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calla lily displacement

Here’s a recently reworked piece, Calla Lily Dis­place­ment, from the Destruc­tive Test­ing photo series I started ten years ago:

Believe it or not this work sprang from a dis­com­fort I had with the doc­u­men­tary photo tra­di­tion, where the pho­tog­ra­pher is often con­sid­ered an invis­i­ble pres­ence, and where pho­tog­ra­phy is a neu­tral and even benign tool with which to view of the world.

Destruc­tive Test­ing is a group of still life images doc­u­ment­ing var­i­ous gen­tly destruc­tive acts against botan­i­cal mate­r­ial. In these actions, I was inter­ested in ques­tion­ing that neu­tral­ity by point­ing out the pres­ence of the pho­tog­ra­pher. At the same time I wanted the image to still be a beau­ti­ful one, some­thing that bal­anced the destruc­tive­ness with qual­i­ties we expect from images we want to have around us.

(And yes, I wanted to do a calla lily pic­ture that wasn’t like the tens of thou­sands of them that have already been done…)

April 24 2008 | Categories: art • photography | Tags: calla lilies • Destructive Testing • documentary photography • James SOE NYUN • Zantedeschia aethiopica | 1 Comment »