Reviews of Souvenirs
Reviews
The photographic series Souvenirs, by David Arnold, reminds us that the Nature is a human construct. The point is made in various ways. There is the humor inherent in the intersection of a human device, such as a saw, floating above a landscape, or a 2D cut out figure of a woman floating in a lake. Here, the juxtaposition jars the viewer, surprising the eye and the mind with a coupling that is uncommon. But just as often the effect is subtle. An empty swing for example, swaying above a ratty sage, without a human in sight; inscrutable markers, indicates #9 in a desert landscape wherein nothing obvious is designated; highway arrows point in the opposite direction, toward no apparent roads, specific but abstract signs lost in an endless horizon; the foundation the ruins of some habitation, the foundation and the steps of a dwelling long abandoned, but not consumed by the comparatively powerful forces of the natural world.
Even in the more obviously constructed photographs, where the props call attention to themselves, the successful of the series is that it refocuses the direction whereby sense is made of the world. No matter ho the aesthetically perfect the composition of the landscape photographer, there is always the sense of peeping at the real world. The real is “out there”, the photographer has been lucky enough to “capture it”. Arnold simply points out the obvious, that is, that there can be no clear demarcation between subject and object, that the act of vision transforms the thing seen, that when you snap the shutter, you create the real in an active, ongoing participation.
Looking at the skies in these photos, they almost always occupy half the image. They weigh it down, makes it almost claustrophobic. The skies are the vacant reality, the ones replace the human clearly doesn’t fit. But on the ground, anything might happen—and does. A jar makes a fragile assertion in an otherwise beautiful, but empty, expanse. A suitcase lifts open at the ledge of an empty drive-in theatre. A crutch insinuates itself in a plain, endless fence line that divides one otherwise uncommon chunk of ground from another. What could seem equally unmitigated space, left there, placed there, gently or strenuously insisted on the need for human factor in any estimation of what might be real.
What, then, makes these photographs so poignant is how ghostly they are. We see the residue of human involvement the echoes of human artifice, but no human per se. The photographs seem almost lonely. But not completely, for its this near nostalgia that resolves right in the lap, or rather the eye, of the viewer. The viewer becomes the participant in the otherwise boundlessly stretching landscape.
Keith Shein, Neon Arts Letter, February, 1989
The photographic series Souvenirs, by David Arnold, reminds us that the Nature is a human construct. The point is made in various ways. There is the humor inherent in the intersection of a human device, such as a saw, floating above a landscape, or a 2D cut out figure of a woman floating in a lake. Here, the juxtaposition jars the viewer, surprising the eye and the mind with a coupling that is uncommon. But just as often the effect is subtle. An empty swing for example, swaying above a ratty sage, without a human in sight; inscrutable markers, indicates #9 in a desert landscape wherein nothing obvious is designated; highway arrows point in the opposite direction, toward no apparent roads, specific but abstract signs lost in an endless horizon; the foundation the ruins of some habitation, the foundation and the steps of a dwelling long abandoned, but not consumed by the comparatively powerful forces of the natural world.
Even in the more obviously constructed photographs, where the props call attention to themselves, the successful of the series is that it refocuses the direction whereby sense is made of the world. No matter ho the aesthetically perfect the composition of the landscape photographer, there is always the sense of peeping at the real world. The real is “out there”, the photographer has been lucky enough to “capture it”. Arnold simply points out the obvious, that is, that there can be no clear demarcation between subject and object, that the act of vision transforms the thing seen, that when you snap the shutter, you create the real in an active, ongoing participation.
Looking at the skies in these photos, they almost always occupy half the image. They weigh it down, makes it almost claustrophobic. The skies are the vacant reality, the ones replace the human clearly doesn’t fit. But on the ground, anything might happen—and does. A jar makes a fragile assertion in an otherwise beautiful, but empty, expanse. A suitcase lifts open at the ledge of an empty drive-in theatre. A crutch insinuates itself in a plain, endless fence line that divides one otherwise uncommon chunk of ground from another. What could seem equally unmitigated space, left there, placed there, gently or strenuously insisted on the need for human factor in any estimation of what might be real.
What, then, makes these photographs so poignant is how ghostly they are. We see the residue of human involvement the echoes of human artifice, but no human per se. The photographs seem almost lonely. But not completely, for its this near nostalgia that resolves right in the lap, or rather the eye, of the viewer. The viewer becomes the participant in the otherwise boundlessly stretching landscape.
Keith Shein, Neon Arts Letter, February, 1989
