For as long as I can remember, my family has saved and re-used giftwrap. Presents are wrapped without tape, unwrapped carefully, and the paper put away. At Christmas we pull out a big box of old gift wrap to choose from, and the gifts under the Christmas tree are a landscape of familiar patterns and colors.
In editing these photos, I found the pieces of giftwrap naturally falling into pairs. Some show their history of heavy use. Some are fragments that challenge the frame of the photo with their uneven shapes. If the giftwrap was itself a photo, the three dimensionality of the "original" pops up into the new image. Sometimes the materiality of the paper is more important than the pattern.
Although a photo has a two dimensional surface, and although the objects photographed here likewise have a two dimensional surface, the images refuse to be two dimensional. Perhaps because we understand photos as three dimensional, the eye is drawn to any edge, fold, texture, pattern, or line that suggests greater depth, even when that depth is an image within an image.
View the slideshow
No comments:
Post a Comment