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The Visionary’s Garden I’m in despair. I’m thrilled. Sometimes,
when you’re working on an art project, you run across another
piece of art that effects your work deeply. That’s what
happened to me recently when I found a I’m in the process of illustrating my short novel, Angel Scene. The images for the book are all manipulated photos, some shot by me and others by Marne Lucas, one of the minds behind the hit underground film The Operation, and the co-director of the Sex Workers Film Festival. I make my images organic by degrading them. I add darkness. I add noise. I layer junk on top of the main images, other photos I’ve taken as I walk around San Francisco. The junk images are composed of cracked concrete, industrial spills, stains on factory walls, rust, broken glass, and vines growing on the underside of freeway overpasses. I mix these layers of visual white noise with the main photo the way a record producer mixes the audio tracks of a song. The resulting images look like they were found in the basement of a house that’s recently burned to the ground. The illustrations look damaged, mad, trashed. And that’s the idea. I use old police forensic photos as my models, along with influences such as Joel-Peter Witkin, Richard Kern and the paintings of Dali and Max Ernst. I thought I’d found something new, at least a little original. As usually happens when you dare to think you’ve invented something, you get reminded that there’s nothing new under the sun. My Ecclesiastical came in the form of Fichot’s book, The Visionary Garden. Fichot is best known as a musician, a member of the band Die Form. He’s also a formidable photographer with a keenly fetishistic mind. The photos in The Visionary Garden range from a handful of silly goth-inspired shots to artfully arranged fake murder scenes to sinister and David Lynch-like erotica. Fichot layers many of his images with decaying urban textures. Coupled with his sense of lighting, costume, and composition, these create eerie tableaus that are both alluring and disturbing. I’m particularly curious how he convinced one model to lie on what looks like a forest floor so that he could half-cover her with leaves for one of his "murder" shots. Dammit, it once took me all evening to talk a model into standing in a closet so I could shoot her there. And there were no insects in the closet and no park rangers who were going to stroll by and catch us in the act. If you crave unusual erotica, The Visionary Garden will take your libido to new, dark places. But this is not an easy book to find. Copies pop up on eBay occasionally. The best place to find it (if you’re in North America) is through the Canadian book company, Marginal Distribution. They sell copies for $80 Canadian. If you’re paying in US dollars, that’s a good price. If you’re Canadian, just be happy that a book this cool got through Customs. Contact:
http://www.marginalbook.com/ CANADA |
The
Visionary Garden, a book of photography by Philippe Fichot
– someone who’s not known as a visual artist. But,
now that I think about it, neither am I.
