mercredi 10 août 2005

"Nature Morte" is a Deathly Description... But there's life in still-life yet It has often occurred to me that to create a simple still-life - a composition that is both pleasing to the eye, descriptive as to the nature of the subject / objects, and with some interpretative emotion - is not as easy as it looks. There are countless such photos seen in photo magazines, "how-to" photo books and household or life-style magazines, but they generally, if not entirely, adopt the usual clichés to convince the viewer that the composition is complete in every detail... the final touch being the sprayed mist of water droplets covering every leaf and piece of fruit to emphasise the "just picked" impression. But what it usually is, is "still"... as in still-life. Or dead... as in the French nature morte. Of course still-life is a correct description because nothing moves... similarly nature morte is dead substance. But we try to interpret these lifeless things with camera and film, or brush and colours, in order to show shape and form, colour and tone as well as texture, weight... as a whole... in a composed arrangement which is telling, informative, evocative, pleasing enough to look again and again at it's two-dimensional rendering of what is very three-dimensional in real life. The lead photo image is a typical result of how I used to spend hours making as interesting a composition as possible using half a dozen bottles of various shapes, sizes and opacity against a plain background. Without careful positioning of lights, reflectors and French Flags (not Tricolours, but pieces of card to block-off light spilling on certain areas) it would have resulted in a flat image with little or no separation between the overlapping objects. However, the smaller still-life image with the bottle and glass of wine, frying pan with foodstuffs, etc, (above left) is how most photographers (and painters) represent this type of subject because it is traditional, safe, and what they have seen in countless magazines and books. Well... it's time to look at, and absorb, different imagery from different books and sources. I'm discovering more interesting photo ideas, not from my photo library, but from my art books and exhibition catalogues collected from the mid-1960s. And by comparing the still-life photo with the painting "Nature-Morte" by the French painter Amédée Ozenfant (1886-1966) next to it, it's not too difficult to see a similarity. OK, they're completely different visually, but, common to both are several everyday household objects, similar curves, lines and overlapping shapes. It is the interpretation that is completely different... and exciting to look at. Ozenfant may not be a common name but he wrote the best selling "Foundations of Modern Art" which should be remembered by many from college... his 1952 Dover Publications edition being the first book I bought at grammar school for my art studies, and referred to as I wrote this. From the Ozenfant still-life I link to the "Nature Morte" of Italian painter Giorgio Morandi whose work is sublime. In the excellent article "The eloquent whispers of Giorgio Morandi" by Karen Wilkin writing in "The New Criterion" (on line), she quotes Umberto Eco... "Eco spoke of how he first encountered a single Morandi still life in an exhibition of contemporary Italian art in his home town, when he was still a high-school student. He was enthralled by the little picture and returned to the show every day for the two weeks of its run, puzzled by how a small painting of not very much could continue to hold his interest and challenge him." And that is the interpretation and emotion holding the viewer... the interpretation from representative to imaginative. The bachelor Morandi lived in a dingy house with his three unmarried sisters and spent two months on each small still-life painting... his bedroom being his studio for most of his life. I think Morandi's compositions are reminiscent of the beautifully composed, photographed and printed still-life images of Irving Penn... especially his "Cigarette" series. From Morandi my line of thought turns to the abstract work of obscure Czech photographer Jaromir Funke (1896-1945), and in particular a version of "Composition" which is illustrated as a 6.75 x 5 inch ferrotyped print from 1930 in the Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago, and as "Untitled (Shadows of Bottles) c1927 silver gelatin print 11.5 x 9.25 inches purchased by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art" in the superb book "On the Art of Fixing a Shadow - One Hundred and Fifty Years of Photography," published by Bullfinch Press. This is where the link from painting to photography really interests me... from Ozenfant to Morandi to Funke. There's a beautiful description by Funke of his artistic motivation... "The beginning point and the objective is emotion, an emotion in a certain sense, something like a dream, where human fantasy is laid open and fairy tale-like rifts are mastered. Fairy tales, indeed, but created out of a photographic reality. A human dream, photographed in order to relate it to others." Funke was influenced by Frantisek Drtikol, a fiend of Josef Sudek and a leading member of the Czech avant-garde during the 1920s and 1930s and with Joseph Ehm risked his life by continuing to edit and publish the avant-garde journal "Fotograficky obzor" (Photographic Horizons) for more than two years after Czechoslovakia fell under Nazi occupation Funke's interplay of shadows and light is evident in his images... and takes my interpretation of still-life a step further with the transient scene of coloured glass bottles behind a thin cotton curtain... as the curtain moved with the breeze the back-projected silhouettes of the objects danced into different shapes for a split-second (hardly a still-life). I made no adjustments to the composition (the curtain did that for me by distorting the shapes the nearer or further it moved from the bottles) and no changes to the lighting (natural sunshine on a cloudless day). My only manipulations were camera position and exposure settings to the motor-driven Nikon F3... making it easier to create an "airiness" to the image by opening up the aperture to overexpose slightly and reveal the transmitted patterns and textures. My ideas of how to shoot an imaginative still-life certainly changed from the original (top) image of strictly composing every element in the composition so revealing a careful interplay of line and form - using a tripod mounted Hasselblad 500C fitted with a 100 mm Planar... to a hand-held Nikon waiting for the breeze to surprise me with an exciting image. The former under total control... the latter in hopeful expectation... but both with a creative eye and mind fully activated before either cameras were. 11:45:34 PM    comment []