Anodyne
Monday, March 27, 2006
 

Star Magnolia on the Corner, 2006

Up at 6am to clean the balcony, before the power washers and the painters arrived at 7am to rappel down the side of the building, rattle the (drafty and not terribly well secured) windows, and spook the stuffed cats.

A week or two ago, magnolias were the only flowering trees around. Glance down any street, and if one was present, it was as if it was hollering full-blast through a megaphone, a la Rodney Graham's marooned Mountie: "Here I am! Here I am!" Now every tree in the world is churning out blossoms and split-second identification is comparatively harder.

I'm trying hard not to make a conventional "series," ie., pictures whose only point is the identification of a shared subject. Art photography isn't Where's Waldo. Each picture has to be autonomous; if not, a lot of second-rate images will wander in over the transom under the guise of being part of the group, like those so-called friends of friends who show up unsolicited to your house party and drink all the beer.

Scott McFarland's photographs of desert plants at the Huntington Gardens, exhibited under the umbrella title, Empire, are a good example of self-sufficient pictures that also comprise (hesitantly, uneasily, like herded cats) a series.
- posted by cjb @ 8:15 AM


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