Monumental Still Life: Silent Compositions
Author, Professor Mark Durden.
(1)
Colin Wilson is working both with and against “the low plane reality” of the still life genre. (2) His photographs tend to be spare and understated, unadorned, stripped and pared down to essential elements and forms. There is also an economy through the plain and familiar things which he often chooses to photograph. Beauty and luxuriance enters the work through what many might see as the “old style” techniques of photographic representation he uses. Wilson concentrates us on the process of pictorial description through the sensuous form of his meticulous black and white depictions, rich in detail and tonality.
Things, ordinary common things, possess a real presence in his pictures, a presence which is at once both physical and symbolic. Take, for example, his photograph of a simple old white enamel bowl placed upon a wooden table. In many senses this is a straightforward still life of a not unfamiliar object, a study of the beauty of its half-spherical form, which in the photograph looks a little more like an egg cut in two and on its side. Only one soon becomes aware that things are not so straightforward and matter of fact. The bowl is literally full to the brim with milk. A small drip has gathered on the lip of the bowl and there’s a wet stain clearly visible on the wood surface. There’s also a little blemishing ripple which disrupts the surface of the milk. In such a concentrated moment, it is as if the stillness of this still life is being drawn out, the sense is of something being held, kept in, like a breath. As its presence is heightened through its depiction, so being photographed when brim-full of milk further alters the bowl’s value and meaning: it becomes metaphoric, associated with sustenance, with fecundity, the life force of a pregnant human form.
In many respects, the counterpoint to this picture is the photograph showing the two strange coffin-life forms created by two tin bathtubs, one turned on top of another, so the two appear like a locked case or casket. The setting for this display of objects is a bare room, some unused attic space, stripped of all décor. The bathtubs suggest absent human figures. Such a claustrophobic picture evokes a sense of an eternal deathly embrace, of a couple forever locked together, a dark and gothic variant of Brancusi’s Kiss.
The same bare room provides the setting for a number of arrangements and configurations of objects. Some photographs are closer to stage sets than still lifes, tableaux in which familiar household objects have been imaginatively transformed— a white cloth propped atop a table evoking a mountainous or glacial form, an upturned table becoming a four-poster-bed, festooned with rag-cloth bunting, a group of fake Xmas trees creating a gloomy forest. Such pictures invite the viewer to participate in childlike acts of make-believe. A certain innocence and lightness animates the cold and dark interior spaces of these pictures.
Other photographs, like those with the bathtubs, are harsher, more chilling. The different arrangements of three fairly plain and upright chairs in the bare room once again evokes absent human figures. The formal arrangement of the empty chairs, each lined up and facing the camera, is like a formal Victorian studio group portrait in negative, bereft of its sitters. We are shown only the setting, a controlled, minimal and uncomforting mise en scene. In the other picture, the chairs are arranged so that they are now touching, interlocked, huddled and pressed together. Only the central chair is turned to face the wall. One of the sitters in this group portrait would have his or her back to us, remain, one assumes detached, disconnected from the other two. Thought of in terms of the lived world of social relations, the placement of the chairs in the picture is suggestive of something having gone awry, a breakdown in the order and unity of the portrait group.
His latest series, Minor Consolations, could be seen to call upon the tradition of still life and especially the seventeenth-century Dutch Vanitas of flower painting. But his are far from the riches and luxuriance of this tradition, where the Vanitas theme was played out amidst the splendour, abundance and diversity of the flowers on display. A closer point of reference is found in some of Manet’s flower paintings made in the last years of his life, the same modesty and directness characterises Wilson’s non-ostentatious and unassuming still life pictures. In terms of the photographic history of the genre, they are far from Roger Fenton’s exotic and excessive Victorian extravagances. They are closer perhaps to Edward Weston’s photographs of fruit and vegetables. But Wilson is not as obsessed with form. In his photographs, the flowers in the cups, glasses and various containers, which all go to serve as makeshift vases, are essentially weeds or common garden flowers. And the arrangements are awkward; all have a certain informality, lack balanced composition. The flowers were picked and arranged by his children at a time of a serious family illness— small lonely displays on grubby tabletops, fragile floral compensations which are preserved, but darkly, in the deathless, undying medium of photography. With no whites and highlights, and all frozen behind a glass which does not reflect light, the very printing and display is keyed into the mood and affect of this work. The impression given is of light being sucked out of these photographs. They have something akin to Daido Moriyama’s harsh photographs, from the early seventies, which made even the archetypal Japanese landscape, of trees in cherry blossom, appear grey and dirty.
One is struck by the ordinariness of the subject matter in Minor Consolations. These still lifes most fully confront us with banality. The “low plane reality” of his subject is more readily accepted in this series. We lose the formal geometric purity of the arrangements in his other pictures. Less contained and controlled, these latest photographs are messier. The flower arrangements are untouched and unaltered, photographed simply as they were received. One possible point of relation for such work is found in the vernacular photographic tradition that circulated alongside and within photography’s history— epitomised by that anonymous postcard of apples, dating from 1907 or earlier, which John Szarkowski included in his selection of a hundred photographs from the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art: a picture “memorializing the triumph of a dead, unheralded pomologist, and the sincere and simple construction of an anonymous provincial photographer.” (3)
Wilson’s photographs are also interesting in relation to the way they both confirm and undo Szarkowski’s famous distinction between photography and traditional painting. Painting was “slow, difficult, rare and expensive, and was therefore used to record things of great importance” while photography “was quick, ubiquitous, and cheap, and was used to record everything, most of which seemed, by painters’ standards evanescent and trivial”. (4) Szarkowski’s example of the postcard indicates the lowliness of photography’s subject matter, but also importantly shows how low things are transformed once they are photographed. Wilson’s latest pictures, of course, all elevate the lowly, but do so, by using processes which can be considered to be “slow, difficult rare and expensive” in photography, capitalise on a crafted aesthetic which could be seen to be more akin to painting.
In Minor Consolations, the luxury of the printing and framing, the shift in scale, pulls against the poverty and artlessness of the things photographed. The shallow depth of focus introduces a physical, haptic element in our relationship to these floral tributes. Their symbolic importance, however private, is magnified and monumentalised. Even if we did not know the context behind the making of these small decorative displays, their specialness and value remains clearly unambiguous. These are, then, very much epic still lifes. They invite us to dwell upon the emotional significance of these commonplace garden flowers, flowers which serve as tokens of love, little fragile moments of jubilation, all set against palpable black voids. Wilson gives grace and gravitas to such small things and the simple gestures underlying them. Photography is for him here very much caught up in an act of veneration and cherishing.
Mark Durden is a Professor of Photography at the University of South Wales, and a writer and artist.
1 Silent Compositions refers to Diderot’s description of the Still Life paintings of Chardin, exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1765. Diderot on Art, Vol1. ed’ John Goodman, Yale University Press, 1995, p. 60
2 Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, London:Reaktion, 1990, p.95
3 John Szarkowski, Looking at Photographs, New York: The Museum of Modern Art,
1973, p.58.
4 Ibid., p.58.
