I Move In Mysterious Ways

I want to create a collection of flat, highly stylised, and contemporary, monochrome images that essentially depict monochrome subject matter with a bias toward the colour white and rendered in low contrast on neutral tone grade 1 paper. I want to try to attempt to make something that looks like a radical break from the normal contrasty monochrome image. In other words monochrome images with no blacks or shadows and yet which appear to be totally non-contrived where the form of convoluted subjects is totally rendered in no more than three degrees of off-white tonality. It would be really something if I could achieve this in a range of thematics say, from white and metallics of artificial environments, too natural white subjects....very very difficult. White of course, is a rare colour in nature. There are no all white plant forms for example and finding my subjects is going to be very tricky. Contrary to my non-contrivance stipulation above, it may also be interesting to experiment with abstract compositions comprised of milk, china, and white flora for example. I would also like to re-do Pot Head with much flatter lighting and set against an all white background. This would compliment a quite striking close up of a cheap plaster bust face in intense frontal lighting, which I have already printed. Its quite an interesting image of a relatively ordinary subject.
The white colour theme in some ways springs from a desire to find a stylistic mode unique to me but which also embodies resonance's of the work of my favourite photographer; Minor White. The extraordinarily creative American Art photographer who later became involved with the FLUXUS movement and the American art cult headed by John Cage. Minor White was probably one of the first to truly intellectualise the medium in the 40s & 50s with his fascinating theories on the quasi-metaphysical nature of chance events and fortuitous random juxtapositions and their contemplative representation in photographs. White had an extraordinary capability to transcend the banal and everyday subject in a way that appears to have more to do with some indefinable sensitivity. An innate ability that exceeds a mere talent for composition and the orchestration of subject, light, and print method to produce some of the most mysterious, alluring, and magical photographs I have ever seen. Non of these pictures are contrived. Instead they poetically capture and portray moments and natural interactions. A lace curtain wafted by a momentary breeze in an open window frame captured with an almost Zen like quality and exquisitely printed on platinum paper, gives a real sense of immediacy, and forms a truly poetic treatise on the cameras ability to freeze time. I want to really try to express these qualities in my own photography. But within the highly contemporary style idiom alluded to by my White (colour) Period concept. Which is also intended to evoke something of the Zenic quality of Minor White's photographs, whilst also encapsulating the fashionable "retro" of 60s futurism.

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