one eye
Monday, March 05, 2007
As I said when I started reviewing photography books on this site, my primary goal is to deal with titles that have been a part of my life for a relatively long time. But with last week's arrival of One Eye, a small photographic monograph created by comic artist Charles Burns, I find that I am already inspired to deal with something new.
One Eye was an impulse purchase at Bridge City Comics, downstairs in the creative office and retail development shared by FogStock, and I encourage anyone in Portland who reads these words to buy your copies there; everyone else should fulfill your purchasing needs at Powells.
Burns is the creative mind behind the independent comic epic Black Hole, but he also holds an MFA in photography, and One Eye is a product of his digital shooting experiments over the last five years.
As someone who evaluates photography and photographers for their commercial potential, I come to One Eye (and most contemporary photography) measuring it against its potential application to the logic of stock photography. That process boils down to two questions: would these images move if they were widely distributed in current ecosystem of stock photography? What creative inspiration might I take from these images that can either guide my own photographic production, or the direction that I provide to others?
The questions are clearly not completely abstract; if one views his work as single images, Burns shoots with a casual style that is both very consistent with contemporary photographic practice and dispersed through the categories of art and commerce. FogStock handles some artists who produce images that are stylistically similar to images in One Eye (consider Alin Dragulin, Mike Hipple or Estaban Resendiz Reyes), and these are quiet but important images for our agency to market. They might not sell quite as well as conventional commercial lifestyle images, but they add a sense of density to our collection.
The conceptual twist that promotes One Eye from understatement to conceptual thickness is the pairing of images in a manner both inspired by and destructive of the narrative norms of comic book style sequential art. Burns populates each page in One Eye with two images, each composed horizontally, and each joined together in a vertical arrangement.
I keep talking about Richard Avedon in these posts, and I promise to stop at some point, but now I will do it again: in Avedon's many books, he relied on a fairly simple set of propositional forms for the association of photographs on a page. I would argue that you can pretty much boil them down to two: These are Similar and These are Different.
Burns applies a conceptually similar semantic logic to his images, but one with a more intricate set of operators. In particular, the graphic language deployed by Burns develops more metaphorically complex messages like This is a Part of That and This is a Negative of That (similar but reversed).
Also noteworthy in the structure of One Eye is the way that Burns uses color to define the relationships in pairings. In It's Only a Temporary Thing, Burns opens the book with a photographic opposition of green nature and red culture, similar to the chromatic opposition expressed in Out With The Tide. Later in the book, his sequence of I Didn't Think It Would Be Like This (Lime Green), Random Selection (Tangerine Orange), A World of Small Pleasures (Lemon Yellow), You're One of Us Now (Mint Blue) and Aftertaste (Pumpkin Orange) deploy subtle color similarities to tie together the content of his pairings.
Do these kinds of formal observations of structure threaten to bleed the life out of One Eye, and the small pleasures of some of the other photo books that are under examination in this blog? I pursue an analysis at that level to try to better understand what it is I do as a photographer and a photo editor, and I believe that a richness will emerge from my descriptions. So check back to see how this process continues.
posted by fogged @ 3:32 PM