Some days I think that I should just shoot fabrics. They have an inherent beauty. I like them. And they are relatively value-free. Of course we could create a theory or borrow some other that would pertain to the photographing of fabric. There is the labor that went into its production, the environmental damage that the planet sustained, the value we place upon it. Everything must enter a discourse of values.
Here is a portrait of a model arriving at my studio. She has just walked in the door and I've asked her to stand before the fabric that I've pinned to the wall lit from the side by the studio's only window. This is how she looked coming from the street, before we began to make our own artifice that was different from the artifice she had made for some other purpose. I should have made more photos like this, I think, a few of every model, for again, as a group, they would begin to enter some larger discourse and take on another meaning imbued with other values. Who are these women? Why do they come? What sociological and psychological forces, etc.
I make photos while they prepare themselves. They look different then. Some of them like these photos most, for they are at that moment somewhere between who they were and who they are about to become. I take a few photos to show them that I can make the kind of images they are used to seeing in magazines and advertisements. I should have posted this photo in a glitzy style, perhaps without the darkness that is not glamorous. But in a different form, this is truly a pretty photo. The woman in it is a "real life model." I mean to say that people pay her for her work in advertising and illustration.
My point? I forget. I don't often have one these days. I was thinking about my photographs and the value I place on them versus what other people see. Perhaps I feel the frustration of letting some work go so that it is not mine any longer but the world's where it will mean whatever people will have it mean. I am talented enough to make whatever kind of images I want to make, I think. But I can't make them mean what I want them to. All that is beyond authorial intent.
Oh! Yes! The frustration of writing a poem "about something" and then letting it go into the world and no one who reads it "sees" what the "about" is or was or was intended to be but never really iswaswillbe in the first place because we can't capture the IT in words, photos, paint -- nopey, we can't.
ReplyDeleteIt must Become it's own thing when we let it go or else it is nothing.
WHAT? Yup. You must understand. :-)
Hey -- I did an estate sale at house last weekend and the people traveled around the world twice. I bought the prettiest fabrics - from India, Turkey, Saudi Arabia -- they blew away the tapestries from Holland and the embroidery from Portugal which seemed so staid and conservative in comparison to the gold and silver threads wound round the paisleys and patterns. Textiles are a down fall for me.
And that's the rub isn't it? Beyond authorial intent...
ReplyDeleteI love the fabric picture....but I'm weird that way!
Mattise grew up in a mercantile town in France, so he began drawing and painting fabrics at an early age. It is one of the things I love about his paintings, the fabrics. Once in London, I spent most of a day going to the big fabric houses that were all located near one another in a ritzy part of town. Just to look at them.
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