I had an intense discussion last night with someone over the ‘Exotic’ series. They come from the ‘art’ side of the tracks, with no real awareness of the photographic tradition. He really liked the trips, he’s even going to be buying a big print of one, but he expressed disapointment with the latest work. His main criticism was that it lacked the impact of the trips, and that the individual images ‘disappeared’ as I didn’t allow the images to connect formally.
Now that is exactly a design feature, not a flaw.
The task I set myself was this…
- How do you present a series on a wall that allows individual images to be ‘read’ in the same way as you can read images in a book.
- How can you present the images so that each component image is complete in and of itself, whilst allowing the connections between the individual parts be relationships of content, without allowing the possibility of the strong graphical connections that were such an inherent feature of the trip project.
In 1. I’m thinking specifically of the wonderful books produced by Silvia Plachy. I really must do a post about her. But the strength of her books is the way you flip back and forth seeing thematic connections between pictures. I can’t imagine that these would work well as individual images on a wall.
The ‘Exotic’ project is about categories of ‘things’ . The almost square format was eventually chosen to give almost equal weight to each element, and that, unlike a linear reading, allowed constant reference to be made between each element.
I tried many arrangements, images of different sizes spaced over a canvas, dips, trips, each collection having a different layout. The move from dips to the square was a huge leap forward for me that allowed me to see ways out of potential deadends I sensed coming up.
In the end the ‘almost square’ seemed to work best. The almost mechanistic choice of the same format concentrates on the images without allowing the page layout to become too much part of the work.
Anyway, it is a work in progress so I’ll probably change my mind at a later date…
August 21st, 2007 - 7:50 am
An interesting post about interesting concerns. It’s hard to see and get people to see the implications of what you say on the web: the images are small and grainy, the viewing space is also small, unrealistically luminous and variable from viewer to viewer. To model a wall, one needs a wall I think.
I’m on the trail of a hanging system that will allow me to put work up easily and just as easily move it around, take it down and replace it. I’ve found a ‘clip track’ system manufactured by a Dutch company, but for some reason hard to actually buy — at least in small configurations.
Why? Because I’ve been thinking along similar lines but in what I think is a more open-ended fashion, i.e., not necessarily two images, not necessarily in horizontal and never actually connected physically. In other words a configuration that can be customized to a space and the preferences of the viewer. The discrete ‘elements’ (as you call them) need not be in a particular format (which opens up the possibility of either vertical or horizontal ‘pans’) and the spacing among the elements can vary in a kind of musical time / rhythmical way. A visual morris code.
One large piece I have in mind to experiment with is this one — http://tinyurl.com/2wuerd — which will start as four discrete, relatively large, plaque mounted pieces that are positioned much as they are here. I would imagine in total it will be about a meter on the long end. Admittedly, it’s not a particularly ‘appealing’ thing, at least from a colourist’s standpoint, but I think it will be a useful experiment. (If I can get my wife over the cognitive gap of looking, even temporarily, at ‘deep winter’ in ‘high fall.’
…edN
August 21st, 2007 - 5:09 pm
Julian,
Although he talks about the relationships of images one to anothr in something of a different way, but have you read Another Way of Telling by Berger? There may be a few things in there that could point you to some ideas about what you are doing
tim
August 22nd, 2007 - 1:07 am
I need to reread the Berger. It was an interesting role reversal for me - arguing against a formalist!
Ed, I think those 4 would look great as a set of panels. Don’t forget to put up a jpeg when you have it done.