is allegory dead?

[Drew Wiley]

Real world functional definition of kitch : 90% of what you encounter on the web or in commercial galleries.

[Toyon]

Contemporary allegory would be perceived as kitsch. Serious art must be as content free as possible.

Hahahahaha

[Heroique]

"...It has to unfold over time, or be worked out by cues presented to the viewer..."

This is a key challenge.

Naturally, it's more difficult for a static image than for a flowing literary narrative.

A famous literary example: The knight named Redcrosse in Edmund Spenser's The Fairie Queene (1590). The knight, as readers around here know, is an allegory for (Christian) holiness. The initial "cue" for this is his name, of course, but his actions over time make it all the more clear what he stands for in this justly famous Elizabethan epic of photographic vividness.

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Below, "The Red Cross Knight" (1793), by John Singleton Copley (National Gallery of Art, London). This is a scene from Spenser's The Fairie Queene – Redcrosse meeting two ladies who, like him, are also allegories – Faith and Hope. The "cues" are all there. It's a magnificent painting by one of America's greatest artists, but would Copley be laughed to scorn today?

[jcoldslabs]

For an allegory to succeed the subject depicted must clearly represent something other than the literal. This is difficult to do in such a representational medium as photography. Weston's "Pepper No. 30", while suggestive of a human form, is still just a pepper, and Adams' "Clearing Winter Storm" is...hold on...I know this one...wait, don't tell me....

J.

[Drew Wiley]

Nothing in a photograph is literal. It's all some kind of illusion standing for some psychological motive, even if that is only to make a buck, create a memory, or make a surveillance map. It a flat piece of paper or plastic or illuminated panel. Never the "real" world. Even if you program a satellite to take "random" serial shots, there's still an artificial emphasis programming the device to take a particular look at the world in light and texture. You don't need costumes and studio props to reinvent the world. You do it subconsciously every time you take a picture. So there is no such thing as "content free". Even if you take a cutesy shot of a chipmunk sitting on a Natl Park sign you have a staged motive. Even the chipmunk knows that. So prior to the chipmunk signing your model release, at least pay him with a cracker or peanut. He could care less about your picture itself.

[Nathan Potter]

Interesting result from a Google search, Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century photography: A-I, index, Volume 1, page 27. Nice article on allegory in photography.

Allegory is a concept with two parts. The first meaning is what is obviously presented, with something that evokes a second meaning through prior social, societal, and historical context. The allegory isn't a mere illustration, as it's meant to necessarily evoke something that has come before. It has to unfold over time, or be worked out by cues presented to the viewer. The allegory is like a shadow play, with characters in the foreground masking the shadows of something else in the background.

A photographic allegory isn't easy at all, unless it's been set up beforehand. For instance, I wouldn't expect someone to go out and do allegorical street photography. Allegories might be constructed later, but not likely in the actual act of making a street photograph. Using an allegory in landscape photography might be easier, but I can't think of any that I myself have made.

An effective allegory has to be carefully constructed. Consider, how would you condense The Lottery into a single photograph?

I like this explanation. The image at hand is what we have to work with, with something else as a shadow in the foreground and background. What is outside of the actual image comes from the imagination of the viewer. Viewers don't always have the experience to contribute the allegory so it is difficult to execute such in a single photograph.

I tried to use this approach in the 1970s' in a series about war and violence as a result of the Vietnam war chaos. The intent was obvious at the time due to the widespread news of the carnage but I suppose could easily be missed now (although maybe not). I'll post the image below:


VIO-1-74-07{BWO[t1 by hypolimnas, on Flickr

Image is the result of target practice on a boy mannequin that I stumbled on in a gravel pit. Someone had placed the remains of the head on the hood of the bullet ridden pickup. Of course my intent at the time was to symbolize war type violence against humans (the shadow subject). Most viewers got the allegorical message. I may have posted this previously but can't find it.

Nate Potter, Austin TX.

[Brian C. Miller]

What I found amusing about Pepper No. 30 is that it was just a pepper to Weston. He was just playing with his food. His own comment, in part, was, "It has no psychological attributes, no human emotions are aroused ..." He never made any of his pepper series as an allegory for anything.

The problem is what people imagine and project onto an image. In Weston's case, it was all kinds of stuff, and he termed his peppers as being "libeled." The first thing that has to happen when someone looks at the photograph is to think, "It's not really about that, is it?" For literature, the first hint is that the story is fiction. For painting, it usually comes on like a freight train with the horns blaring, with visual cues like flying people and things like physics and gravity aren't especially important. The elements are placed so that it's unquestionably an allegory. It's not a case of, "this can be seen as an allegory," it's flat-out an allegory.

Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, wrote Alice in Wonderland as a satire of mathematics. If Albert Einstein had written a book of fiction of what he thought of quantum physics and entanglement ("spooky action at a distance"), what might it have looked like?

When a photograph starts looking like a smoke trip, then 99.94% of the time it's a smoke trip. It's really not an allegory for anything. It just surreal or abstract for the sake of being surreal or abstract. There is no secondary meaning, other than to occupy blank space on the wall.

So back to the real problem, how to represent an allegory in a photograph.

[ROL]

VIO-1-74-07{BWO[t1 by hypolimnas, on Flickr

The unfortunate resemblance to certain very recent eastern Ukraine incidents aside, and in deference to the subject of this thread, may I suggest a title for the work:

Al E. Gory, R.I.P. ? – ??

[Drew Wiley]

You sure got that one backwards, Brian. It wasn't just Diego Rivera who wiped his brow when he looked at those kinds of EW prints. Those things are reeking with
psychological tension. Otherwise, the peppers would be on the page of the weekly newpaper produce ad, not priceless collectibles. Maybe not allegory per se, but
certainly a reflection of something other than a mere vegetable with a nice sheen to it.

[jcoldslabs]

I would normally say that it is a mistake to confuse the artist's intent with the meaning of a work because each of us reacts to it in our own way. But in the case of an allegory the intent IS the meaning. Orwell didn't say, "Oh, I just wrote a puff piece for children about talking farm animals." His stated goal was to criticize Stalin's rise to power.

Jonathan