Still lifes

[Chris Jones]

While I am at it I could send another still life in the series. This one looks like a keeper for now???

[Struan Gray]

The connection with lyric poetry I may need to tease out more but it does show that photography, at least as an art, can be approached just as much from the direction of literature as painting. There may be some connections with visual poetry, as well?

This is well worth a read, and expresses much of what I feel about my own landscape work:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n21/jonatha...er-with-empson

The extension to still lives is an exercise left to the reader :-)

I am starting to muse on the link between symbolism and cliché. Is is possible to find or discover an effective visual metaphor that doesn't immediately get done to death? I'm thinking no.

[cjbroadbent]

... I am starting to muse on the link between symbolism and cliché ...

Symbols are an easy instrument for verbal communication about images. They crop up frequently where images are planned and budgeted by committee (atmosphere and mood are hard to describe in a pre-production meeting).
But photography can't do symbols. Even in black & white, it lacks the abstraction of other media. A dove is just a bird, a shell is a shell and that's that.
In charcoal, a dove is read as 'Peace'. A shell in oil painting is (or once was) read as voluptuousness. I would suggest that a photographer who uses symbols unattached to propaganda runs the risk of ridicule. The subtle language of signs and symbols has been lost for ages.
With the the blunt instrument that is photography, the most we can do is to suggest something outside the frame.
Structure, light and the hint of an idea are the tools we have - and that is plenty enough to contend with.

[theBDT]

Would Edward Weston's Pepper #30 be a still life? It is just one element plus background...

[Chris Jones]

Would Edward Weston's Pepper #30 be a still life? It is just one element plus background...

I rather like this question because it doesn't have a yes or no answer, so it can be both yes and no and becomes an ambiguous statement, perhaps. Genre then becomes a question of varying social relations. (I get this idea from MAK Halliday, google to find more.)

With modern art we are no longer able to think or do art as separate categories. I could call myself a cross media poet which works with line verse and photography, or perhaps a multimedia poet.

The work of Peter Ciccariello, a cross genre poet interests me greatly because of this break down of categories.
http://invisiblenotes.blogspot.com/

[Chris Jones]

Is is possible to find or discover an effective visual metaphor that doesn't immediately get done to death? I'm thinking no.

Some of the still lifes I am working deal with cliche and use cliche so I was delighted by this comment. Also, I am working toward landscape, as well.

I agree that visual metaphors are cliche but I suspect this may be the problem of what a metaphor is as a representation which repeats itself endlessly, it may seem, and floods over a pure novel presence. So how to solve this problem? I can think of two ways, one goes away from cliche and figure toward abstraction and the second goes toward figure and even appropriates cliche into the composition.

There is a type of writing here in Australia, ficto-criticism that uses cliche as a strategy to critically break the assumptions which rest on cliche which I find useful for ideas and suggestions.

www.textjournal.com.au/april05/gibbs.htm


Bakhtin's suggestion on dialogic discourse in the novel, novel meaning writing something that is new, as a dialogue of different languages inside the sentences in novels, may work. EG language of science, language of law and street language in a single sentence. This could be one way to go, it seems to me. A dialogue of cliche leads to collapse of cliche into the work revealing a pure presence beyond cliche...? Moving from an optical vision to a haptic vision is another strategy I am thinking about.

Anyways, no need to follow what I am trying to say. Other ideas welcomed, Chris Jones.

[Chris Jones]

These URLs which link to still life images by William Yang, an important Australian photographer and performance artist, may be of interest to others then myself.

http://www.stillsgallery.com.au/arti...image=20&nav=1

http://www.stillsgallery.com.au/arti...image=21&nav=1

The Stills gallery is worth a browse, BTW.

[Chris Strobel]

Ok I'm in.Sunflower Calumet C-1, 300mm, Fp4+, PMK

[Robert Fisher]

Wow!!!

This deserves to be printed BIG and displayed in a prominent location.

Congratulations Chris!

[Chris Strobel]

Thanks Robert!