The power of three
“Make it different. Keep it the same. It just takes three pictures to start and confirm a pathway. There are no winners: no bronze, silver, or gold medals. They’re all equal and yet all different. With a pathway the next pictures are always a surprise. Sameness provides consistency; difference the accumulation that creates chronology. The power of three can also operate with projects over time. It’s the way the audiences we never meet get to know our work, reaching them with something new in every picture and every new project while still being the same photographer. It’s the way we see the world that becomes the unifier, the pathway marker.” – Arno Rafael Minkkinen
The group exhibition for "the power of three" workshop I attended at the Griffin Museum of Photography is about to start in May. Our esteemed workshop instructor/ photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen kindly wrote each of my fellow workshop participants a nice review that would accompany our work being exhibited. The following was the lovely review Arno wrote for me. During this workshop, there were times when I felt Arno knew more about the essence of my work than myself the creator. Arno’s lovely writing gave me the confirmation I need for the direction of my photography moving forward. I am grateful to have had this opportunity to study with a tremendous mentor who cares deeply about helping his students finding their visual pathways and further strengthen their unique voice. I am also thankful to my fellow workshop participants who showed great warmth and generosity throughout the course of the workshop.
To learn about this “power of three” exhibition and my fellow workshop participants, please visit Griffin Museum of Photography’s web site.
"Homage to Arno"
"PUIMING WEBBER – MIND GAMES FOR THE SOUL
Matters of the spirit arrived with the birth of photography from the get-go by one of its most overlooked and underappreciated inventors, Hippolyte Bayard. It was the first directorial mode image (A. D. Coleman’s term for making an image instead of taking it) not to mention selfie wherein Bayard depicts himself as a drowned man (Le Noyé, Self-portrait as a drowned man, October 18, 1840. It was an act of revenge for having been neglected by the French Government in favor of Daguerre who actually saw Bayard’s photographs in a group show before Daguerre was even announced as the inventor of photography. Daguerre showed paintings in that very same exhibition. In my History of Photography classes I don’t first let on that Bayard’s suicide was a fake, so the students can absorb Bayard’s grief all the better. Yes, tears have welled in some eyes even.
Inner feelings and other intangible states of being like faith and grief are not very easily photographed. Minor White and Duane Michals each worked from such sensibilities through sequences of pictures, trusting the viewer would arrive at the same conclusions as picture maker. In Michals’ Death Comes to the Old Lady, 1969, a deceased husband comes to fetch his wife out of her chair with a long exposure swoosh. In Minor White’s Sequence 8 inMirrors, Messages, and Manifestations (Aperture, 1969), White uses the male nude to connect land and sea at the water’s edge: Gather here departed Saints | The tide pool pitted rock | Naked and gentle to their feet | To invest themselves with flesh again.
Puiming Webber is on to another solution, working from within. A headline I wrote as a Mad Men Madison Avenue copywriter on the Minolta account went: What happens inside your mind, can happen inside a camera. It was a line that convinced me to try and become a photographer. Puiming Webber creates a kind of White-Michals hybrid as she tackles her spiritual quest combining Michals’ narrative line with White’s single image craving for beauty. Webber trusts her viewer to find the beauty in her spirituality through the triptych mode. She invites us to become her, viewing what she views, placing the very images into our hands as well. A potentially magical alternative is in the works using three triptychs placed one on top of the other forming an immediate resemblance to a game of tick, tack, toe. The narrative form it suggests will likely allow the viewer to engage even more collaboratively with her mind game. "
© Arno Rafael Minkkinen, 2023
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