Allen Schill
Still-Life Photography

Anthology and Rhythm - View Camera Photographs

One thing I have always looked for in subjects found in nature - or tried to impose on them via composition or framing - is a sense of balance or equilibrium.  If the subject is quite homogeneous, the photograph can be framed almost anywhere, and the result will be roughly the same.  If the subject is differentiated within itself, with contrasting forms and textures, the composition is generally a matter of finding the most satisfying balance of diverse elements within the frame.  

When preparing a subject in the studio, one is at liberty to control everything in the image.  When I arrange the elements of a photograph, I am aware of following some intuitive sense of organization and balance.  When the homogeneity is not extreme to the point of uniformity - that is, when there are a number of similar objects, as with several of the images in this group - I like to arrange them so that they seem to be floating in equilibrium, more or less evenly distant from one another, like chemical ions in solution, that tend always towards a uniform distribution.  To do this takes considerable care - they may appear in a sort of random distribution, but if I had tossed them randomly on the background, the result would have been quite different.  An apparently random distribution requires very un-random positioning. 

One or two images are of single objects, like "White Chrysanthemum", and their composition was a simple (but not necessarily fast) matter of positioning on the background surface.  A few more have a small number of objects, like "Star Flowers" and "Ginkgo Leaves", but were still relatively easy to compose.  Those which involved, let's say, between a dozen objects and fifty, required my taking the greatest pains.  This was the case with most of the pictures in this group.  (The last few in the group - apart from the color variants - approach homogeneity, which takes them close to the purely textural images in the "Minimalist Textures".  One in fact, "Moss, Poconos", is not a studio arrangement, but rather one of the few view camera photographs I have ever taken outdoors.)

A few of the subjects in this group - "Desert", "Thawing Apples", and "Twelve Drying Flowers on Slab" - were photographed in stages, and exist in as many as five states.  The materials were arranged when fairly fresh, then allowed to dry out on the set, while being photographed at intervals.  (Or, in the case of the "Thawing Apples", as the frost melted on the fruit.)  The images are not just variants or trial versions; a great part of the idea was to show the passage of time.  This theme also interests me considerably, and I have worked with it on other occasions, for example, the scans of natural materials as they dried, undisturbed, on the scanner.

The "anthology" of the title comes from the Greek for a "collection of flowers", and most of these photographs are of dried flowers. Those which are of other things - pastel sticks, ribs, bits of styrofoam popcorn, leaves, etc. - nevertheless try to express the same pictorial idea, so they are grouped here by affinity.  That they are all visually rhythmic should be evident, at least to a visually literate person - or I have failed.  In any case, the theme is made fairly explicit with the titles of two of the works here:  "Flow", which underlines some vague idea of movement in the composition, like eddies in water, and "Ribs (Calligraphic Field", which alludes to the perfect equilibrium and positioning on the page of all the great traditions of calligraphy - Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Medieval, you name it.

I can't resist telling one anecdote about the origin of one of these photographs, the "Ribs (Calligraphic Field)":  My ex-wife was in the catering business, and often brought home some excellent leftovers.  Once it was "a mess of" barbecued ribs - pork, I think.  After we ate them, I gave the bones a good boiling, cleaning, and rinsing.  I let them dry thoroughly in a warm oven, then in the open air, and finally stored them in a plastic bag for future use, as I already had the idea for this image.  Some months later, I decided to check them out.  I hadn't expected them to develop a mold:  what I saw was what I imagine one sees upon opening up a crypt - there was a gray-green dust, very fine, whose surface was so nebulous you could hardly say just where the mold began and where it ended.  The bones went beyond my expectations.

These images exist in limited editions of fifteen signed and numbered prints of any size and any type of print, whether traditional analog silver-gelatin prints or digital pigment prints.  They consist principally of gelatin-silver prints (as they were made when I still routinely made traditional prints and had not yet adopted the use of a digital pigment printer), sized mainly to a format of 16" x 20" or 11" x 14". Because I generally did not complete the editions in gelatin-silver, I have begun to fill them out with most images by making digital pigment prints in A3Plus, not to exceed a total of fifteen.  For example, of "White Chrysanthemum" (id#137), I already have six signed and numbered gelatin-silver prints, and in recent years have made two digital pigment prints, so I can make no more than seven additional pigment prints.  

For more about this series, see the comments and essay in the menu item below, Calligraphic Rhythm.

© 2014 Allen Schill.  All rights reserved.  No part of this document may be reproduced or used without prior written permission from the author. Anyone is welcome to link to it, or to quote brief passages, but I would like to be notified.