About the Book
My photography could rightly be described as documentary photography, although what is often documented, what is left in the frame, tends to raise more questions than it answers. That's a tension that strongly appeals to me, the expansion of unknowing, especially when it's accomplished in a visually intriguing fashion.
What is this book about, and what are the photographs inside of it about exactly? To answer that, let's take a minute to talk about its name.
The title is holothurian.
What is a holothurian? I'll tell you, but first I just want you to consider the beauty of the sound of the word. Maybe you'll even want to say it aloud with me.
Say it: Holothurian.
That's just about as lovely a word as ever I've heard. I don't necessarily need to know what the word means, I can love it just for the intrinsic music of its spoken tones.
In point of fact, however, a holothurian is a sea cucumber, an enigmatic invertebrate, a bottom-feeding echinoderm living just about as foreign an existence as any other animal scuttling around this grand moist dumpling with us, sharing a common name with a fairly dull garden vegetable, and frequently startlingly beautiful.
You can see a holothurian here: http://nachodonut.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/faria_sea-cucumber_5.jpg
...and here: http://nachodonut.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/sea-cucumber.jpg?w=500&h=375
...and here: http://bit.ly/rlmQ0I
...and here: http://bit.ly/qJfgiK
How strange and excellent they are! How well they embody the two qualities I most enjoy in this life: They are absurd and beautiful. I love the beauty of their proper name, holothurian, and I love its contrast with the cornfed plainness of their common name, the sea cucumber. I love the strangeness of the animal that those names reference, especially how that animal exists by and large entirely outside of the frame of human reference.
What does a holothurian, a sea cucumber, mean to you? Is it wonderful? Is it signifcant? Is it what you need?
The late writer Donald Barthelme, whose rhetorically and philosophically thrilling stories I love to an unreasonable degree, had a notion that a story could be about itself entirely, a self-contained object, which could be, metaphorically speaking, hung on a wall like a painting. He felt that rather than this being a confining notion, it was actually quite liberating to the page.
“The combinatorial agility of words," he wrote, "the exponential generation of meaning once they’re allowed to go to bed together, allows the writer to surprise himself, makes art possible, reveals how much of Being we haven’t yet encountered.”
Since I was young, photography and the act of writing have been two sides of the same coin for me, different paths to the same end, distinctive but equivalent methods of telling a story. Barthelme's idea, then, of a story's potential to be about nothing but itself and its own intrinsic energy, ideas and beauty appeals to me equally in a rhetorical and a visual sense.
If you like you can paraphrase his edict, substitute one set of photographic tools for the literary ones that he employs, and illustrate that the idea is fluid between media:
“The combinatorial agility of visual elements, the exponential generation of meaning once they’re allowed to go to bed together, allows the photographer to surprise himself, makes art possible, reveals how much of Being we haven’t yet encountered.”
So then, what is this book that I've created about?
Like the stories of Donald Barthelme, like the sound of the word 'holothurian' and the absurd and beautiful creature it names, holothurian the book and each individual photograph within it, is, quite like this absurd and beautiful universe overall, about nothing but itself.
In the crescendo of what is perhaps his most well-known story, Barthelme writes, “The citizens in their cars looked at the porcupines, thinking: What is wonderful? Are porcupines wonderful? Are they significant? Are they what I need?”
Porcupines, much like holothurians, are absurd and beautiful. The first porcupine I ever saw in my life was sitting far above the ground on the limb of a tree. In Canada. I'll never forget it.
If you decide that holothurian is wonderful, or significant, or what you need, this site will sell a copy to you. I hope that you would enjoy it.
What is this book about, and what are the photographs inside of it about exactly? To answer that, let's take a minute to talk about its name.
The title is holothurian.
What is a holothurian? I'll tell you, but first I just want you to consider the beauty of the sound of the word. Maybe you'll even want to say it aloud with me.
Say it: Holothurian.
That's just about as lovely a word as ever I've heard. I don't necessarily need to know what the word means, I can love it just for the intrinsic music of its spoken tones.
In point of fact, however, a holothurian is a sea cucumber, an enigmatic invertebrate, a bottom-feeding echinoderm living just about as foreign an existence as any other animal scuttling around this grand moist dumpling with us, sharing a common name with a fairly dull garden vegetable, and frequently startlingly beautiful.
You can see a holothurian here: http://nachodonut.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/faria_sea-cucumber_5.jpg
...and here: http://nachodonut.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/sea-cucumber.jpg?w=500&h=375
...and here: http://bit.ly/rlmQ0I
...and here: http://bit.ly/qJfgiK
How strange and excellent they are! How well they embody the two qualities I most enjoy in this life: They are absurd and beautiful. I love the beauty of their proper name, holothurian, and I love its contrast with the cornfed plainness of their common name, the sea cucumber. I love the strangeness of the animal that those names reference, especially how that animal exists by and large entirely outside of the frame of human reference.
What does a holothurian, a sea cucumber, mean to you? Is it wonderful? Is it signifcant? Is it what you need?
The late writer Donald Barthelme, whose rhetorically and philosophically thrilling stories I love to an unreasonable degree, had a notion that a story could be about itself entirely, a self-contained object, which could be, metaphorically speaking, hung on a wall like a painting. He felt that rather than this being a confining notion, it was actually quite liberating to the page.
“The combinatorial agility of words," he wrote, "the exponential generation of meaning once they’re allowed to go to bed together, allows the writer to surprise himself, makes art possible, reveals how much of Being we haven’t yet encountered.”
Since I was young, photography and the act of writing have been two sides of the same coin for me, different paths to the same end, distinctive but equivalent methods of telling a story. Barthelme's idea, then, of a story's potential to be about nothing but itself and its own intrinsic energy, ideas and beauty appeals to me equally in a rhetorical and a visual sense.
If you like you can paraphrase his edict, substitute one set of photographic tools for the literary ones that he employs, and illustrate that the idea is fluid between media:
“The combinatorial agility of visual elements, the exponential generation of meaning once they’re allowed to go to bed together, allows the photographer to surprise himself, makes art possible, reveals how much of Being we haven’t yet encountered.”
So then, what is this book that I've created about?
Like the stories of Donald Barthelme, like the sound of the word 'holothurian' and the absurd and beautiful creature it names, holothurian the book and each individual photograph within it, is, quite like this absurd and beautiful universe overall, about nothing but itself.
In the crescendo of what is perhaps his most well-known story, Barthelme writes, “The citizens in their cars looked at the porcupines, thinking: What is wonderful? Are porcupines wonderful? Are they significant? Are they what I need?”
Porcupines, much like holothurians, are absurd and beautiful. The first porcupine I ever saw in my life was sitting far above the ground on the limb of a tree. In Canada. I'll never forget it.
If you decide that holothurian is wonderful, or significant, or what you need, this site will sell a copy to you. I hope that you would enjoy it.
Features & Details
- Primary Category: Arts & Photography Books
-
Project Option: Small Square, 7×7 in, 18×18 cm
# of Pages: 40 - Publish Date: Jul 04, 2011
- Keywords street photography, documentary, absurd, beautiful
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