Tuesday 30 June 2009

Eve, Eve



Two images of the same scene, or rather Diptychs are Sonneman's primary focus in all aspects of her art. I came across an interesting article from the Village Voice published in 1978 by Ben Lifson:

' A situation described in the left panel changes in the right as time lapses between exposures. One can tell little slice-of-life stories with a technique like this...But Sonneman's style goes further. It can dramatize how our perceptions of things change when we take a second look at them from a slightly different point of view....

The black line between Sonneman's frames is thus like a semicolon in a sentence dividing an initial statement from an afterthought.... It makes no difference how much time has elapsed between the first shot of a couple lying on a beach and the second shot in which a horse and rider speed past them. Sonneman's fiction of the world's rapid change is accomplished.

Since we know that in each diptych the images were juxtaposed in real time- not in the darkroom at some later stage- we imagine the photographer when we look at the pictures. Sonneman thus creates a fiction of the photographer as well as the world.'



Coney Island Couple

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