So what's Moby Dick got to do with it?
10-March-2010
I confess I love Moby Dick without being able to understand it. It’s sea yarn of a man’s quest for revenge which destroys him and everything around. It’s worthy of great book status for the way it tells that warning alone.
Best though are the chapters in between the narrative on different aspects of whaling. Somehow Herman Melville manages to make each essay relevant to the common experience of existing.
The photograph below was selected for exhibition in last years Schubert Ulrich. It’s a "street" photograph and I submitted the quote from the chapter called “The Fountain” as my artist’s statement. I think it’s sayingthat seeing is not knowing, and there's a mystery to things that our senses and our reasoning can't explain.
Two people talking, and one asks the other to describe the whales' spout.
“But why pester one with all this reasoning on the subject? Speak out! You have seen him spout; then declare what the spout is; can you not tell air from water?
My dear sir, in this world it is not so easy to settle these plain things. I have found your plain things the knottiest of all. And as for this whale spout, you might almost stand in it, and yet be undecided as to what it is precisely.”
Art Photography, Street Photography, Was Herman Melville the first Post Modernist without knowing it?
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