A de Chirico moment

click photo to enlarge
Recently, walking through a small paved area that has a row of fairly new shops, I had what I can only describe as a "de Chirico" moment. I briefly felt that I'd stepped out of my everyday existence into the scuola metafisica world of the noted Greek/Italian painter, Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978). This quite unnerving experience was prompted by the sight of a casual assemblage of items propped up against the front of a virtually empty shop that bore a number of "closed" and "closing down" signs. The cracked tailor's mannequin, hoops and wall cupboards/shelves (?) in the clean, deserted space had a look of the unsettling surreal paintings of incongruous objects in architectural scenes with which de Chirico made his name. All that was missing were his deep shadows that the overcast English sky was unable to manufacture.

I took my photographs and as we walked on I reflected further, wondering whether the collection of redundant pieces had been placed there in a deliberate way, but I concluded they probably hadn't. In a blog post of 2008 I pondered on the concept of "found poems" - poetry that is found and extracted from prose that was written for non-poetic purposes. This assemblage seemed to me the artistic equivalent: "found sculpture" perhaps. The use of everyday objects in art has a long history but in terms of "found" articles didn't become mainstream until the "readymades" of the French artist, Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) achieved widespread acceptance.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Lumix LX3
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 12.8mm (60mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f2.8
Shutter Speed: 1/500
ISO: 80
Exposure Compensation: -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Helicopters, bubble canopies and quotations

click photo to enlarge

"Definition of a helicopter: a conglomeration of spare parts flying in close formation."
Anonymous

"Helicopters are like horror movies: you know something bad is going to happen, you just don't know when."
Anonymous

Helicopters don't fly, they just beat the air into submission.
Anonymous

I remember once reading an article about the invention and development of the photocopier, during the course of which the author said that many engineers engaged in the task felt that what they'd created was so complex, with so many parts, it really shouldn't work at all. The latter suggestion has been made about the bee and its ability to fly. And, as the three anonymous quotations above suggest, the helicopter is viewed in pretty much the same light.

Perhaps it was the fact that the first helicopter flew a long time after the first aircraft and sufficient time had passed for people to become comfortable with what a flying machine should look like. The appearance of a gawky craft without wings, tailplane, fin and with no long thin body, that when airborne wobbled alarmingly, and always crashed if the motor stopped - no gliding possible - must have immediately sown seeds of doubt about the safety and future of the helicopter, thoughts that haven't entirely disappeared from the general public's mind even today.

I recently went to Newark Air Museum in Nottinghamshire, a quite large private collection of military and civil aircraft of various types. Today's photograph shows a Westland-built version of the Bell Sioux, a military version of the Bell 47 that first flew in late 1945. Like many early helicopters it has something of the dragonfly's appearance, with a large perspex bubble cockpit at the front and a steel lattice-work "body" (more a skeleton) that ends with a tail rotor. Above are two rotor blades with, below, the same number of landing skids.

This particular helicopter was on display in one of two large buildings that hold most of the aircraft. The plastic cockpit was reflecting the multiple skylights of the roof, and the pattern they made drew my eye and suggested a photograph. I took this shot knowing that I would crop it to square and vignette the background to emphasise the bubble with its mannequin pilot.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 24mm
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/20 sec
ISO: 200
Exposure Compensation:  -1.00 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Serendipitous visual connections

click photo to enlarge
Photography has always made more of serendipitous visual connections than has painting. The fact that painters have a free rein when it comes to subjects, whereas photograpers have to root their images in something offered by the real world largely accounts for this. Surreal paintings, for example, can be anything that the painter can imagine, whereas the photographer's conceptions are limited by the subjects he can capture and the way they can be juxtaposed.

Today's photograph was taken at the same exhibition of underwear as yesterday's image. Here a group of mannequins modelling bras, corsets, briefs etc. were arranged on raised blocks in front of a wall. The curator had taken careful steps to theme the signs and props that accompanied the lingerie, even to the point of having a discreet "Please do not touch" sign painted on the backdrop in a red, cursive script. It was clearly meant to apply to the mannequins and their underwear. However, when framed by the camera alongside a headless, voluptuous female shape made of overlapping shadows it seemed to be less of a request for restraint and more an invitation to consider the nature of reality. Can you touch a shadow? Does a shadow actually exist in a corporeal sense, or in any other tangible way? How would you go about leaving a mark on a shadow?

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Lumix LX3
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 5.1mm (24mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f2
Shutter Speed: 1/40
ISO: 80
Exposure Compensation: -0.66 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Fashion, lingerie and shadows

click photo to enlarge

"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months."
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) Irish playwright, poet and author

Wilde's sentiments, you suspect, would not be shared by most people today, so effectively have we been brainwashed into believing that new is better, that being fashionable is desirable and makes us desirable, and that anyway it is inevitable so we might as well enjoy it.

Fashion is, it seems inevitable, but that doesn't mean we should enjoy it or that it is intrinsically enjoyable. I think we sometimes forget that its sole purpose is to part the public from their money, and fashion shouldn't be confused with "styling" or "design". I've sounded off elsewhere in the blog about the idiocy and wastefulness of the fashion for bottled water, the stupidity of the public in paying more rather than less for clothing that has large adverts for the manufacturer plastered all over it (watch the current soccer World Cup spectators for mind-blowing evidence of this), and the craziness of the fashion for jeans that are artificially aged and torn before you buy them for a sum of money that is greater than you'd spend on a new, undamaged pair.

However, yesterday, when I attended an exhibition at The Hub, Sleaford, of women's underwear with my wife (I definitely needed to add those last three words in this sentence!), I was reflecting on the amazing discomfort that women put themselves through in the name of fashion. From the 1920s bras designed to minimise the size of the bust to the 1950s Playtex rubber corset that claimed to reduce the size of hips, there seemed to be no form of self-torture that wouldn't be sold and bought in the name of fashion. And when underwear wasn't being purchased with the intention of making parts of the body smaller, it was manufactured with the opposite in mind, as with the wired uplift of the "Wonderbra", or the bra that had inflatable sections to increase the apparent size of the bust at will, amply demonstrated.

Well, the ups and downs (and ins and outs) of female fashion was very interesting, and the exhibition was certainly worth seeing, but as well as illumination about the history of female undergarments, I was also pre-occupied with the possibility of finding an image with which to feed the blog. This is the one that caught my eye, a mannequin and its multiple, overlapping shadow, the result of the strong display lighting. The image looks a little like an example of "colour popping", but it isn't, as a close inspection of the shadows will reveal.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Lumix LX3
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 8.8mm (41mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f2.5
Shutter Speed: 1/60
ISO: 320
Exposure Compensation: -0.66 EV
Image Stabilisation: On