Tuesday, March 07, 2006
Photo Journal Six - Barbara Ess, Wildlife (Not Shown)
This isn’t my favorite Barbara Ess work. (A shot of woman from the waist down in a frilly skirt with some kind of illuminated trim. She seems suspended in mid-air) It’s beautiful. It speaks to the dreaming line that floats between beauty and death, the flux it hovers over, the impermanent nature of everything. But it isn’t my favorite.
I haven’t ever seen my favorite Barbara Ess photograph in real life. I have only heard about in an article describing one of her gallery shows. It is a pinhole image of a hand-puppet shadow, an animal projected on a wall and the word "wildlife" scrawled on the same wall.
I am in love with the idea that you might paint with shadows and light using the most primitive means available and still arrive at a delicate result.
I am in love with the idea of the image: a false thing, the shadow animal, and the word signifying, telling us what it is but that it is not that at all. I love the lie.
I am in love with reality defined by negative space, defined by negation, defined by absence.
I am in love with the idea that dreams and reality merge, shadows creeping into the real.
This picture reminds me of those connections we make right before we fade to dead asleep, the halfling time when we hear the world around us, nestle in it’s perfume but what we see is a washy mix of our subconscious and the world shutting down around us.
It is how I imagine death, the slow separation of the sense. There is no longer a whole picture to be made, no meaning to be construed. We are at the mercy of our imagination and our memory so that maybe hell is not a place to go but the journey we take through our own life’s choices right before we pass into oblivion.
I haven’t ever seen my favorite Barbara Ess photograph in real life. I have only heard about in an article describing one of her gallery shows. It is a pinhole image of a hand-puppet shadow, an animal projected on a wall and the word "wildlife" scrawled on the same wall.
I am in love with the idea that you might paint with shadows and light using the most primitive means available and still arrive at a delicate result.
I am in love with the idea of the image: a false thing, the shadow animal, and the word signifying, telling us what it is but that it is not that at all. I love the lie.
I am in love with reality defined by negative space, defined by negation, defined by absence.
I am in love with the idea that dreams and reality merge, shadows creeping into the real.
This picture reminds me of those connections we make right before we fade to dead asleep, the halfling time when we hear the world around us, nestle in it’s perfume but what we see is a washy mix of our subconscious and the world shutting down around us.
It is how I imagine death, the slow separation of the sense. There is no longer a whole picture to be made, no meaning to be construed. We are at the mercy of our imagination and our memory so that maybe hell is not a place to go but the journey we take through our own life’s choices right before we pass into oblivion.
# posted by Mike : 10:33 AM
