from the gaze.”

Our site would not be complete without a playful and ironic view of Baudrillard’s concept of simulation. This is the “hyperreal” – the media’s excess of images in which copies or models supplant reality. Thus, products and their signs compete to be the ‘real thing’. Reality itself has been confused with its own image. In such a state, the duality of the world strikes us yet eludes us.

“The unreal is no longer that of dream or of fantasy, of a beyond or a within, it is that of a hallucinatory resemblance of the real with itself.”