Christian Patterson part deux

Work from Christian Patterson's book, Sound Affects. See more here.

Christian Patterson's work interests me because it is simultaneously subtle and entirely alarming. The subtly comes with the territory of his chosen subject matter. We've seen this type of subject matter before. It covers ground previously explored by earlier color photography pioneers such as William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, who made dirty hotel lampshades worth looking at...or so they seemed to convince us. Like his predecessors, Patterson revels in the imperfect geometry and muted colors of every drab hotel room corner, but in this work, Patterson adds a fourth dimension: urgency.

In his photograph of the lit gas stove, Patterson presents his viewer with, what at first appears to be a snapshot of a nondescript kitchen interior. But rather than allowing his audience to settle there and quickly move on, Patterson leads the viewer into a space of tension that holds the viewer's gaze just long enough for him/her to realize that the image is not a snapshot, but rather a clearly an orchestrated scene composed specifically for the camera. I can not help to think of Jeff Wall's photograph, Insomnia, which suggests a documentation of a domestic scene, but on closer examination, is clearly a carefully constructed scene created for the overall emotional effect it will have over the viewer's psyche.

The tension in Patterson's photograph (similar to Wall's) is created by the suggestion of time (past, present, and future) within the still the image. The photograph, by nature of being a photograph, marks the click of a shutter, and single moment in time. In Wall's Insomnia, the passing of time is suggested by the open cabinet doors, which show the movement of the subject through the space prior to the taking of the photograph. In Patterson's photo, the image of the burning flames with no one in sight suggests a future catastrophe, which then alerts the viewer to a sense of the passing of time.

The collision of the static and the dynamic in Patterson's photograph makes me think of Roland Barthes's notion of time collapsed as he outlines it in Camera Lucida. In his discussion of a photograph of an executed prisoner, Barthes argues that the photograph is death itself insofar as it is the collapse of linear time. The photograph is simultaneously past, present and future.

(In the background of Patterson's photograph, there are words that reference the Book of Revelations from the Bible. That is another discussion, perhaps even more interesting than this one.)