Saturday, April 11, 2015

I saw with an injured eye, captive

I couldn't find a good name for this photograph, so I asked for suggestions, and got a lot of them, for example that it looks like an inverse totem pole, or life, or iron maiden, or eagle claws, etc.

As they say, "a camera always looks both ways", so I named the photograph "Introvert". You know the saying: “How can you tell if a Finn likes you? He's staring at your shoes instead of his own.”

(Posting title is from the poem On Antiphon Island by Nathaniel Mackey.)

2 comments:

Markus said...

First of all: What a wood structure! I've never seen something like this before.

Re. the Finns: So Finns must be either physicists or mathematicians, 'cause that's how we tell them apart: If they talk to each other, the physicist looks at the other's shoes, while the mathematician looks at its own.

And thinking of the image and its title again: I knew this adage of the photograph looking both ways, but rarely found it as applicable as in this image. You can certainly interpret it in an introvert or an extrovert way, and I, too, would have leaned to the first way of seeing it.

Juha Haataja said...

Thanks, Markus!

When I saw this half-rotten tree stump I thought it might look fine in an art gallery, lighted by well-placed spotlights, and titled so that the art critic community would have something to think about.

The saying about looking at shoes apparently applies to me three times: physics, applied mathematics, and being a Finn. Maybe I should start taking photographs of shoes.