I have made a rule with myself not to put too many photographs on my blog posts, for a good number of reasons:
- This is a blog about art, not photography (although I suppose there is an argument that overlaps the two I suppose).
- I’m not a great photographer.
- The camera I have isn’t really up to much.
However these images I took have got under my skin a bit, and I feel like sharing them with you. I won’t immediately tell you what they are pictures of – you can let your imagination run riot instead.*
I have found them very mesmerising. How about a picture of some far away nebula that the Hubble telescope is so good at capturing? Tree roots in snow? A close up of some feathered bird? Ice melting into a muddy puddle, or some CGI creation for a fantasy movie? The Surrealists might have fun with it.
My own take on it, especially when you see it in black and white, was a bit of costume design for a play, perhaps Jack the Ripper under an all-concealing cloak, with just his legs sticking out at the bottom. or a badly wounded bird flapping it’s badly torn wings.
My final thought was that it could be one of those old cartographic images. A map of a treasure island, or the depiction of earth with an ocean in the centre and the known land masses arranged around the edge. Accuracy is not a necessary requirement for these early creations of the world. Is the earth flat? Are there sea monsters I see in the ocean?
I did get around to a drawing – sometimes it helps to clarify one’s thinking on a subject. It does seem to have come out as a mixture of an actor on stage dressed up as a wounded bird (or Jack the Ripper – although, I’m not sure there is any pictorial evidence as to what he actually looked like). There is an element of the map in my doodle as well, and I like that. The bird and map could be symbolic of migration, a theme that I might delve into more deeply at some point in the future.
*In case you haven’t worked out what these are photographs of, and I am sure you have (answers on a postcard if you like), then the answer is revealed in this blog post.