DIVIDING SPACE

A photograph is a representation of a very tiny fragment of the natural world. The edges of the photograph place almost everything outside the frame and the instant of the shutter excludes almost all of time. This is the reason that even the completely unmanipulated photograph is not necessarily honest, if by honesty we mean that the photograph conveys the understanding a participant in the world might have had.

If the photograph often fails on honesty, it usually excels for accuracy. The unmanipulated photograph has an uncanny ability to portray the world both literally and specifically.  Photography is the idiot savant of the visual arts. If we look carefully at a photograph, the idiocy allows us to see in ways that confront our concepts and assumptions about how the world is put together. The portrayal is slavishly literal, the details unerringly specific. Clearly a photographer makes certain choices. The instant of the exposure and the visual angle on the subject are elements of interpretation. But given those—and such choices are always present—the photograph interprets nothing. In the concrete visual sense, it simply records.

I find this literalness an asset, perhaps photography's greatest strength. I have used this in much of my work to describe the actually observed layering, discontinuity and complexity of people and things in space. It is, for example, an idea, not an observation, that the world continues beyond the frame of a window we peer out of. It is an idea that a landscape bisected by a tree is joined behind the tree. It is an idea that two people in different parts of that bisected landscape could ever know and touch each other.  In deconstructing these ideas, we can see again what is interesting in the ordinary world.  It is complex and very engaging and often has little to do with our ideas of how things are.

In Dividing Space , I am presenting the two related subjects of divided space and space that divides.  The first term refers to the purely visual issue of how things in the world actually appear. The second is about how divided space serves as metaphor for the physical and emotional divisions between people. These two senses of dividing , the verb and the adjective, are mingled in these images. The visual divisions are literal, but also serve as metaphor for the fundamental isolation of human experience.

ALL IMAGES COPYRIGHT © WALT WHITMAN ODETS 1965-2009