This is a slightly unusual view of the Treasury from the Siq, as it shows a wider view of the facade of the monument. The tour guide made sure to get us here just after 10 in the morning, so that the light illuminated the facade without overpowering it, which gives it this glowing effect. In fact, the glow is so strong that it is illuminating the Siq too, and you can see that the pink colour of the rock is not confined to the carved frontage, but extends all around it. The carving has revealed these lovely colours.
Categories: photograph · travel
The workshop is quite an investment of time and money for me, so I want to make it worthwhile. I’ll take some time to think about what I want to get out of it. I hope that this is merely the first post of a series about what I should like to get out of the workshop in particular, and out of photography in general.
I want to learn how to take pictures that mean something.
That statement was always true, but I recently visited a gallery which had put on a free exhibition of portraits. Most of the paintings there were records of the people, but there were two pictures that really caught my eye. One was called Santa Maria della Salute and was a portrait of a Muslim woman against the church in Venice. [I couldn't find an online version, I'm afraid.] The woman was dark, in a black coat and scarf. She was looking sadly over her shoulder out of the picture. The church, in contrast, was white. Apart from a clear sky, the church and the woman were the only two things in the picture. They made a study in opposites, which led me to think about what the painter was trying to tell me. I felt very strongly that the woman was a refugee, and was looking back with sadness and regret to the place she had come from, as looking over her shoulder was a symbol for looking into the past. That she was rendered entirely in dark tones and the church in light tones emphasized the difference between them. That struck me as odd, as you would expect the church to welcome people who are homeless or lost. If the church and the woman were separate, then it seemed impossible to me that the church could have welcomed her. I took the church as a representative of the West, and so for me the picture was a rebuke to us Westerners for our treatment of the Muslim world. My interpretation may be very wide of what the painter intended, but I felt that my chain of reasoning was secure, so the painting had meaning for me.
The second painting that I remember from the exhibition I have since managed to find online.
In this picture the shape and colour of the girl’s dress reminds us very strongly of the shape and colour of the oysters we see on the platter next to her. The scalloped hem reminds us very strongly of the edge of an oyster shell. Even the pattern on the dress is made of oyster shapes. The dress contains the girl. Oysters contain pearls, and to remind us of that fact there are a number of pearls on the bed too. The analogy is too strong to avoid: she is a pearl. It’s a very elegant compliment. But I think there is a different reading. The oysters have been opened so that we can get to what is inside, the flesh and the pearl. The girl, lying with her arms behind her head, is also in a very open pose. She is offering herself to the viewer. It’s a quite extraordinarily sexy image.
The first picture was much, much more than a simple representation of a sad-eyed Muslim woman, and the second picture portrayed much, much more than a girl and some oysters. I think the memory of both pictures will stay with me for a long time, because I was able to find so much in them.
I want to be able to make photographs that say as much as those two paintings.
Categories: goals · workshop
