The Process … dialog with the elephant
I shot the above photograph maybe a year ago near the garment district in Manhattan. The camera misfocused, but I really enjoyed the photo so when I was near the same street months later, I revisited the elephant and made another photo. Different light but now the elephant was being used as a coat rack. Months after that I was in the area and revisited him to find his feet had been bound with gray duct tape.
I really enjoy the slow dialog that I’m having with this elephant statue. Joel-Peter Witkin, in a one day seminar I took years ago at ICP used the phrase (for the first time to my young ears.) He ‘had a dialog’ with a headless corpse, a naked, bloated man wearing only black socks. He claimed he had to remove the subjects head (I believe with a tool similar to bolt cutters) in order to legally preserve the man’s identity. Then he was left with a headless body, a seated mass that kept falling over while he was positioning it. In the lecture he pointed to the finished photograph – the pose that he and the subject had both “arrived at” was the only one in which the subject would stay put. He referred to this part of the process as “the dialog” that he and his subject had. He said this in a very genuine way and with less theatrics than you would expect. That phrasing really stuck with me.
These photos are presented in the sequence in which they were shot.
