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Getting the references covered... |
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14-02-2005 |
I just finished reading the whole Harry Potter Series, and now I know...
And if you haven't read the books, if you haven't seen the films, you don't know what a muggle is, you have to idea who might Tom Riddle be, you have no clue how to get to platform 9 3/4... Those are all references that you would easily catch if you've read the series (which I suggest you do, because, well, they're not bad at all, and make for good metro-tram-bus and weekend reading...).
There are many closed worlds like that in our modern times, and it has always been so. Among my own references are stuff like :
Dune, by Frank Herbert
2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C.Clarke
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
Ok, ok, I admit, I'm a science fiction fan, so my references of course cover many of the numerous Star Trek series and movies, the Star Wars mythology, and a lot of the work by Isaac Asimov. I am also a fan of fantasy, so I of course I know all the nooks and cranies of The Lord of the Rings, and could discuss at length of the ommissions and editorial decisions made by Peter Jackson is his films.
Now, what has this got to do with photography ?(not much, actually, photography was not invented back in the days of the hobbits...)
But seriously, culture is giving us a sort of reference framework inside of which concepts have meanings. If you don't know the difference between hari-kana and kata-kana japanese script there is no use trying to present a piece of artwork that exploits that difference, you won't get it... (I'm not even sure if i got the right names myself...)
 It's one of the strength of the famous Pepper no.30 from Edward Weston : it draws on a basic common reference. We all know what a pepper is and what it looks like, we know how it grows, we know how it smells, how it tastes, we know the sound it makes when you cut it with a knife, we know the texture of it when we bite in a piece of it. We know peppers. Id it had been potato no 30, we would have gotten it, lichi no 30, we would have been interested by the wierd fruit, but as westerners (as I think most of the people who saw the Weston image when it was made...) we wouldn't have felt the same.
We know peppers, inside and out, that what makes this image so strong, because it shows that simple pepper in a new light, is uses an universal reference and presents it as a thing of beauty.
We know peppers. And somehow, for an image to tug and our heartstring, we need to have a reference point, we need something we can hold on to in order to try and interpret the image, in order to take it all in and digest it. Even if the image is of some exotic thing, place, person or fruit, we always try to fit it into our rigid reference framework.
We know peppers, and now I know Harry Potter too... |
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