Silhouettes (Pt. 2, because EPortfolios Dislikes Me)

(Sorry for the secondary upload, I submitted my previous post before I had finished my thoughts, and ePortfolios won’t let me change or delete the previous post)

One thing I liked about Palma’s photographs is the way he plays with silhouettes when composing his photographs. On his Instagram for example, he has a very striking picture, from November 8th, of an art project from afar. The art project itself is a flat silhouette, the color is all in the sky and rolling hills in the background. I thought this was an interesting way to photograph this art project. By the nature of the thing, art is usually meant to be the focus of attention of an art gallery or art garden. By photographing it with just the background in color, Palma flips that. It doesn’t necessarily change the fact the art is ultimately the subject of the photo, but it does both detract and add something to the sculpture itself. The sculpture loses the color it would have had, which detracts something from it (after all, the artist certainly intended audiences to see it’s color), but it also makes the audience think more deeply about what could have been there. Similarly, the silhouette plays with a point of view, letting the audience guess what the object looks like in a three dimensional space (Something akin to a crane lift? But how wide are the legs of the crane? Does the balance weight hang in the middle, or to the side?) The photo, and the others like it on his page, both retract and detract from their subjects, in a way I find very interesting.
There is another photo I think which also exemplifies this. From the same period, but two days prior to what I’m calling the “crane-lift” photograph, there is another silhouetted art piece. In this case, it resembles round rocks, against the backdrop of the sky. And unlike the crane-lift photo, the silhouettes dominate the image, with more black shadows than sky. In fact, the image is so zoomed in, that we almost can’t tell what the art piece actually is. I’ve been calling it the “rock” picture mentally, because the rounded edges look like rocks, but I truthfully have only guesses. Overall, this photo does detract more from it’s subject than the crane-lift photo does. Normally, when trying to photograph something, you want to provide a view of what it looks like. Although silhouetted, we do get that with the crane-lift photo. We don’t get that, to the same degree, with this photo. There’s a metaphor to be made about zooming in on something so closely that it loses meaning as a whole; However, I also think there’s non-metaphorical amusement to be had from guessing what it does look like. We can only assume at what the art looks like off frame, and I think that that mystery and guessing is part of what makes these pictures so interesting.