Sweet sorrows
Below is an image that embodies some of the challenges of working at a small scale. The original vision I had involved filling the smaller grave with black jellybeans. Eventually I found a large enough bag of jellybeans of the right sort on Amazon that contained enough black ones that once I’d picked them out, I’d be able to fill the hole. I did shoot it that way, but problems were immediately evident. The jellybeans didn’t read as candy. However carefully I arranged them to make their bean shape apparent, they didn’t look like jelly beans, but almost like large rocks. I couldn’t find a work around. Someone to whom I expressed my frustration suggested using some other candy. It seems obvious, but I had been fixated on black jelly beans. Possibilities abounded; what about little red cinnamon hearts? Smarties?
My studio began to resemble a cheap confiserie as I assembled varieties of candy. But none of those looked right, either. Finally, a trip to a bulk food shop led to the discovery of mini M&Ms. I filled the grave with them, but their colourfulness, while an interesting effect, didn’t express the mood I was looking for. I had bought enough of those to be able to edit out all the colours other than brown, and that’s what I did. The image snapped into place, once enough of the brown mini M&Ms were carefully arranged into a mound and then moved so their little m would show. The brown candy also harmonized nicely with the larger grave mound, which is filled with dried coffee grounds. Both coffee grounds and candy are unruly when trying to make miniature mounds, and it took some time to arrange them to illustrate the grave shape I was striving for.
And now I have containers of numerous candies in my props storage. Surely those brilliantly colourful little pill-like shapes will be useful? Some context will appear to make jelly beans look like jelly beans?
Presentation
The images are best appreciated in print. Printing finishes the project; but getting the print right is always hard. I do my own printing. Besides the vagaries of tuning an individual print, is the whole problem of size. Small? Large? Huge? And should they be lustrous? Matte? Maybe large, Illuminated transparencies? There’s no certain answer, and I haven’t even tried all the reasonable options. I believe there to be a range of effective options, and that the most important criterion is the intelligibility of the image and its inherent narrative.
For now, I print them on 17x22” (43x56 cm.) Canon Premium Fine Art Smooth paper. It has the depth and richness that I’m looking for, and the size is a good one to draw the viewer in. The size is important with miniatures because it affects how we perceive the final image; are the characters smaller than life or larger? More or less real? How does being confronted with a large image—or a small one—change our perceptions of the expressiveness of these little characters? Immerse us more or less in their world?
Once they are printed, they need to be framed. Originally, I framed them with mats showing a bit of white paper around the image—a standard photographic presentation, but not right. These are not, to me, “photographs”. I know that sounds odd, since they’re made using a camera. Other miniature photographers, most notably David Levinthal, have found a place in the photographic tradition—I was inspired by his terrific show at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY. Yet, my images are not documents. They don’t use photography to explore the world. Even my little dioramas barely exist; looked at from any perspective other than the camera’s and the don’t look finished. They’re a sort of illusion compounded between camera and set. On the scale between pure photography and other, plastic arts like painting or sculpture, I think of them as somewhere in between, at a bit of a remove from photographic tradition.