Blog Entry 3

IMPLEMENTING AN IMAGE

Photography by Jay Defeo

Jay Defeo worked with black and white photography as well as with painting and drawing. What really drew me to her work was that I could really see the connection between drawing and painting in her photographs. She often photographed what she had drawn and then used these photographs as a basis for other drawings. She referred to this as "transplanting an image".

She worked on her black and white photographs from 1969 to 1976. All of her images were very intimate in size. Most were smaller than eight by ten and some were even as small as 3 by four inches. Her images have familiar shapes and the same smooth quality. The lines and undulating forms seem to radiate from a center.

She loved to experiment. None of her subjects fit into a traditional genre. They could be considered "still lifes", but they are a whole lot more than that. To me, these objects are more about form and tone. Defeo used her camera as a visual journal. She didn't document her subject in traditional ways, but more as abstractions of different shapes and tones. Images of plants make up about a quarter of her work. She worked with simple objects, and very often natural, mostly plants. She often photographed roses, like in the photograph above called "The Rose".

In the darkroom, she had a lot of technical talent. She often made multiple prints from a negative. Each different print she would differentiate the tonalities, contrast, and cropping. When photographing, Defeo would create variations by walking around a subject to get different perspectives at different times of the day and even on different days. She was very interested in the visual idea and the classical form. This is why I love her photographs so much. I love the idea of taking something so simple as a leaf on a plant and manipulating it to become something so beautiful.