New Work, September 2013

2013 has proven to be a very busy year. With so many workshops and a lot of traveling, I haven't had many opportunities to get into a regular shooting schedule.  There's pro's and con's to this, but one advantage is feeling the freedom to get in the studio and just play.  Without any concrete directions or thoughts on where to begin, it really opens up the possibility to make new discoveries and wild breakthroughs.

This image is from a recent shoot where we were really starting from scratch, and where I really felt like I could take a lot of risks and see what developed.  The whole shoot was just fantastic, but I have to say I LOVE this image!

I feel like this image is really emotionally charged.  The figure here is really suffering, he's clearly in agony and we're witnessing it.  It's a very active quality of pain, and very striking.  There's a heroic quality to his pain, maybe something like martyrdom?

The red portions of the figure read to me as very raw, like recent wounds, while the dark area in his chest feels like an old wound of some sort.  The lighting and the colors in the shoulder and arm gie the impression of exposed tendons.  The fist coming through the chest could be something punching out, something reaching out from within or bursting through, but I also don't always see it a fist.  Perhaps it is an exposed organ, maybe the heart?

There is something about the overall quality of agony here that makes the lines around the wrist and upper arm appear to be chains of some sort.  It's almost as if he is bound in a dark chamber somewhere.  Or maybe this is an internal struggle- a psychic battle in some dark corner of the mind- and representative of something Karen Armstrong referred to as the labyrinth of the mind....

All that said, I find the face here just INCREDIBLE.  There is subtle but clear smears of red over his eyes, and to me it gives an immediate feeling of blindness.  Perhaps he is nearly blind, or blinded by blood.  Seeing his blindness adds to the overall tragedy of the suffering he is experiencing, bound and body falling apart...

So much of the color work I've done shooting with the mirrors has had classical religious qualities to them, specifically reminding me of Christian iconography.  This image, however, goes back to a more mythological feeling for me.  Prometheus, who is credited with giving man the gift of fire, was punished for doing so by being bound to a rock where every day an eagle would tear out and feed on his liver, only to have it grow back to be eaten again, day after day.  The bound quality of the figure in this image, the body falling apart, the raw flesh, the clear agony and obvious suffering, even the fist reading as an exposed organ, all remind me of the torture of Prometheus.

This is a well known sculpture of Prometheus by Nicolas-Sébastien Adam, housed at the Louvre in France:

 

As the fall season begins and I work on getting back to a regular shooting schedule, I'm looking forward to posting more images here and on the website, and making more unexpected and exciting connections like this one!

 

Connections, Resemblances, and Associations

Last week, I gave a lecture and presentation on my work as a guest at The Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles. The slide talk went very well, and the audience was wonderful.

Every time I give a slide presentation of my portfolio, I try to update it to include my latest work. Not only does it keep the talk fresh and up to date, but it gives me the opportunity to reinterpret some of the older images and sometimes see things in a new context.  Looking at some of the older images with a broader and more developed understanding of the work can provide new insights on what I've done in the past. In preparing for my talk at The Annenberg, I did something I've been meaning to do for a long time...

When I made the image I call "Dead Silences", I was in my second year of grad school. In a critique with 8 fellow students and the professor, one student mentioned that it reminded them of a "Janus" face. Rather than admit that I had never heard of "Janus" before, I nodded in agreement with most of the other students who seemed to understand what this statement meant. I did however research it afterwards, and was surprised at just how accurate this observation was:

According to Wikipedia- "In ancient Roman religion and mythology, Janus is the god of beginnings and transitions, thence also of gates, doors, doorways, endings and time. He is usually a two-faced god since he looks to the future and the past."

The resemblance of Janus in this image still fascinates me to this day, and was only the first of several instances in which one of my images resonated with an unintentional reference.

I had been thinking about this a lot since seeing the connection between one of my recent images and Masaccio's "The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden".  For the slide talk at The Annenberg, I thought it might be fun to illustrate some of the other inadvertent analogies that have appeared in some of my work...

- Click the jump below to read more -

Working With Color in the Mirrors

As I've said, working in the water with color revealed new dimensions, depths, and interpretations to my work. Differences in color temperature of light above and below the surface of water revealed distinct variations that were totally unexpected, allowing me to see the same subject matter I've been working with for over 25 years in a totally new way. The color also gave form and context to certain aspects of the body and it's reflections, things that were more abstracted by black and white.

After photographing with color under water for 2 years, I decided it was time to explore how color would impact the mirror work.

This is a fairly recent image since starting work with the mirrors again a few months ago.  I think the color has a similar effect on the mirror work as it did in the water- it defines a lot of the forms that were previously annihilated by black and white. The color brings with it an element of reality, and along with the notion that photography is automatically taken as truth, creates a tension with the bizarreness of the rest of the image.

The image above is one of my favorites that I've seen in the mirrors so far.  A lot of the latest mirror work has had an undeniably classical religious quality to it, which is a surprise to me, because I'm not religious.  When I go into a shoot, I don't have an image in mind, or even an idea of what I want to convey.  After seeing this image, I couldn't help but think that not only did it feel classically Christian, but that it reminded me of something in particular.  And then it struck me:

This is from  "The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden", by Early Italian Renaissance painter Masaccio.  I was so surprised to see the similarity not only in the gesture, but in the overall expression.  There's something about the articulation of the image that feels very similar as well, something about the graphic quality...

A good friend of mine came by the studio and had a similar reaction to the image, but a different painting in mind:

"The Birth of Venus", by Sandro Botticelli.  I though it was so interesting he had such a different association with the expression.  The gesture is the same, but the overall feeling is so different than the one in "The Expulsion".  It's also a bit more of a contrast stylistically, but definitely similar.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were other works of art, particularly with the same kind of notoriety as the two given here, that share similarities.  What I find so interesting is that I hadn't planned this prior to making this image, rather, it was discovered after the fact.  I also love that my friend could have such a different, but equally relevant, interpretation and/or association with an image that is just as much a surprise for me as for anyone else.  I feel like that is one of the advantages of working intuitively, that it can lead to these wonderful discoveries, and bring up more interesting questions.