Still lifes

[kev curry]

Thats quite a leap... still life to gay porn, fascinating

[Struan Gray]

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.

I agree with most of what you say, but I can't go along with this. The attached Paul Caponigro photograph is a canonical refutation. Abelardo Morell's wonderfully observed casual still lifes work for me too.

I agree that one problem is to get viewers to take photography seriously enough to consider the possibility that there is more than meets the eye. Among serious art consumers that battle was won long ago, but among 'ordinary' people there is still a need for hand-holding, or the sense of authority that comes from a gallery or museum.

I also agree that paintings and photographs speak with different voices. Cartier Bresson's best work would be unbearably kitschy as paintings. Photographs which mimic medieval or C16th portraits, with the subject surrounded by directly interpretable objects, often come off as unnecessarily forced, even if you choose symbols modern people will recognise.

I think we are in a historic low point for symbolism in the arts generally. How you interpret that fact, and how you might try and break away from it, are questions of taste, but I don't feel that lack to be an inherent trait of the medium of photography. There is a lot of 'discourse' with symbols in recent art, but it is mostly of the childish play-with-a-word-until-it-loses-all-meaning sort. It would be good to find a way of using symbols that recognises their power in a sincere way, but without simply copying historical models.

Chris, my comment was inspired by the way that today's successful metaphors 'go viral', and are so quickly diluted by casual and commercial overuse. What I think of as conscious metaphors, the equivalent of symbolism in plays and poems in the pre-visual age, are manufactured and repackaged so quickly that they don't have time to gather meaning by organic or unconscious processes.

Photography is part of that repackaging, re-seller driven process, but it also can act against it. My daughter found herself fighting popular culture's vision of girlhood from the age of two onwards, so projects like JeongMee Yoon's Pink and Blue project (http://www.jeongmeeyoon.com/aw_pinkblue.htm) resonate strongly. I also think that photographers are particularly good at discovering those rare instances of organically-grown metaphor hiding in plain sight. Stephen Gill's photographs of hotel toilet paper are an acute observation of an irrational phenomenon that seemed to come from nowhere but which is now ubiquitous (they're buried in a flash presentation at stephengill.co.uk) His other work, particularly Hackney Flowers, also looks at metaphor in the modern world, although there is a particularly English feel to the whole that might not appeal to the international audience here. Banksy's games with surveillance cameras are a more populist version of the same thing.

Good luck with your series Chris. Show us the results...

[csant]

Photographs which mimic medieval or C16th portraits, with the subject surrounded by directly interpretable objects, often come off as unnecessarily forced, even if you choose symbols modern people will recognise.

The again, I think of Sugimoto's Henry VIII, or Sudek's exercises on Caravaggio. It can work nicely when it is a stylistic exercise - and by that I do not intend diminishing the (artistic) value of the photograph.

[mandoman7]

I would say, stop and think of your audience.

[S. Preston Jones]

Chris Strobel, can you tell us more about how you took this picture, the sharpness over the whole flower with a 300 MM lens on (4x5?) is outstanding. Love the image.

Preston

[Chris Strobel]

Chris Strobel, can you tell us more about how you took this picture, the sharpness over the whole flower with a 300 MM lens on (4x5?) is outstanding. Love the image.

Preston

Hi Preston, thanks!The C-1 is and 8x10 camera.Its pretty simple really, its just a tight crop on a whole bushel of sunflowers shot about 5 feet away at I believe about f/45.This is the only scan I can find right now of the neg, its not the scan I used for the crop, but its the same neg.

C