Thinking about Photographing the Unseen. 25-11-16

I looked at Germaine Krull’s pictures of vegetables in a Berlin market and general detritus taken in Les Halles. You can almost smell the rubbish as you admire the neat stacks of cauliflowers.

I tried this image of fish on a stall in the Rialto to suggest a certain smell.

I felt these were perhaps still too literal. I wanted to suggest something even more intangible as I did with my old school scarf.

I put the camera in the back of a cupboard empty but for one tin of beans. I turned off image stabilisation and set the timer. I triggered the shutter remotely. I raised the ISO to 2200 to get some gritty grain into the image. I edited the image into a square format to mimic the shape of the cupboard. I restricted the image to two elements only, the tin and the hand, choosing to focus on the hand. I was trying to evoke the time when we were young and poor and inflation was raging at 15%; every halfpenny mattered and we were often down to our last tin of beans.

The image is not really successful in that it’s not at all clear that the tin is in a cupboard or that it is the last one. The focus on the hand is not sharp enough and the grain just looks like a mistake. I will have to think again.

 

 

 

26-11-16

Maybe this will work better. I’ve kept the square format. Black and white is more austere than colour.

In the end, though, images of the unseen will depend heavily on being anchored by some text.