One Eye
July 30th, 2007by Charles Burns
ISBN: 9781897299043
I always thought of Drawn and Quarterly as publishers of comics, so I was surprised to see they put out this book. Apparently I shouldn’t be, though, as it is part of their Petits Livres series of “affordable art books dedicated to acknowledging the wide variety of talent within the comics community and beyond.” (Burns is Harvey Award-winning graphic novelist.) Here he is photographer, not cartoonist: One Eye is a collection of diptychs (always two rectangular images, one flush above the other) assembled from images taken with a Sony cybershot camera bought five years ago.
It probably says more about me than the book that the diptychs that first made more sense to me were the ones like “Trace Evidence”, with its nearly empty rooms in “broom clean” condition and leaving an apartment for the last time feel. The sense-making was on a more obvious and easy level: I knew what I was looking at, I didn’t struggle with why these two images were together, and it evoked the feelings you might expect when rooms feel a bit more empty than just clean. In the same vein, “Second Coming” features a contiguous row of homes in the distance under an ominous sky on top, with dirt, shattered glass, and a weak ray of light that functions as path up to it underneath. The image is a jarring because it almost could be one image, not two.
I began to catch Burns’s sense of humor (and I do respond to toys), so I was taken with “As Wide As the World”, a macro of stretchy batlike superhero toy and hands with painted fingernails pulling a different blue stretchy toy by the arms, a ruler on the edge of the frame. I appreciated the charm in “Our Little Things”, where a hand flies a little bug-eyed green guy in a rocketship fashioned from an empty toilet paper tube and scotch tape, and across the sea of a palm rests a bright clay mermaid.
I enjoyed the humor in titles like “Fat of the Land”, which shows us a beer-themed lamp on a side table with a “thank you for not smoking sign” that signals this is a public (and probably cheap) place and a recliner with lamp, the edge of a fireplace so we can be sure this is someone’s home just visible below it. I can’t decide if it’s defaced or just oddly handmade, but there’s one ugly Mickey Mouse above a snapshot of pizza, fries, and chicken in a vending machine in “Nature’s Mistakes”.
Burns definitely doesn’t shy away from ugly (closeups of magazine photos of weenies and beans aren’t pretty) or uncomfortable (the goofy 1970s yet supposedly sexy picture of a woman about to lick her lips is closer to revolting under the beans). Yet I just can’t help taking a second or third look at images like “Incubator”, where salmon sits in a tray with its plastic wrap removed while underneath it, a small lamp, picture, and alarm clock are placed in what looks like but isn’t a microwave.
Many of the photographs seem joined predominantly by matching colors: “Random Selection” shows an old handheld color selector isolation mask, revealing a small square of color that matches the peeling, sunburnt back below. A neon neoprene beer bottle coozy and smiley face coffee mug match each other in “A World of Small Pleasures”.
Locations are always noted, though they aren’t what you expect. Rather, the images aren’t what you’d expect for the locations — its Paris without the landmarks. Seattle has a doll’s head and a rumpled bed, we’re told Philadelphia but the photos are of old magazine bits. Burns seems to be poking at the conventions, with every image given a proper title, a location, and a year taken. So while some of the “meta” you might expect is here, the book isn’t sized or priced like a typical art photography book. Burns is clear he isn’t capturing typical (if you can say there is such a thing: costly, overly finished, with an essay included, expensive equipment required?) “art” photographs. All the images were taken with an old point and shoot consumer model digital camera after all, and not “manipulated in any way”.
The one eye of the title may be the cyclops-like cover image (a macro of an eye from magazine or comic with nose and lips from some kind of mannequin), Burns’s eye as he took the photographs and then created the diptychs, and the consuming eye of the viewer. If you are interested in diptychs, supposedly low-brow art, or photographs that capture that “oddly familiar yet semi-alienating weirdness” vibe, you’d probably like this book.
