Above: Vintage Travel by Edward Fielding
Formalism in art emphasizes compositional elements such as color, line, shape, texture, and other perceptual aspects rather than content, meaning, or the historical and social context.
Jan Groover: Tilting at Space
For Jan Groover, a walk in the woods to photograph a landscape becomes not an image of a tree but an abstract of the landscape. All landscape photographs and all photographs for that matter are abstractions from reality.
The photographer chooses what to show and how to show it. What to keep inside the frame and what to keep out. Where to position the objects and how to arrange the compositional elements.
“The photograph is never about the subject but about the space and how things relate to each other.”
– Jan Groover’s Husband, painter Bruce Boice
The still life images taken by Groover and others from fine art to food photography is an arrangement of objects before the camera.
Groover’s still life photographs took the concept of formalism perhaps further than most by using objects that subjectively have little do with each other other than provide interesting shapes and lines. Like the squiggles, squares and triangles in a modern painting, these ladders, bottles and kitchen sink objects provide a quality of texture, reflection and shape.
“I HAD SOME WILD CONCEPT THAT YOU CAN CHANGE SPACE”
~JAN GROOVER
“one day I had the thought that I didn’t want to have to make everything up, so I quit painting. Then I found out that you have to make everything up anyway.”
– Jan Groover
