diptych # 29 ~ country mouse / city mouse # 2 - Babes and Bitches: the femme fatale with her historical, mythical and biblical origins and her afterlife in popular culture

Children's books / Halal Meat ~ Keeseville, NY - in the Adirondack Park / Queens, NY• click to embiggenSo I'm tinkering with the idea of a picture making project based on an academic paper, Babes and Bitches: the femme fatale with her historical, mythical and biblical origins and her afterlife in popular culture, written by Liesbeth Grotenhuis*. Liesbeth is from Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where I assume she both lives and teaches.

That written, my mental tinkering primarily revolves around my desire to undertake a constructed-picture (as opposed to found pictures) project. I have nothing against constructed pictures per se. After all, I made a living and commercial career out of making constructed pictures for advertising and marketing. However, making them for fine art sake is whole nuther kettle of fish.

As most know, I have spent virtually all of my personal picture efforts in the cause of making straight (found) pictures. My M.O. has been both discursive and promiscuous (also see here), although, not entirely without focus inasmuch as I continue to flesh out as many as 9 individual theme-based bodies of work.

Nevertheless, there has been an ongoing low-level background murmur, an itch if you will, which keeps nagging me to make some made pictures. While I'm certain that part of that murmur/itch is a throw back to my commercial picture making days, there is also a very strong desire to give making fine art made pictures a go.

The whole thing is kinda like Jeff Wall's statement (see his MOMA exhibit here), only in reverse:

“I think my relation to photography is changing. For a long time it was necessary to contest the classical aesthetic of photography as too absolutely rooted in the idea of fact, and the factual claim made by photography both within and outside of art. I accept that claim, but I don’t think that it itself can be the foundation for an aesthetic of photography, of photography as art. The way I thought I could work through that problem was to make photographs that put the factual claim in suspension, while still creating an involvement with factuality for the viewer. I tried to do this in part through emphasizing the relations photography has with other picture-making arts, mainly painting and the cinema, in which the factual claim has always been played with a subtle, learned and sophisticated way. This was what I thought of as a mimesis of the other arts, something that could uniquely be done as photography. What I began to realize later was that this mimesis was of course taking place on the foundation provided by photography itself. So, slowly, it was possible to turn toward photography itself, as an equal player in the mimetic game. Now I see the possibility of developing a mimesis of photography, as photography.” ~ Jeff Wall

I'll keep you posted, re: my mental tinkering on this subject and its possibilities.