So what's Moby Dick got to do with it?
10-March-2010
I have to confess I love Moby Dick without being able to understand it. It’s mainly read as a rollicking sea yarn of a man’s quest for revenge which ultimately destroys not only him but everything around him. It’s worthy of great book status for the way it tells that parable alone.
Best of all though are the chapters in between the narrative that are contemplations on different aspects of whaling. Somehow Herman Melville manages to make each essay profoundly relevant to the experience of existing which is common ground to all.
The photograph below was selected for exhibition in last years Schubert Ulrich (the what? I hear you say). It’s a straight street photograph and I submitted the quote from the chapter called “The Fountain” as my artist’s statement. It’s basically saying seeing is not believing but Melville’s use of language, well it gets me in!
Imagine two people talking, and one asks the other to describe the spout.
“But why pester one with all this reasoning on the subject? Speak out! You have seen him spout; then declare what the spout is; can you not tell air from water?
My dear sir, in this world it is not so easy to settle these plain things. I have found your plain things the knottiest of all. And as for this whale spout, you might almost stand in it, and yet be undecided as to what it is precisely.”
Art Photography, Street Photography, Was Herman Melville the first Post Modernist without knowing it?
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