Discourse Assignment Blog: Tome Duarte’s Photobook

With reference to the lecture on Postmodernism I’m going to write about the recently self-published photobook of Tome Duarte, which I consider both a dear friend and a like-minded photographer. His newest book titled “The Russian Are Coming 2” is a series of paired black and white images of Russian vintage matchboxes facing stills from a vhs pseudo-russian porn movie. Such and unusual choice of pairing up archival-type looking images with an amateur vintage pornography stills not only questions the very basic purpose of erotic images but also the general meaning and associations that wraps us in our daily lives. It also questions the general terms of sexuality dictated in the current art world. To add to all of this the images features a hardly recognizable remake and coded captions of scribbled Kirilica (Russian alphabet). Such attempts to create new meanings in words and calligraphy however are not rare in recent postmodernist work. For this I would like to refer to the series of Clare Strand “Signs of Struggle” in which she puts tags and codes made of letters and numbers on her photographs to create an archival feeling. Even though Tome’s inspirations can clearly be distinguished as reminiscence from the past, I still feel they contain enough power to evoke real emotional reaction and leave you appreciating his quest into the unmarked territories of photography. I believe his approach is best described by the caption he has written to this photobook: “owing its existence to a set of coincidences and epiphanies that precipitated my New Approach to Everything which consists of a mix of subjective idealism and the monistic methaphysical doctrine of “I DON’T GIVE A FUCK” (Duarte, 2012).

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