Every Thursday, as part of my personal “enriched environment” initiative, I post a piece of art, usually from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which recently released online some 400,000 high-resolution images of its collection. All artwork will show a sun (or sunlight) somewhere.
I won’t name the piece or the artist, but instead invite you to study the art and post a comment addressing one or more of these questions:
- What is going on in this picture?
- What do you see that makes you say that?
- What more can you find?
If you have another idea, run with it.
Special Update! The New York Times website does this same exercise every Monday with a news photo that is uncaptioned and contains no text (click!). The Times asks viewers the same three questions:
- What is going on in this picture?
- What do you see that makes you say that?
- What more can you find?
However, at the end of the week, the Times posts the background information on the picture. So, I’ve decided to do the same. I’ll still post an unlabeled piece of art on Thursday. But return on Sunday (for the Sunny Sundays post!) and you’ll find an update on the artwork here.
Note: To embiggen the image, click on it!
[Votive Candles, New York City]
Artist: Walker Evans (American, St. Louis, Missouri 1903–1975 New Haven, Connecticut)
Date: 1929–30
Medium: Gelatin silver print
Dimensions: Image: 21.9 x 17.2 cm (8 5/8 x 6 3/4 in.)
Classification: Photographs
Walker Evans dropped out of college in 1923 and moved to New York with the ambition of becoming a writer. Three years later he was in Paris auditing classes in modern art and literature at the Sorbonne, concentrating on the work of Flaubert and Baudelaire. He returned to New York in 1927, and, suffering from writer’s block, began to make photographs. “I was a passionate photographer, and for a while somewhat guiltily. I thought it was a substitute for something else–well for writing for one thing.”
Evans’s earliest photographs are direct observations of street life–snapshots of electric signs, street peddlers, and Coney Island bathers–and abstract, geometric compositions of construction sites, sewer gratings, and the shadows cast by elevated train platforms. His method of documenting the city combined the concerns of the historian and anthropologist with the talents of a graphic artist. Creating an exhaustive visual catalogue of significant, if ordinary, facts, he forged a new idiom from the American vernacular. Concise in form and poetic in a prosaic way, this idiom of the neglected and the commonplace would change the direction of American photography.
Evans’s interest in street signs, both commercial and handcrafted, shows the influence of Eugène Atget, specifically his photographs of Parisian shopwindows that had been admired by the Surrealists. This photograph of a crudely constructed sidewalk advertisement for religious articles was probably made in an Italian neighborhood on the lower East Side of Manhattan. In the printing stage, Evans cropped the negative at both the bottom and top to eliminate the heads of pedestrians and to hang the votive candles and offerings from the top of the picture, much as his contemporary Joseph Cornell might have placed them in a box. In a brilliant assessment of the scene, Evans superimposed graphic signs onto textual signs, a conflation that represents one of his first attempts to merge pictures with words.
The juxtaposition of the morbid objects hanging in the window and the candy soda ice cream sign in the background is startling.
It looks like seven objects are hanging in the window. They descend in two groups from left to right. The first group is three body parts: a heart, an arm and a hand, and another, bigger arm and a hand. The second group is four stick-like objects. the fourth stick is the longest and hangs down lower than the picture’s edge.
It makes me think of some kind of musical wind chimes or bells.
I see seven objects hanging in a window. As someone else already pointed out, the bottoms of the objects basically form an oblique line running from the upper left corner down to the lower right. The roofline of the building on the left in the background also makes an oblique line from the upper left towards the lower right. The source of light (the sun) is off screen and on the left, too.
The smaller arm and hand has the palm facing the viewer. The bigger arm and hand has the palm facing away from the viewer. I am intrigued to know what the heart-like object is on the far left, and the four stick-like objects on the right. Two of them seem to have decals on them.
It’s a shocking picture because it suggests a store is selling fake arms for people who have had an arm amputated, and the small arm suggests the user might be a child. And then there is the question about what the other objects are for, creating, at least in me, an unsettling sense of confusion.
The fact that the photo is black and white seems to highlight the stark reality of it all.