Silver sea
One of my favorite books ever (Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels) inspired the idea for this shoot. This book, if you don’t know it, is a book you should read if you like to read even a little.
In the first part of the book many things are buried. Most notably a boy, but also family heirlooms and personal treasures. Some are lost, some are found.
In the second part of the book, right at the beginning, there is talk of a past flood of the Humber River, half a world away. Houses flooded and the things in the houses ended up anywhere.
“You can slip a silver spoon out of the mud like a bookmark.”
I have loved this book for over 20 years…probably 24 if my calculations are correct, and have read it at least 20 times. The author is a poet, so knowing the plot and the characters, it’s still worth reading again just for the language, and to remember.
I won’t spoil the plot or the characters, though even telling you everything wouldn’t ruin reading it. And the photo I made above doesn’t give up a thing.
Rather than burying the silver, or finding it, I threw it into the waves near shore, and photographed it there. This is just after I’d placed it carefully in a tidal stream, and photographed it there, as we all know, set up photography is set up. Those pictures were interesting too… there were leaves and reflections of trees, and it was serene. Much more like I’d imagined it when I was thinking about the photo I wanted to take, and when I say thinking, it was more like the photo idea just kept nagging at me until one day I went to the fabulous cheap used things store and bought a handful of silverware. I didn’t want to throw my grandma’s silver in the sea.
I stopped home to get my camera, and told my son what I was up to, he was uninterested since I more or less always am up to something, and he’s a teenager. But in explaining why I bough $5 worth of used silverware, and why I didn’t want to use my grandma’s silver (too personal) I figured I would just go ahead and take a handful of the good silver just in case. Of course as soon as I got to the water I realized I had to use my silver, because it’s personal. And as a photo, having matching silver is ideal because it’s not distracting the eye by being different, but because it’s in the water it’s not very noticeably a set either.
The final image is part of my cartomancy series, and is titled Ashes. Which is partly a reference to the book, and people who died in the Holocaust. And throwing my grandmas silver into the sea felt in a way like throwing her ashes into the sea might have, though of course I collected the silver and took it home, and she’s buried in a cemetery in Michigan. But also because of one of my favorite quotes by another Ann(ie), Annie Dillard, and somehow it has a lot to do with the book Fugitive Pieces, in it’s own way, plus the process making, and of getting around to making this photo.
“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”