This is an image by photographer Laura McPhee. It is called "Understory Flareups, 4th of July Creek, Valley Road Wildfire, Custer County, Idaho 2005. Tech specs: it's a inkjet print color photo taken with a large-format camera- Ansel Adams style. And it is big- probably 4' or 5' across. Formally: You've got repetition of diagonal forms- light shafts, tree trunk and the verticals of the trees. The canopy creates a frame of dark around the center filled with light and smoke. The fallen tree trunk draws the eye inward, to the glowing flames. There is a play of light here, between the white, bright light of the sun filtered through the smoke, and the warm, burning orange of the flickering flames. Everything on the floor of the forest is dead and brown, while the trees framing the top appear to retain their green life. The large-format of the camera allows for incredible detail, each needle on the branches is discernible, while the smokey haze creates a thick atmospheric perspective. Phantom trees are visible in the background, giving the forest a feeling of endlessness. The size of the photo sucks you into it, placing the viewer directly into the scene, while the straight-forward and factual nature of the title assures us that what we witness is the real thing.
Now what?
How the hell am I to apply a methodological approach to this? Argue the phallic nature of the trees is a fit of Freudian psychoanalysis? Claim that the title"understory flareups" really eludes to the fermenting revolution of the proletariat masses in a typically Marxist fervor? Maybe the "regenerative" fire depicted is symbolic of the menstrual cycle and the firefighters that will likely arrive on the scene are agents of the patriarchal system, bend on quelling the natural power of an inherently feminine nature- wait while I don my raving Feminist panties! Perhaps McPhee was just driving by, saw an opportunity and took a picture of a pretty scene with no other thought in her head and it is hanging in the gallery now because it's a picture taken in Idaho and we are always interested in promoting locally-produced art. Institutional critique anyone?
I'm biting my tongue here, but I think I might go the route of Post-colonialism. Yuck. But I'm thinking exactly along the lines of A. Adams here- the simultaneous glorification and colonization of the great American West. Pictures as archival- depicting reality. Perhaps I'll even go into the Treachery of Images and Foucault (God I'm really stuck on him right now!) and discuss the invested nature of the photograph. And this means more Barthes. Oh- and it can't be more than three pages.
FML.
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