[-empyre-] Starting the First Week / Valente and Ziyalan (Renate Terese Ferro)

[William Bain]

Hello Empyreans. Very much enjoying thediscussion. I would agree that there is a (possibly offensive) Times Square ante-Disney aspect to Peter Valente’s photosas presented here. Maybe I should also say as received on my computer, for I’mnot sure I got the best quality download. But just briefly if I may on three ofthe pictures: I found myself concentrating on the fragmenting choices, maybebecause of the overlapping yellow rectangle at the bottom of Picture 1, where ayoung woman smiles tentatively in the direction of the viewer. There woulddefinitely seem to be a kind of peekaboo aspect here, where not only thepectoral region but the top of the woman’s head is cropped out. It is like aperverse symmetry, prohibiting access to brain and breast. But then (unless mymachine has merged two images) we see the yellow-and-violet rectangle,apparently lying beneath the image of the woman. In terms Roland Barthes usedin *Camera Lucida* the studium in this photo is a young woman in ambiguoussurroundings whereas the punctum is the additionally ambiguous image partlycovered by the main one. As I say, my computer may have superimposed two shots,but even so, there is this element of you-can’t-see-all. The other twophotographs I wanted to mention are both in black and white. Photo 12, thepenultimate (in my download) interests me because of the composition, theparticular position of the figure within the rectangular whole of the photo.Here we have the whole upper body of the woman, and we are in fact drawn to theface by the diagonals formed by legs and arms. Somewhat ironically given what Isaid about Photo 1, in12 we also find a second rectangle that could be the bottom of a second photoor, perhaps more likely, a window casing or a mirror. But this time the secondrectangle is at the upper left, interpretable as offsetting or counterbalancingthe cropping out of the woman’s pubic area and her buttocks. Again there isambiguity: Is she lying back in anticipation? Is she on the point of standingup? Could she have been pushed so that she fell back onto the couch? Thisperhaps is the particular fragmentation in this particular photograph. Finallyin Photo 5 the figure, a smiling young woman is seen in a frontal view fromalmost the top of her head to just above the pubis. Thus again the cropping,the fragmentation. Her hands and forearms are out of view above her head. Thefigure is framed by what might be door or window casements, somehow emphasizing(to my eye) the upright position of the figure, apparently in a stretchingposition that we can only assume is a kind of full corporal exposure. But againwe are shown only part(s). Looking forward to more. Thanks of course to PeterValente for the photos & ideas. Best wishes, William<http://tinyurl.com/pkemmhk> 
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