Senses Working Overtime
“To think through things, that is the still life painter’s work– and the poet’s. Both sorts of artists require a tangible vocabulary, a worldly lexicon.”
The quote is from Mark Doty’s essay Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, but it could also apply to filmmakers and this polaroid by Andrei Tarkovsky, taken in the early 1980s and published in Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids in 2006. I found it online here, with a sample of others, equally beautiful. They all have the same grainy, still quality, and focus on light itself. Here the comparison to Vermeer’s paintings and Dutch still lifes seems unavoidable. The window, the table setting, the lemon. There’s an implied synesthesia that was a conscious element of still-life composition: smell, taste, touch, and sight combine into a fused experience of longing. Is there an implied sound too? Or is silence itself an auditory element?
The palette has the eerie, surreal tone of Tarkovsky’s films. The greenish light is unexpected and seems to offset the otherwise sunny flowers and lemon. The color intensifies the texture, as the image as a whole seems to take on the pebbled skin of the lemon. Suddenly the black shadows seem velvety, the light strained through a colander as well as glass. As in his films, Tarkovsky makes you work for your visual pleasures. Doty explains,
“We are instructed by the objects that come to speak with us, those material presences. Why should we have been born knowing how to love the world? We require, again and again, these demonstrations.”
In: contemporary, film, photography, polaroid, still life · Tagged with: Andrei Tarkovsky, Mark Doty, Still LIfe with Oysters and Lemon