Eden
Gelatin-Silver, Archival Ink-Jet and Lambda prints
2002-2003
The foundation of this work is the vernacular photographic still-life tradition: polaroids of hunters and their kills, made by and for a rural community. Produced as a matter of course by shop-keepers, these images are an unpretentious living manifestation of the urge to visually preserve the goods of the world and display them for our visual and metaphorical consumption: exactly the tradition of still-life. More specifically, the images I am using reflect the Vanitas and Memento Mori genres and their preoccupations with fragility, mortality, and pride.
In the modest rural community of Eden, hunting is less a recreational sport than a seasonal routine. The deer taken are taken for food, and the hunters are mostly local residents. The polaroids are displayed in a changing array throughout each hunting season at the front of the general store. They form a center of community life as people keep track of the year’s harvest and their friends and acquaintances’ kills.
What attracted me to the images was their uncanny power, the resonance they generate with the higher traditions of representational art. The still life is only the most immediate connection; frequently the emotional intensity radiated by the hunter and his or her prey recalls in gesture the pieta or other religious and historical subject-traditions. The hunter is fresh from exertion, flushed with pride, and, having participated in a violent act of life-taking, seems often to be opened up. The polaroids, for all their untutored and casual formal qualities, represent clearly almost spiritual openness.
Much of my work for the last decade has explored the region of the tabletop, the special discursive space of still life and work table. A preoccupation with the optical problems of representation, in general and particularly in large-format photography, has led me to make the table-top into a location for collage (in the surrealist sense) and carefully calibrated optical distortion (anamorphosis). The uncanny spaces, perspectives, and transitions that result are generated before the camera: the prints are unmanipulated. Visual uncanniness and subtly contradictory spatial cues make the image slightly difficult, a formal and perceptual difficulty that balances the potential difficulties presented by death and violence. The work is neither an endorsement nor a condemnation of hunting (or anything else) but a self-complicated reveling in the richness we can see in the world, an opportunity for visual delectation in a world one step removed from the unmediated one we imagine ourselves to be experiencing.