| We seldom consider objects that are right at hand. Our daily routine engenders
repetition, expectation, and distraction, making it difficult to pay fresh and
focused attention to any one thing. We are grateful that our busy minds can catalog
what we see quickly, visually, without reflection or further investigation. Often
only in memory do we consider the meaning of those few things we notice from
the flow of life.
Albert Renger-Patzsch’s Flower exemplifies photography’s unique ability
to arrest the processes of movement and change, to isolate pieces of the world
from their space and time, so that we can really see them. In the artist’s
words, by focusing our “rapt, intransitive attention,” by separating
this one flower not only from its surroundings but also from its actuality, his
photograph performs an act of transformation and transcendence. The image is
precisely descriptive—a spare, arresting document—and something more.
In this flower’s delicacy and opulence we sense an extraordinary life force,
both powerful and impermanent. Though specific in its observations, the photograph
is far-reaching in its implications, testifying to the force of beauty, allegorizing
nature’s continual engagement in cycles of generation, growth, demise,
and decay. . . .
:: Paul Roth, Curator of Photography and Media Arts
Corcoran Gallery of Art |
Text excerpted from A Capital Collection: Masterworks from
the Corcoran Gallery of Art.
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:: The Curator's Journals Project
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