Monday, May 12, 2025

25-5-11

Sometimes I take the time to discuss my own photographs. This one....

It's a contrast between the manmade and the natural. That tree is a survivor towering over the built landscape. It's like they forgot to cut it down when razing the hill for a laneway lined with little car houses. 

Despite the towering tree perched upon the hill, the garages have a monumental scale that dominates the frame in the foreground, pushing the limits of the framing of the photograph, and the towering tree is diminished in scale. The biggest things, the tree and the sky, take up the smallest part of the photograph. The banal components of the landscape dominate and are powerful in their ordinariness. 



 This photograph isn't dissimilar to the one above. Though it's inverted somewhat in that nature is represented in the constructed and lends a sense of monument to the house itself. The lion, (Ce n'est pas un lion. - Magritte) frozen, symbolically protects the mansion. It's two steps removed from the real, as in, it's a cheap plaster with faux patina representation of the proper marble Medici lions of the 16th Century. The landscaping and the "wild" lions suggest a pastoral landscape and a strong tie to nature, and yet it's completely subverted by pretend arches and columns, cultivated gardens, and faux wildlife. 

It becomes an ostentatious display of an idea of wealth and permanence while it's really a rainy season or two of no maintenance away from an entropic re-ordering into dust. 

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