A melancholy beauty

 

The confidence and precision with which Tim Carpenter describes his photography is reflected in his images impeccably beautiful. A look always clear and aware, a composition refined as much as essential in meaning. Never random results, achieved and improved with a switch from 35 mm camera to a 6×7 medium format rangefinder. The absence of human figures is also important for the overall mood of the photographs, yet is not a coincidence that his landscapes are actually brimming of human life, even though no people are depicted in them. In his words we do not face an improvised conviction, but a slow maturation built on solid foundations.

 

«In one of the first artist statements I ever wrote, I wrote of my belief that “people organize their physical worlds in order to make them beautiful. When they arrange flowers or a store window, or create a sign or design a building, it’s all meant to bring beauty to their lives – and to others’.” and that’s still true, although I found the idea better expressed recently by Marilynne Robinson, who writes: “I have always felt that people somehow immortalize themselves in a landscape, that the mere fact of a specific human presence in a place leaves it changed. Walt Whitman was right about everything, never more so than when he celebrated the epic and melancholy beauty created in a place by all the transient multitudes and generations that pass through it.” I hope to use the landscape to express my feelings about these transient multitudes, and what they’ve left behind. In “A most serene republic” series, I am pursuing a sort of melancholy beauty which for me is based on a couple of ideals. The first is that the subject matter be utterly commonplace, to the extent even that it’s easily overlooked and disregarded. I think it’s that disregard that can create a melancholy feeling. the second is that the composition should express an underlying order or “form,”; an idea given voice by the photographer and writer Robert Adams. For me, when the elements in a photograph are properly balanced, there’s a sense of the uncanny (the picture just “feels” right) that is an essential precursor to the delivery of the emotional content of the subject matter».

 

 

Photo:

© Courtesy of Tim Carpenter

www.rehearsalsfordeparture.com

(click on the image at right for more pictures)