It should surprise no one who follows this blog or knows me that I, with my belief in print making as the only manner in which to fully appreciate a photograph, have pictures hanging on the walls of my house. However, it did surprise me to realize that there are 56 of my pictures (all framed) on the walls. If pressed before I made the count (just today), I would have speculated that there are 20-25 hanging photographs.
Moving on ... on today's entry on LENSCRATH, there is work that shares my fascination with dirty / patina-ed kitchen utensils and food given over to decay, albeit pictured in a different manner than my similar referent pictures. The work by Joan Fitzsimmons is accompanied by an artspeak-ish (not the worst I have ever read) statement, which is to be expected from a B.F.A + M.F.A. picture maker ...
In my work, I’ve asked questions about human relationships, the nature of home, my relationship to nature, and the significance of the quotidian. The ordinary act of living is endlessly complex and uncertain .... ~ Joan Fitzsimmons
Fitzsimmons goes on to tell about her manner of working and her "relationship" (my word) to her referents and concludes with informing us that she "now note[s] that my materials and imagery and manner of collecting them, suggest/are traditional female work, so I am, once again, ready to place it within a feminist context."
Fitzsimmons' pictures are OK. Some work in creating a moderate visual interest. Others not so much. In either case, as far as making pictures of cutlery is concerned, Fitzsimmons' work pales in comparison to that of Jan Groover.
Groover's work has been described as "predominantly empirical, visual, and sensual - images rife with mystery, movement, and intrigue. There's a good read, No More Lazy Still-Life Photography, Please about Groover HERE I especially like the part about when Groover stopped making what she had been doing during her early career. She complained that ...
... she didn't know what to do, and her husband literally said, "Go photograph the kitchen sink." He managed to shut her up, but she took him quite literally, and started photographing just the shit that was in the sink.
Unlike Fitzsimmons and other contemporary picture makers for whom Concept is everything (hence all the artspeak which, ironically, is rarely about art and more about personal self-psychoanalytic crapola), According to Groover, the meaning of the objects is of no importance; only the shape, texture, and form that falls into a particular space is important. And was Groover's Formalist attention to shuch thing which instigated John Szarkwski to say...
.... her pictures were good to think about because they were first good to look at.iMo, that's something that could not be said about Fitzsimmons' pictures.