Jospeh Gelfer & Laki Sideris - Men and Meaning

Joseph Gelfer has a new project that looks pretty cool - he is providing text for photographs by Laki Sideris. There are only five entries so far, but it looks like it has excellent potential as an eventual book.

Here is the announcement from Gelfer's blog.

Men and Meaning

The start of a new project I’m developing with Laki Sideris: Men and Meaning is a photographic and textual exploration of how men go about constructing meaning in their daily experiences. This meaning-making journey unfolds on two primary levels: what it means to be a man and perform masculinity, and more generally how the subjects derive meaning from the world around them. The images are a mixture of the staged and the documentary, the text a mixture of the biographical and the imagined.

And here is one of the first few posts, a simple but moving photo - Photographs by Laki Sideris | Words by Joseph Gelfer.

04 Desire

Žižek clearly tells us that, “Desire named as desire in this Other is what we think we have chosen, while in fact, by a logic we are not aware of, it was the only choice allowed.” So I have thought long and hard about this desire. From where does it come? Does something stir in the DNA at the sight of these child-bearing hips? Is it the passive availability in her stance that piques my conditioned need to dominate and consume? Could it be—more romantically, more spiritually—the elusive search for completeness? And then I cannot decide if its potency is evidence of the fact that it is indeed the only choice allowed, or whether it is evidence to the contrary (assuming, of course, that such potency can only be authentic). In the end, after all these years, all I know is the net effect of desire: the dissolving away of all things so there is nothing but her and me.