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RECENT

Canned goods and work gloves. These are part of an ongoing project, or perhaps two ongoing projects. I shot these objects, isolated in a studio, and then made prints larger than life (30"x 24"). This was actually my first digital production (although the canned goods were captured on film) and I was struck by the disembodied nature of the process. When so many adjustments are possible and the materials so pliable, the work’s ties to its subject can become tenuous. All of which seems odd to me since the photographs begin as precisely detailed descriptions of fairly common objects.

The gloves are worn and stained and reflect a certain pattern of interaction with the physical world (this is the spot where my finger once wore away the leather). The canned goods, too, betray a rough contact with the world. Food is adulterated by the very process which seeks to preserves it. Tomatoes that are cooked and skinned and stuffed into jars bear slight resemblance to fruit on the vine. They do, however, retain the mark of their maker, or canner.

Like much of my work, these pictures concern not just the nominal subject of the photograph but also the people and forces behind it. No two people fill a pickle jar exactly the same way and in that jar traces of both the garden and the gardener can be found. But at the same time, the objects, as they are portrayed in these pictures, can seem to take on a life of their own, to have a sense of presence that is related to, yet distinct from, the circumstances of their creation. They are no longer utilitarian objects, but have instead become specimens and, by extension, foils for our projections.

All Images and Text © Thomas Birtwistle 2008.
All Rights Reserved.