Dale’s Soapbox Rants

Possessing the Demon

One of the pictures in the album I posted during the month of October, Michael Murphy: Recent Photographs, is this:

Fig 1. 4436a

When Michael sent me this picture a few days ago I got very excited and that inspired me to put up an album of his work. When you look at Fig 1 with your monitor set to 1024 x 768 so it fills the screen, you are seeing a not too bad rendition of what I see when I look at the 13x19 print hanging on my bedroom wall. The major difference is detail. Taken with a Canon 10D, the detail in this image is truly 20/20. And that is important. Sometimes the angels are in the detail, and this is certainly one of them, because this picture is epic in scope.

When James Joyce set out to write Ulysses he envisioned a re-telling of Homer's larger-than-life characters and drama this time painted in the homey, everyday minutiae of turn-of-the-century Dublin. The equation is simple: true epic heroism is just as much the stuff of the common man's daily existence as it is the stuff of grand battles and ultima thule adventures.

If you spend some time really looking at every nook and cranny of 4436a you discover that there is a lot going on. There are five different planes of activity layered atop each other, as if Michael had used the multiple exposure button on his camera. The first plane is the photographer and camera and the world behind him, which we normally can only infer the existence of. Then there is the near window pane of the Naughty & Nice store display. We infer the existence of this plane because it reflects the photographer and his background, including the tree and a shadowy buiding. Next we have the store display with mannequins, hanging diadems, and a wire rack of posters. Beyond that is the opposite window of the store display, and beyond that the city street surroundings.

All of this could easily be too busy and chaotic, but I don't see it that way. Everything is casually but carefully tied together with rhymes of colour, texture, and form. A complex and colourful world unfolds from the central mirage of the photographer and the twinkle in his eye, as if we have been granted a glimpse inside his cranium, into the private fantasy world of an artist. A world constructed of frigidly graceful mannequins, rectangular advertising objects, and glittery baubles. And still this fantasy is not all - it is grounded in its context of a humdrum, tawdry small city street.

Notice how the black mannequin's hand connects to the black camera, perfectly segueing from reality to fantasy. Notice how the glare of the bright sky and concrete are controlled to create an ethereal, airy feel to the entire composition. Notice how the tree plus blue sky reflection overlays the floral blue print of the leftmost mannequins garb.

For the first hundred years of its existence photography was done in funereal, gothic shades of grey or sepia. For the next fifty years photography struggled to tame the demon of colour. 4436a tells me - among other things - that colour photography has finally and truly arrived. The demon is finally in harness and its masters empowered to create tours-de-force such as this.

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