Plenty: Photographs of Display by Elke Solomon
Display is the primary artifact of an impulse to be seen ñ a drive that is
so socially and biologically widespread as to be called a universal
need. By the same token, and equally, we like to look. Over the last
decade and more, Elke Solomon has become a connoisseur of
display, and a virtuoso voyeur. Strolling, camera at the ready, through
food stalls and flea markets from Brooklyn to Hong Kong, she has
witnessed the nearly endless variety with which ordinary domestic
goods are arranged for retail consumption. Mostly what she has found
is plenty. The snapshots Solomon has amassed, hundreds of which fill
several ring-bound volumes, are an encyclopedia of abundance:
heaps and barrels of food, row after row of clothing, baskets and
bushels and boxes of all variety of stuff in depth, and breadth. Almost
always, there is also rigidly fixed order. In the visual language of
fecundity and wealth, the ruling figure seems to be metonymy. Buy the
one and you will have, figuratively, the whole, the many; the
multitudinous. But metaphor is close behind: buy the pomegranate or
the lacy white dress of the spring green plastic bowl an be healthy,
wealthy, and young.
That, anyway, is the basic structure of the language of display that
Solomon has been studying. But its particular pleasures are all to do
with surprise often comic, and the images in this book were chosen
with that in mind. Some of the humor is at least partially intended by
unknown artists on the other side of the lens, as when two pigs face
each other in a sign painted for an Italian deli, or a chicken and a cow
dance side by side in a Kosher marketís window. But much is
fortuitous. A stunted totem of stacked plastic trays each filled with
drinking glasses, the glasses and trays covered in plastic wrap,
suggests slapstick forestalled ñ to comedyís advantage. A table laden
with carefully arranged antipasti is subverted by the intrusion, at upper
left, of a couple of meaty links of sausage, limp, lumpy, and
unmistakably priapic. At an outdoor market, we see nested straw
baskets, and, as a decorative scroll at the right margin, the double
curve of a manís stomach hanging over his belt: a second look
reveals a disembodied foot below. Some photos capture the visual
mishaps caused when the one-eyed camera causes near and more
distant things collapse, as in a table full of sunglasses that also holds
two hand mirrors, which extend like plastic prostheses from the thighs
of a man standing behind it. In Camera Lucida , Roland Barthes
distinguishes two basic elements of photography, the studium ñ the
ìvery wide field of unconcerned desire, of various interest, of
inconsequential tasteî1 that constitutes the namable subject of a
photograph ñ and the punctum. This second element, he writes, is that
discrepancy which ìpunctuatesî or ìstingsî or ìwoundsî the studium.
It is also what most holds Barthesí interest ñ and Solomonís.
For all its careful order, there is not much formal tact in the kind of
display Solomon is after. Good composition makes its subjects seem
unique, and elevated above the sordid appetites that govern the
market. It promotes poise and integrity. The kind of ordinary
commercial display Solomon documents, by contrast, targets simpler,
even baser, pleasures. And amid its routine excess there tends to
emerge, at least in Solomonís photos, the anomalous extra that, like
the unconscious, escapes deliberate control only to reveal itself as
expressionís never idle motor. Thus the irrepressible vitality of a shirt
hanging too big in the field of vision, or the over-bright bouquet of
plastic-handles serrated knives, or the cartons of grapes pared with
onions. Abundance spoiled ñ or, ratcheted up to something like
delirium ñ by unvoiced drives has been the subject of still life artists
from Arcimboldo to Martin Parr, whose nearly psychedelic food photos
of the past few years area florid cousin to Solomonís. As in the
paradigmatic Dutch still lives of the 17th century, plenty tends to harbor
1 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p.27
an intimation of trouble: decay, often slight and insidious; mortality.
And, just as often, it offers us the last laugh.
Though they constitute a family, Solomonís photos also honor cultural
specificity. Ranging across three continents, they are rich in unfamiliar
incident: egg yolks lined up in shallow trays to dry in the sun, for
instance, in China; tomatoes shaped like zucchini, in Italy. Color, rich
and sometimes unexpected, is also culturally specific. But this book is
not a travelogue, and it doesnít humor the idea that consumption is a
register of discernment. It is a decidedly ecumenical celebration, and
many of its satisfactions have to do with the sequence and pacing of
the images, and with the medium-specific pleasures of the book.
Having and holding these tempting images, we can still ñ a particular
kind of enjoyment ñ savor the desire they provoke.
And, not least, we indulge our curiosity. In an essay written for an
anthology addressing questions of visual display, Stephen Bann
focused on a pivotal moment in the min-16th century when European
culture was shifting from religious to secular values, and the cabinet of
curiosities became a popular form. Random collections by modern
standards, these compendia were, Bann says, a kind of way station
between shrines, based in ritual, and museums, made possible by
enlightenment rationalism. The ìcuriosityî addressed in these
collections was, Bann writes ìinimical to inductive reasoningî and also
to the kinds of attention sustained by religious relics. ìAttachment to
objects ñ we might reasonably say, the cult of objects ñ was an
inseparable feature of curiosity, and so was a particular style of
display.î2 With contents assorted cheek by jowl, resistant to logic but
alive to the dictates of intellectual, visual, and physical appetite the
cabinet of curiosities as Bann describes it is just the kind of display
Solomon celebrates.
Nancy Princenthal