decay # 24 ~ the concept
Monday, November 24, 2008 at 08:25AM 
Rotten apples and green thing on a tarnished silver platter • click to embiggen One of the things most valued in the previously discussed Art World, Photography Division, is the notion of concept. It is the one quality in a picture that is an absolute must-have. Without a doubt, concept has become the dominate consideration of a picture's value as Art.
This not exactly a new development in the Art world in general. As far back as 1648, the Academie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture in Paris along with the Royal Academy in London in 1768 established rules and precedents designed to assert the intellectual content of their work. One of the primary purposes of these various "standards" was to separate Art from (mere) craft.
Their basic premise was that Art was not contingent on the features of the actual world - in fact, the more it distanced itself from the features of the actual world the better because it required and demonstrated active intelligence to make that leap, or, in other words, the hand of the artist was made manifest.
It was against this "standard" that the upstart medium of photography had to struggle in order to attain the status of Art - after all, how could a mechanized form of copying the details of the features of actual world demonstrate the hand of the artist? Anyone could push a button, right? Picture making in the medium of photography was considered little more than "copying" the the features of the actual world.
Eventually, the Art world came to recognize that picture makers used their brains in many ways when making pictures and the medium began its slow rise to acceptance in that world, BUT, after a time due in part to the flood of good photography wherein the hand of the artist was made evident - primarily through their use of the medium's characteristic of selection, the Art world seemed to be overwhelmed with Art from the Photography Division.
It seemed that what was needed a much more stringent "standard" for a medium so prone to artistic promiscuity and it was deemed that it was no longer sufficient for a picture maker to excel at selection in order to be admitted to the hallowed halls of the Art world. No, that would not do. That was way too easy a thing to do. The days of wine and roses were over.
Thus emerged a much more stringent "standard" of concept or "intellegent design" for the medium of photography - a picture must be about much more than what it illustrates. It must, above all, illuminate. It must reference ideas well beyond that of its visual referent. If a picture could reference a veritable host of ideas, so much the better. In some cases of wretched conceptual excess, the more obtuse the concept the better - even to the point of concepts that were impossible to intuit or understand without a MFA Degree in art history/theory together with an advanced degree in the field of psychotherapy.
All of that said, I am an ardent devotee of pictures that illustrate and illuminate. However, I do come down on the side of visual referents that, at the very least, are a reasonably understandable metaphor for the concept that I hope to suggest to the viewer.
Such is the case with my decay series so I was delighted beyond measure when, contrary to all my prejudices and misconceptions, a sales clerk (sales facilitator?, sales consultant?) at a small, chain-store camera shop at a mall in Plattsburgh - where I had gone to have a test large print made - immediately upon viewing that print, launched into quite an informed discourse about Flemish still-life painters and the concept of vanitas.
You could have knocked me over with a feather because ...
he "got it" exactly right. On the illustrative side of things, he knew that I was/am mimicking the Flemish still life masters with my use of "ideal" north light, the color palette, and a general sense of composition, And, on the illuminative side, he also understood that, like them, I am also picturing items that are suggestive of and metaphors for the "transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death". He knew that these concepts were/are hallmarks of paintings created in the vanitas manner - a type of symbolic still life painting commonly executed by Northern European painters in Flanders and the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
And, not only did he "get it", he actually really liked the pictures.
I'll say it again, you could have knocked me over with a feather.
I began this series over a year ago. It was intended not only as an expression of my life-long visual fascination with decay but also as a cautionary tale about the excesses of our consumer driven lives/economy and its deleterious effects upon the real quality of life and living. Not only does that lifestyle produce mountains of waste (but not always decay) but, IMO, it is also "rotting" our society in a remarkable demonstration of self-inflicted destruction.
Again, IMO, I firmly believe that the momentous events of the past few months certainly bear witness to the concept to be found in my decay series.
So, I'm curious. Do any of you work with the idea of concept with your picture making? Are the visual referents in your pictures metaphors which can be used to open the door to greater meaning in your pictures?
decay
Reader Comments (6)
Mark - this is, I think, a step further in your series. First of all, it made me immediately want to comment, which isn't usual. It struck me visually. I think the addition of the "decaying" silver platter really adds another dimension to it. Very effective, and the rather scattered set-up provides a tremendous depth and interest to the composition. A stunner! Well done.
Why did you left out the red pepper on the left ? he he joking. But a bit of red ? Why not ?
Seriously. I agree with Dan about the evident "mutation".
Still in northern light ?
I like it but I still have the doubt that the effect is a bit less strong, as a decay, the previous ones seemed more "acid" (was the metal ?). This one is a bit on the romantic, a la Greenway, side.
I'd like to believe that all of my Man Made Wilderness photos are about something other/more than what is actually pictured.
My new "project" is extremely conceptual. It is a series of photographs of photography books which I'm calling "Landscapes in the Landscape." It's so highly conceptual, even I haven't yet figured out what the concept is, because I don't have a MA or a degree in psychotherapy.
Now this is some decay! Let's see more!
I don't think I work with highly thought out and documented concepts. It's more poorly thought out questions and wonderings, or small ideas that seem to lead me somewhere. So, I suppose there is concept behind what I'm doing. The thought process to start my farmscapes was very mundane. I had been taking pictures in Norther Minnesota and in Yellowstone, places I go a few times a year. I grew up with a fantasy about Plains Indians and mountain men. I guess my picturing was an extension of that, pictures of wild places with little trace of man. I began considering moving to Grand Maria or West Yellowstone to be near the places I liked to photograph. Then I had a thought to find out what was in my area photo wise. I have alway been interested in all kinds of landscape, its one of the main reasons I love to travel, to see how the land looks differently and is used differently in different places. So I'm not sure why I never photographed non-wilderness much before. Maybe my childhood fantasies and an idea of what others would want to see affected my selection. When I first started to photograph farmscapes I thought of them in comparison to wilderness. (I guess that's still part of my thinking about them, the comparison to wilderness.) I saw it as, in someways, a destroyed landscape. Of course what I found was much more complex than that. One of the things I do see is how this landscape is part of an industrial system. Corn and soybean for the most part are input into manufacturing plant to make food like product, or bio fuel, or additives to plastic, or high fructose corn syrup. And the land is plowed and harvested with giant machines. The land is highly fertilized with petrochemical fertilizer. Runoff from this area creates the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Its a ground zero for many of the problems of modern life. Sometimes it seems more like an open pit mine than a landscape. But you know what, light and shadow and form and old romantic ideas of rural life still play across the land, and I think that's what people see in my pictures. I don't think they see the destruction of the planet. But then how do you take an ugly picture that's still a great picture if what Robert Adams said is true:
And I guess I found out that you can think about these ideas but that they exist in our heads, that out there is just stuff. At any given moment we are just seeing the sun light reflecting from the land. I can look at my pictures and see a juxtaposition between resources being used up and pretty light and colors, while someone else might see there idilic childhood on the farm. So how much control do I have over the meaning of my pictures in the mind of someone else unless I tell them to have these ideas in their mind when they look at my pictures.
I'm also interested in other things like: the road as the primary mode of experiencing landscape, including things that the mind looks past as a central part of the landscape composition (signs etc.), the whole man and nature thing, and the formal similarity in a photograph between grand landscape things and mundane things (like a picture from a ditch and one from a mountain valley), and I'm interested in photographs transformation of something mundane, the thing, into something meaningful, the picture.
So, there are conceptual thing that create and drive my interest in my picturing, but I don't know if they are evident to other or interesting to others when they look at my pictures. I think at best sometimes viewers are a bit perplexed that they are finding beauty in a highway overpass, but they usually just see a pretty picture of a road and farmland.
Bill, well put. By now the general populace is so trained to look for pretty and sublime, that even in landscapes that have other things going on in them, those metaphorical elements will be missed or ignored out of deference to some sentimental ideal unspoiled view.
It's been discussed here at some other time, the need for accompanying text. I don't think it necessarily shows our incompetence as photographers to utilize some text to go along with our pictures, or at the very least to provide a conceptual framework for a group of photos. Edward Burtynsky's last two books come to mind: Manufactured Landscapes and China. There is little doubt what the concept is for these groupings of photographs. But in case there is any confusion, he has a small amount of text included (not the "scholarly" analyses from the Art professionals). Admittedly his subjects are large and clear.
So I think it behooves us as photographers to find a way to use the surface qualities of photography, through the use of metaphor, to contrast what is seen in the picture, with what is seen in the mind of the photographer.
BTW, I agree that you're onto something with your examination of industrial farming. Keep working it. Maybe the simple use of statistics about modern farming methods as captions to your pictures could work.
Concept? No. Not while working on a photograph. Of course there are series of images that are clearly related, of course I sometimes get back to things that have worked in the past, and of course I could lie and tell you that it's all due to a concept (honestly, you can make one up for everything), but in fact much of my imagery is environment-driven. I shoot what I see, trying to meet the demands of a daily photoblog.
And, guess what, I have no problem with that :)