Jamie Cameron . Near-Life Experience , Roland Bagnall , (Carcanet Press, 2024), 88 pages, £11.99 .
. The first thing that struck me about Near-Life Experience was the coherence of its theme: the title, the dedication, the epigraphs, the poems, they’re all preoccupied with the question of what it is to look, to see and pay attention. This also connects with much of what you have written for our magazine.
Where did this fascination with the relationship between looking and language start? I’ve always been interested in different kinds of looking, whether at landscapes, people, artworks, etc. The odd thing about looking is that it always seems to be the same – as in, with the same two eyes – but actually, we look at things in very different ways. I’ve been taking pictures with the same camera for about 15 years, and I like the idea that all the photographs I’ve taken (maybe tens of thousands) have all been passed through the same lens, that however different or dissimilar they seem they all have that in common.
But the way we look at someone’s face is different to the way we look at, say, a painting, which in turn seems different to the kind of looking we perform when staring out the window of a train or going to the cinema or keeping one eye on the traffic while we’re driving. I’m interested in these differences, especially when it comes to some idea of attention or attentiveness: what does it mean to pay very close attention to something, is that even possib.
