Nicholas Nixon's Patients is a series of black and white photographs of people who are seriously or terminally ill. They are 20 x 24 gelatin silver prints, mostly head on portraits, there are a few very tight shots of people's faces or heads, and one of a person's hand. It is an individual's work on a theme.
The picture that I'm choosing to formally discuss is one of a woman holding a crying baby:
The photograph shows a dark haired woman with a solemn neutral expression holding a crying child against her chest. The background is out of focus. Like the other images in the series, it is black and white.
I found this picture to be very intriguing for a couple of different reasons. One is that it is the most ambiguous of all the images presented. It's unclear if which one of the subjects is the one that is terminally or seriously ill. Second, their expressions are very different, but they convey and stem from essentially the same thing. The woman (who I assume is the mother of the child) has a very solemn neutral expression, and the child has a very anguished crying expression.
I enter the image through the mother's cheek. From there I move down to the baby's face. There is almost a line, going through the mother's chin horizontally that separates the picture into two equal halves. The top half is mirrored by the bottom half, the mother's neck mirroring the blurry background of the top half and the baby's face mirroring the mother's ear. The image as a whole almost seems to form a yin yang. The pain that both the subjects feel are expressed in different ways, the mother's dark eyes and the babies gaping mouth seem to reflect this with the deep blacks.
No comments:
Post a Comment