“I like there to be a joke in practically every photo I take. Nobody has the right to make photography boring."
Norman Parkinson had a career spanning over fifty y7ears. Many see him as the grandfather of modern fashion photography. I believe there was a more complex side to his work.
The image above gives us a small glimpse into the worlod he was creating. The humour is obviously there, the billboard advertisement mirroring the the gaze of the viewer, but look more closely and there are two iconic pieces of Americana in the photograph. We see the Shell logo on the left and the Coca cola logo on the right.
This brings the question "What is the bloke on the billboard actually looking at?"
We have any number of interpretations of what constitutes post modernism, the humour, the message, its inscrutability. I think Parkinson was embracing it with gusto.
In the image above we see a great old staple of post modernism, the juxtposition of the unlikely. The humour is there and as usual the composition is faultless.
No comments:
Post a Comment