My very good friend Bradley Garrett takes very good pictures. Very good, intriguing pictures. I have one of them on my wall at home. An ancient, since long abandoned, reappropriated-by-nature toilet, complete with dirt, mud and ivy coming out of it. But sorry, that should be in parenthesis.
He has now taken the step of announcing a picture for sale on Etsy.com. It is a picture of the abandoned Paris Metro station Croix Rouge.
Croix Rouge Metro Station by Bradley L. Garrett
This is how he writes: “For me, it embodies Baudelaire’s poem The Swan, where he laments the Paris that is being cut through by regeneration, never to return to what it once was.”
That made me think: Can an image actually embody something? I know that is a common thing to express, but think about it. A picture is a two-dimensional, non-flesh, fairly stable over time representation of something. A moment frozen in time. I guess another, much flatter, and more boring way of expressing it would be blah blah the picture blah, blah is a visual expression of the blah blah. Flatter indeed, but then a picture is flat. Or is it? I guess it depends on our idea of the image as medium. What do you think?
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