Equivalence: The Perennial Trend

[mdm]

[Struan Gray]

Ah yes. The old hogg <--> sheep dichotomy.

[swmcl]

I see the hog as jumping for joy. It should be titled "Joy".

[austin granger]

That's a fantastic picture David.

[swmcl]

I do apologise if my comment is seen as being critical of the image David. My comment is having some light jest at the thread concept only - nothing at all to do with the image.

[Miguel Coquis]

"What is below is like what is above, and what is above...."
L'Yvette, Vaux de Cernay, 78720 France

[George E. Sheils]

Ghost echoes: shadow of the lost mariner



Barnageera groyne 2 - 5x4 pinhole by George Sheils (seoirseosial), on Flickr

[Peter Lewin]

George - beautiful image! The pinhole vignetting only adds to it. Would you care to enlighten us as to the Gaelic?

[George E. Sheils]

George - beautiful image! The pinhole vignetting only adds to it. Would you care to enlighten us as to the Gaelic?

Hi Peter, if you mean the words Seoirse O'Sial ....well that's my name in Gaelic.

George = Seoirse and Sheils = O'Sial.

You know, I was a bit unnerved with the reflection of the groyne in the sand. To me it bears a resemblance to some of the old fishermen I used to know when I was a young lad growing up. Some were lost at sea, never to return again. Although, looking at it now it is obviously just a reflection.

I'd just like to shout out to Miguel and everyone else for contributing to this fantastic and engaging thread. ��

[Darryl Baird]

I promised myself that I would read every page of this lovely thread before wading in with my own contribution… I failed in that effort. I simply couldn't wait to nudge into the mix, as I find the conversation and imagery too compelling to resist. I will read the previous (16) pages, I promise.

After the question about the context of the image (museum versus Instagram), I retraced my own experience of the first five pages of imagery and thought that I had already begun to "read" each with a bias -- I was looking at the "idea" of equivalence and metaphor as a jumping off point. I was influenced by the context/theme of the thread itself. Perhaps it was also the mental thinking that had already begun upon reading several initial posts. Whatever, I was fun. I was looking past subject matter to the experience of the image itself, as if in the actual scene. The white door by Austin felt hot to view; I experienced something that wasn't in the print/screen viewing.

Is the reference always external, or can it also be felt more directly, more as an experience rather than as a graphic image?

This idea intrigues me to no end (perhaps it was all that acid I did too, who knows?), but I've been making (and struggling with) work that approaches subjects as gestures, or metaphors, and/or icons, but calling it "pictorial drawing," named in homage of Talbot's 'photogenic drawings' and the Pictorialism movement.


[One area that might move this work a little outside of an (my) understanding of "equivalents" or "equivalence" is a use of focal plane manipulation to pull a viewer through/around the images. Not sure it works better, but it keeps me busy.]

Images from the series, and they're salt prints.