Vegetable Matters

   Still life is an interesting genre in that it has an ambiguous relationship to the arts; it is an inherently commercial practice. Starting in the age of the agricultural revolution promoting the interests of organized farming, improvements in crops and the wealth and status of landowners, still life has always been a genre that has exaggerated, boasted and sold the objects in the world around us. It’s what makes still life so good for selling products. On the other hand, it also enables us to explore the beauty in the world around us, and that provides an opportunity to question this at the same time.

 Still life, therefore, isn’t without interest. Photographic practitioners today not only make a variety of beautiful, challenging and difficult work, but they also provide beautiful photographic prints. Still life can be a vehicle for the uncanny as much as anything else. 

 So I’m suggesting these images are uncanny. What gives them this quality? Do these images make you feel a bit squeamish? Some do, but not all. The others just lack the conventions of picture making. For example, the thistles lay against the backdrop: there is no pretense that they are in a vase. The thistles are not the first flowers that most people would think about buying at the best of times. They are sensuous, but quite frankly they are prickly too. Sometimes the vegetables are just beyond sense, and knowing what one is looking at is one of the key factors in photography. There are not many viewers who are happy with purely abstract images, and even then they need to make visual sense. Objects which are beyond our comprehension threaten us and our understanding of photography. After all, photography is meant to show us the world around us, and if it shows us something we can’t make sense of, then either photography is letting us down or we don’t know as much as we would like to know; we end up being confronted with our own lack of understanding.

 The visual pleasure aspect of this work is very important. The desire to make these images came from a love of the vegetables themselves and from the love of the fantastic forms they make. This is a difficult arena as a lot of very famous and recognized photographers have worked with this specific response; Weston’s image of the pepper is the first thing that comes to mind.  The beauty of the form and the profound respect for the object is so clear in his work. What worked for me in front of the camera was the object which could exceed it’s own boundaries. Vegetables are fantastic for this. They can carry on growing. They can rot and decay. They can grow mould. They can be genetically modified to be bigger and better. These are sometimes frightening concepts for us and these vegetables gently and subtly suggest that something might be afoot in the organic world. There is no sign of genetic modification. There is no sign of decay or decomposition or even infestation. What the vegetable could do though is exceed itself, grow beyond our expectations. The organic world is full of things that we are frightened of and our anti-bacterial sprays are known not to solve everything. 

 So the images are a little disturbing, literally dark, and seductive in their own quiet way. They loom and glow back at us and challenge us to eat them, if we dare.

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