Photography as evocation of place in its fullness: Garish and Vertigo

Recent work of Robert Jones, photographer.

To love cinema is to love photography.  To love Vertigo is to love photography that evokes the fullness of place.  Place in that deeper sense of time, location, setting, mood, memory.  A great photograph is a Madeleine dipped into the warm tea of our subconscious (a la  Proust) that triggers the fullness of that moment.  It is what great art is about.  It is certainly what Chris Marker has been trying to mine all these years as he returned to Vertigo and Hitchcock's Madeleine and wondered, "Why? Why me? You gave no notice..."  Yet a great photograph does give notice, and Robert Jones' work is the best kind of photography that combines all the elements--from material to location, and all the art of the photographer--to capture something beyond the things in the picture.  He captures a time/space/emotional continuum moment in the same way that Robert Burks so masterfully achieves such haunted work in Vertigo.  This side of art is difficult to put into words, impossible to truly codify and file away with our intellects because it speaks to that within us which is without words, without organized articulation.

In the photograph that Robert posted on his June 3rd blog, linked above and photograph provided here, he evokes a certain place in the summer heart that many will recognize from the southeast:  the ubiquitous Waffle House. Ubiquity is the trade and tool of the artist--for it is with the everyday object, place, event repositioned in a familiar yet at the same moment unfamiliar context that jars us Zen like into the experience of that moment, that time, that place.  The simple Waffle House using the Polaroid film that Robert had purchased for less than a fiver manages to do all of that and more.

Robert has a collection coming out soon called Garish. I hope that this photograph, and the rest of Robert's work, will lead you into the same meditative places of pleasure that it has led me.