|
Been reading a couple of books that
have me excited about photography again. Magnum
tells the story of the famous worker owned
collective that blurred the line between art and
photojournalism. The Photo Book
offers a survey of key photographers, arranged
alphabetically, which makes for disjointed
history but generates surprising juxtapositions.
The sometimes overwrought captioning has me
doing voiceovers for my own photos, as here:
Three
Figures, Seattle, 2017. The
title invites you to count the triangulated
figures; the first obvious, the second a mere
(seated) silhouette, the third almost
invisible, as if camouflaged, a slender dark
clad saunterer whose sunlit white hair echoes
the numerous
light globes in the
distance, a comment, perhaps, on
the mechanization of
humanity. At first the picture seems askew, but
that is just the "lay of
the land." This
vertiginous uncertainty calls
to question the reliability of the viewer's
frame of reference, but when checked aginst
the verticals of lamp posts and building, come to symbolize
the struggle of civilization to dominate
nature--an
unwinnable battle as the people
are swallowed by the landscape. The figures become more
obscure as they recede, with only the foremost
shown to have a face, and that partly
shadowed, hinting at the anonymity of urban
existence, which the man drawn into himself in
the shade appears to relish. But delve deeper
and one sees there are not just three or even
four figures, but five; as
happens in patriarchal societies, these
overlooked women exist at the margins. This titular
misdirection challenges viewers to seize
initiative, question the
dominant narrative and the illusory veracity
of photography itself. When properly analyzed,
this composition is revealed to be more than
just a sunny day in the park.
|
|