1854 Photography and the British Journal of Photography have joined with Leica to sponsor a photographer to create a unique body of work on the theme Witnesses of: The Everyday:
We are all witness to moments of beauty – ones that emerge suddenly and pass fleetingly through our daily lives. But how do you capture them? And how do you make the ordinary, extraordinary?
I started my submission by first thinking about what is this thing the everyday? The dictionary definition offers that which is commonplace, not unusual or ordinary. However, I sensed an element of subjectivity: what I think is ordinary might be unusual to someone else. This lead me to think there were criteria beyond familiarity that characterized something as ordinary.
As I continued along that investigation, I was advised to narrow my focus and specifically on food photography, a subject of recent work. The cultural dimension of food came to mind, such as how it influences what we eat, the way we prepare it, when we eat it … it occurred to me that culture has a role as a benchmark of commonplace. Many of the things we see as ordinary are things embedded in our culture and repeated through tradition.
Recalling the theme’s question — how do you make the ordinary, extraordinary? — I needed something ordinary, that could be transformed in some way. It struck me that at the intersection of food, ordinary, and culture was the marshmallow. The marshmallow has emerged over the years as a staple “food” of the campfire, the latter having a long history of cultural significance. However, it’s positioning as a food was interesting as, at best, a marshmallow might be considered food-like, which I thought had interesting parallels to the current state of our everyday. I had in our pantry a bag of marshmallows that I bought some time ago. It had been my intention to experiment with them, a process that involved heating them in the microwave. Heat was interesting to me as a method of transformation, a transformation that we often subject our food to (underlying my thinking was the effort we go through to preserve food, one of which is cooking. Over the past couple of years I have been dabbling with other preservation methods, such as salting, hence the preparation of kassler rippchen and more recently sauerkraut).
10 Seconds
20 Seconds
30 Seconds
60 Seconds
80 seconds
110 Seconds
I was also encouraged to shoot the submission on film and before developing the film, immerse it in some relevant agent. For example, if shooting sauerkraut I might immerse the film in the brine before developing it. There are a lot of attractive parallels between food and film, but not having ever dumped a role of film in a jar of brine, I didn’t know what would come of it, nor whether it would work. I felt the risk of failure was high and with limited time I concluded I would look at this option in a second iteration.
I started by taking top-down shots, a popular approach in documentary photography, especially with food.
These photographs, in my mind, answered the first part of the question — they were ordinary — so how was I to transition them to extraordinary?
Abstraction is often a good place to start.
Using black & white photography is one method of abstraction, but following this path generated few satisfying results. Colour, however, has meaning. White, for example, in the western tradition is a symbol of purity; black of death; red infers danger or anger. Lacking in any nutritional value, and arguably to the contrary, black and red seemed appropriate colours for a marshmallow.
I am a fan of geometric abstract painting and for many years I have wanted to somehow apply that style to a photographic work. For example, painter Paul Klee made images formed simply of squares and rectangles; Picasso made paintings where the image appears through a lens of geometric shapes.
Reading an article by Jennifer Watson Reality and Simulacra in Andy Warhol’s Shadows, published in Rutgers Art Review, Vol 30, Watson highlights how Warhol abstracts his images away from reality: “Warhol’s Shadows are in fact screen prints of photographs of shadows of objects; the print is a trace of the photographic image, which is a trace of the shadow itself, which is a trace of the objects that cast that shadow.” I have this sense that for many, especially those of us who live in urban and suburban areas, that our everyday is distanced from authenticity, from the reality of nature, and a sense of isolation that has become even more so as we hunker down, locked away in our humble abodes during the COVID pandemic. Watson goes on to ask “…where all this layering and distancing leaves the Shadows — as reality or simulacrum[?]”
Or, the way I took it, our everyday is an abstraction of reality. Watson makes one other observation that resonated with me:
“Warhol’s Shadows play on the shift, previously theorized by Guy Debord, in how we define and perceive reality in an era of mass production, mass media, and mass consumption, where ‘the real world is changing into simple images, [and] simple images are becoming real beings.’ That is, empty, substance-less images were replacing real things, and individuals were losing their ability to distinguish between the two.”
In the context of my work, the marshmallow is the shadow of food; it is a food-like substance, mass produced, empty of any nutritional value. Yet, it has come to play a cultural role, especially around the campfire. It is simulacrum as reality, and as some might argue, one possibly cynical view of our current, lived everyday.
After this [maybe depressing] theoretical foundation I was left with one more challenge presented in the problem statement: We are all witness to moments of beauty. Robert Adams has said that in beauty lies hope. In his book “Beauty in Photography” he links beauty with form and says “beauty is, in my view, a synonym for the coherence and structure underlying life…” He goes on to say: “The point of art has never been to make something synonymous with life, however, but to make something of reduced complexity that is nonetheless analogous to life and that can thereby clarify it.”
So, I seek coherence and structure in the work and I offer the marshmallow, not as a synonym to life, but as a simplifying analogy. And, quite possibly, in a more mischievous moment, a challenge to the seriousness of the question.
The project description I submitted:
For millennia the campfire has been the circle around which people ate and talked, sharing their everyday experience. The quintessential foods of the modern-day campfire includes the marshmallow, a food-like substance, ordinary and unexceptional, lacking any nutritional value, yet it is analogous in many ways with our modern, commercial and contrived everyday, abstracted from nature to an ephemeral space of engineered beauty, dislocated from the environment, impacting our health, culture, and identity, careening along an unsustainable path. This project intends to explore the development of food, and its production, as an analogy to the changes in our lifestyle, culture and identity, that is those things that are the elements that frame our everyday.
Retaining the original Black and Red scheme, I moved away from the traditional grid to a more dynamic form.
Here I layered several images, and colour schemes, to maintain the top-down view but with some ambiguity around the composition.
In this image I added a “cubist” component to the composition of layers of different marshmallows.
Here several ideas converge: the circular nature of the marshmallow, as well as the same for the traditional campfire. I used a rainbow colour pallet to represent the wide range of foods of an ideal diet (see rainbowplate.com)
Squared Top View
Here I move away from the circular form to a square / rectangular one. I also bring out the different textures and shapes within each element.
I continue with the cubist theme, but add different levels of brightness to add to the texture of the image.
Here I move away from square to rhomboids.
Leave a Reply