What happens after a critique?
More questions arise than answers. It is a very destabilizing feeling. As I always do after a crit I go back to something simple, what is interesting this always involves my camera. I think the ability to crawl down the view finder, block out the noise of the world helps me to focus and think.
So last week I threw more plants into the bleach - As a gardener this treatment to plants cuts me to the core and I question why do I do this? And then why do I feel compelled to grab my camera and lay them out like a corpse. Arrange them to show off their best side? It is one of the (many) challenges I am facing at the moment. While I am struggling to answer this, it felt important to document & share some results: What
happens when you bleach plants, leave them to dry for a few days and capture them at their best?
They start to look like this after a few days
The bleaching of plants started something new, a discovery after researching Christine Borlands work, Spirit Collection: Hippocrates (1999). It was also driven by the notion that plants are ghosts that follow us, ones we leave behind as a marker to where we have been. It is a method that is very harsh, removing life from something living, removing its ability to breath, while still keeping the visual reference that it is (was once) a plant. This process had been grabbing me, but hadn't really been resolved before the seminar. While I am using the camera again to capture these slowly withering creatures I will attempt to answer the why's and understand better what it is that photography does & say.