Mimosa Tree Seed Pod
Pod
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Category Archives: minimalism
All In A Row
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All In A Row
A Certain Slant of Light
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A Certain Slant of Light
There’s a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.
Emily Dickinson
Vegetal Curves
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Vegetal Curves
Ghosts
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Ghosts
One need not be a chamber to be haunted,
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.
Far safer, of a midnight meeting
External ghost,
Than an interior confronting
That whiter host.
Far safer through an Abbey gallop,
The stones achase,
Than, moonless, one’s own self encounter
In lonesome place.
Ourself, behind ourself concealed,
Should startle most;
Assassin, hid in our apartment,
Be horror’s least.
The prudent carries a revolver,
He bolts the door,
O’erlooking a superior spectre
More near.
Emily Dickinson
Dead Or Alive
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Husk Dance
“Everything around us, dead or alive, in the eyes of a crazy photographer mysteriously takes on many variations, so that a seemingly dead object comes to life through light or by its surrounding. And if the photographer has a bit of sense in his [or her] head maybe he is able to capture some of this—and I suppose that’s lyricism.” –Joseph Sudek
The Poet of Prague
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Egg
Josef Sudek’s Egg
I had not seen the work of Czech photographer Josef Sudek, “The Poet of Prague,” before I created my own photo of an egg and its shadow. Sudek’s development as a photographer is an interesting story, but his work speaks for itself…..beautifully, wonderfully poetic.
In an article that Charles Sawyer wrote for Creative Camera in 1980, he describes Sudek’s photographic aesthetic perfectly, “The eye is usually accustomed to seeing not light but the surfaces it defines; when light is reflected from amorphous materials, however, perception of materiality shifts to light itself. Sudek looked for such materials everywhere. And then he usually balanced the ethereal luminescence with the contra-bass of his deep shadow tonalities.”
In Sudek’s own words (taken from the text accompanying a short video tribute to his work set to music):
” I believe that photography loves banal objects, and I love the life of objects…”
” Everything around us, dead or alive, in the eyes of a crazy photographer mysteriously takes on many variations, so that a seemingly dead object comes to life through light or by its surroundings…. To capture some of this – I suppose that’s lyricism…”
The banal through the eyes of Sudek…….exquisite visual poetry.
Fred Sandback
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Needle and Thread
It’s always great when someone compares my work to another artist’s, particularly when it’s an artist I’m not familiar with and have the thrill of discovering. In this case, someone saw this image and compared it to the work of installation artist (though he prefers to be called a “sculptor”) Fred Sandback, who worked with elastic cord and acrylic yarn to delineate or bifurcate three-dimensional space. Obviously, photography and thread sculpture don’t share the same relationship with space as one is two-dimensional and the other three, but both can draw the eye along line and form. When I work in black and white, my attention focuses on line and form, light and dark, eliminating the distraction of color. It’s all in the eye. I use light like a thread one follows into a dark room. For Sandback, his work was meant to be experienced in the third dimension, as opposed to seeing photographic reproductions of it. In a statement he made in 1999 about his own work he says:
“I left the model of [ ] discrete sculptural volumes for a sculpture which became less of a thing-in-itself, more of a diffuse interface between myself, my environment, and others peopling that environment, built of thin lines that left enough room to move through and around. Still sculpture, though less dense, with an ambivalence between exterior and interior. A drawing that is habitable.”
Redzenradish Photography 