Major Project: Initial Ideas

 It is major project time again in Digital Arts!  This term I am unsure what form my project might take.  However, I have been dreaming of the end and I am reminded again of Araki's images of his wife's funeral.  Araki stated in Tokyo Still Life; 'Someone has said that "photography is the medium of death", That as long as you are using photography you are conscious of death. you can't get beyond death' (Araki:2001:5) I think this has been weighing on my own mind, once an image is taken it is death as that moment is gone and the photograph is just a remembrance.

Nobuyoshi Araki (1990) From Winter Journey

In Sentimental Journey (1971)  Araki, through his images, tells of the love story with his wife and this image is shot 20 years later after his wife died of ovarian cancer. United Nations of Photography states of the book Winters Journey; 'One of the last scenes is a close-up of the casket: hands place orchids around the dead woman’s body, and Chiro appears again, on a book cover placed by her head. The photograph manages to be moving and beautiful, but also shocking. Not just because of the death of this lovely and still young woman, but because of the intimacy of the image.' (Hayes, 2016) Intimacy is throughout Araki's images whether it is a couple eating in a diner, a flower, a tree branch or an explicit image of women in ropes.  Araki's images always make you feel part of the image, we enter the frame.  We touch the frozen image

Nobuyoshi Araki(1996-1997) Private Tokyo

I was also thinking of Robert Mapplethorpe's last self-portrait.  Here below, Mapplethorpe's slightly sunken face looms out from the darkness, his hand is strong and holding onto the walking stick with a death's head.  Mapplethorpe died on the 9th March 1989 of AIDS. 'In the three years after his diagnosis in 1986,  the artist organized the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation to manage his estate, support the medium of photography in arts institutions and fund HIV/AIDS medical research.' (Vin de Vie Wine of Life, 2019) Mapplethorpe lived with the shadow of death after contracting HIV and, at the time there was no cure he spent the last years ordering his estate to support the fight against HIV/AIDs whilst supporting photography and the arts.

Self-Portrait, 1988, platinum-palladium print.  Solomon R. Guggenheim, NY. 

Mapplethorpe's work also has intimacy and beauty his images of flowers with their curves and how the light seems sensual against the delicate petals and stems are beautifully shot, just as beautifully as his images of men, whose curves imitate the curve of the flowers.  Mapplethorpe's Flowers were; 'described by Patti Smith as “worthy conspirators in the courting and development of conflicting emotions. [Mapplethorpe] came to embrace the flower as the embodiment of all the contradictions revelling within.”' (Document Journal, 2015)

Calla Lily (1988) by Robert Mapplethorpe

These images, these still life's, live within the frame but are also the embodiment of death as both the flower and the man will never be as beautiful again as each day we live we walk closer to death.

Ajitto (1981) Gelatin silver print, printed 2009 

These images are my meditation on an idea, a thought that keeps returning  I am thinking I would like to make a small book that has both photographs and text. The text may be poems that are about my own mortality or death in a photographic image accompanied by photographs that illustrate the poems in some way.  I will consider this idea further as I would like to really take photographs this term and go back to where I started in photography to revisit ideas and techniques and look at new ways to see.  I also want to experiment with a manual Polaroid that I have not had a chance to enjoy and learn and see what I can do with an unfamiliar camera.

References

Araki N. (2001) Tokyo Still Life (Text by Adrian Searle), Ikon Gallery Birmingham.

Document Journal (2015). Mapplethorpe’s Flowers by Marcela Gutiérrez. [online] Document Journal. Available at: https://www.documentjournal.com/2015/04/mapplethorpes-flowers-by-marcela-gutierrez/ [Accessed 14 Oct. 2024].

Hayes F. (2016). REVIEW: ‘Araki’ at MNAAG Paris, 2016. [online] The United Nations of Photography. Available at: https://unitednationsofphotography.com/2016/06/30/review-araki-at-mnaag-paris-2016/ [Accessed 14 Oct. 2024].

Vin de Vie     Wine of Life. (2019). ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE:  Five Self-Portraits and a Legacy without Price. [online] Available at: https://vindevie.me/2019/06/28/robert-mapplethorpe-five-self-portraits/ [Accessed 14 Oct. 2024].