Kenneth Josephson – Polapan (1973)

First things first: I have gotten flack for the wordiness of my posts. I post what I post because I believe in contribution as a prerequisite for participation in a community. I don’t have much in the way of original content, so I offer what I can: commentary.

I realize that most of you couldn’t give less of a fuck what I think about images. I don’t give fuck one if you discard what I’ve written when you reblog shit from me. That’s cool. No offense taken.

What I can’t abide is deleting attribution. Don’t do it. If you do, you suck shit through a fucking tube.

Case in point, this image was properly credited in the original post. Somewhere along the line, credit was removed.

It may seem like a small thing. But this has come across my dash several times. Seeing it, i’ve thought to myself: self, the blacks look kinda shallow so this is probably an image created through digital means. It has a bit of the picture-in-picture thing happening, maybe a touch of the album-cover-instead-of-a-face trend. In other words, due to my lack of pre-extant familiarity with the work, I end up mistaking it for a copy cat instead of an instigator.

Further, knowing that this was made in 1973 immediately connects it with Duane Michals Things are Queer and sharpens my ‘inspired picture-in-picture’ formulation toward an insinuation of mise en abyme.

And what is particularly interesting to me about mise en abyme and what Michals focuses on is that you can not only travel inward in such images, it is equally possible–and I would argue more interesting–to travel outward.