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Elijah Cobb: 'Nature Morte'
| Article
# : |
10387 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1993 |
1,437 Words |
| Author
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A.D. Coleman
A.D. Coleman is an internationally published photography
writer, critic, and historian currently based in New York
City. |
Mortality has long been a subject of art; indeed, since some of the earliest known artifacts are connected to burial ceremonies, death may be art's first subject. But while artists in all media address mortality, photographers (and, through their eyes, we who contemplate photographs) confront it.
One of photography's unique aspects is its ability to evoke the presence of its subjects; another is its capacity to seize and render specific moments in time. Nowhere are these manifested more powerfully than in photographs of the dead and dying--whether the subjects are human or animal. This is certainly the operative issue in the suite of images by New York based photographer Elijah Cobb that, collectively, he titles Painting with Light.
In point of fact, while that title precisely describes his working method (more about which presently), it does not address either the subject matter or the content of this series of images. These are more accurately enunciated in the French version of the term "still life": nature morte, which translates literally as "dead nature." For in this work in-progress, Cobb, who lives most of the time in a small East Village nearby subterranean spaces, contemplates and interacts with an assortment of animal cadavers in various states of decomposition.
Though he makes his living as a commercial photographer, Cobb, who is in his early forties, has so arranged his life that he's able to spend approximately three months each year in the Owl Creek Mountains in Wyoming. There, in a cluster of run-down cabins near Thermopolis, he recuperates from the stresses of urban life and works on his own projects, photographing in a solar-powered darkroom. It's a context in which nature provides constant, tangible memento mori, reminders of death; and the ready availability of these, in combination with Cobb's interest in night photography and experimental color, came together as the germinal impulses for this set of pictures.
Shooting Locations
There are two subgroups within the projects: images made in the landscape, between dusk and dawn, and photographs produced in what could be called "the studio" (one of the shacks on the property Cobb inhabits). In both circumstances, Cobb "paints with light" by opening the shutter of his 4 by 5 view camera in the dark and then illuminating his subject from different angles with controlled bursts of light from a strobe flash, altered by an assortment of colored gels. These gels form a
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