tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7512857184700737880.post6172553954466757704..comments2023-10-21T06:41:04.595-07:00Comments on Cultural Productions: Steve Miler's Health of the Planet projectMark Auslanderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05695044647459077963noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7512857184700737880.post-86874930371396892742008-12-07T05:16:00.000-08:002008-12-07T05:16:00.000-08:00I too was fascinated by what I read in Steve Mille...I too was fascinated by what I read in Steve Miller's black and white series as echoes (conscious or unconscious) of early 20th century black and white spiritualist photography of fairies in the garden, of the sort famously celebrated by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Some examples are documented in the website:<BR/><BR/>http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/doyle.htm<BR/><BR/>See for instance Miller's images: <BR/><BR/> Dark Orchid<BR/>http://www.healthoftheplanet.com/sm_hotp_01.htm<BR/><BR/>Orchid Architecture<BR/>http://www.healthoftheplanet.com/sm_hotp_08.htm<BR/><BR/>Central Orchid<BR/>http://www.healthoftheplanet.com/sm_hotp_12.htm<BR/><BR/>and especially Night Orchid<BR/><BR/>http://www.healthoftheplanet.com/sm_hotp_14.htm<BR/><BR/>I'm not quite sure of what to make of the seeming homologies between Miller's X ray images and the old spiritualist photographs of fairies. Some of this is presumably due to the fact that images of fairies were for centuries inspired by botanical forms, and are examples of the widespread human tendency to scan all manner of flora and fauna for anthropomorphic qualities. We are inclined to see human figures in the plant world. (Who knows, there may be evolutionary reasons for this?) <BR/><BR/>But I suspect, as well, that Miller is playing with some of the most interesting paradoxes of photography, which always hovers ambiguously between the epistemes of science, art and the occult. Photographs make claims for rationalist, unmediated scientistic access to the world of Nature, but they also, as Roland Barthes and others remind us, open up unsettling windows to the uncanny, to everything that doesn't quite fit within the reigning protocols of modernity. (We'll be spending some time in my Visuality and Culture seminar next semester exploring these paradoxes.)<BR/><BR/>So in this light, might we say that in addition to X-raying botanical specimens and the "health of the planet," Miller is taking delicate X-rays of the state of the human soul at the dawn of the new millennium, at the moment when, more than ever before, we hold in our hands the fate of every species on the planet?Ellen Schattschneiderhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07543891827639894615noreply@blogger.com