Accidental Ideogram
Nogales, Arizona
2022
These glue marks left when the adhesive failed and the sign that was on the wall fell off still seems to be conveying a message–if only I could interpret the symbol.
Accidental Ideogram
Nogales, Arizona
2022
These glue marks left when the adhesive failed and the sign that was on the wall fell off still seems to be conveying a message–if only I could interpret the symbol.
Arnold Siskind was have liked this photograph.
Thanks Allan. I was unknowingly copying Aaron Siskind even before I’d ever seen his work, and am a big fan. Merg Ross, who visited Siskind when he (Merg) was just a teenager. once told me he thought Siskind was kind of a sloppy printer of his work. I aspire to such sloppiness (in a digital form of course).
And your ideograms are like those Brooks Jensen photographed of graffiti on the concrete walls of left over bunkers along the Pacific Coast. (I can’t find them on his website at the moment.)
Yes, I remember Brooks’s photos, and thought of them too when I took this image. It’s not an original subject at all but one that continues to attract photographers–always a new pattern to document.
I have never seen an actual Siskind print. I have only seen them through reproductions. I to would like to aspire to such sloppiness.
The first Siskind prints I saw were very large prints of some of his tar on asphalt images at the Phillips Collection museum in Washington, D.C. Seeing those images was both inspiring and disheartening. The disheartening feeling came from the fact that, unaware of Siskind’s tar images, I had been taking similar photos for some time, thinking I was being quite original. The inspiration quickly outweighed the disappointment and after that, I just referred to my tar on asphalt work as an homage to Siskind. (You can see some of my asphalt images in my website portfolios.)