Objects
of Comfort and Despair
These pictures come out of the still life genre: the comfort of the
table with food or a vase of flowers and the despair of the vanitas and memento
mori with their reminders that life and death are inseparable. The images
retain the formal shell of the expected, but in most cases selective focus,
that in the digital age can operate with more flexibility than in the time
of camera and darkroom, reveals only a narrow band of sharply defined object
while allowing the rest of the object and its environment to dissolve into
colored light.
Olivia Parker©2006
