AustLit

'In Ken Josephson’s photograph ‘New York State 1970’, a man’s arm stretches out over the horizon. In his hand, he holds ‘a postcard of an ocean going ship out over Lake Ontario’. Yet, the way Josephson’s photograph is ‘made, not taken’, it wants you to believe the ship is out there on the ocean. John Berger in ‘Magritte and the Impossible’ explains this: ‘through the gap behind the appearances of the sea and sky a dark free impossible emptiness.’ On closer inspection of Josephson’s photograph, the ship is floating above the sea, a gap in the (perhaps blue?) horizon. Where is he / Josephson / the hand / the photographer standing? On the shore? A jetty? You read somewhere that Josephson snapped this himself, but how is that possible? In some of his other images, the hands in the pictures look like someone else’s hands. This photograph reminds you of Belgian surrealist René Magritte’s ‘The Treachery of Images’; the oil on canvas painting of a smoker’s pipe with the French statement, ‘Ceci n’est pas un pipe.’ This is not a pipe. Ceci n’est pas un bateau. This is not a ship. It is not sailing over the ocean. But it is also of a ship sailing over the ocean.' (Introduction)