I was lucky enough to photograph Shane Kent this week. He is a ceramicist who runs the SoCA school in Brunswick, Melbourne’s creative heart. While I was making photographs of him, we talked about his craft and the parallels between the work he is creating and my work as a photographer. Ceramics, or pottery as we used to call it, obviously comes from a functional origin. Pots are for storing stuff. Shane’s work is heavily influenced by a Japanese tradition, and it’s easy to imagine his pieces holding rice, fermenting vegetables or storing sake. But today they are beautiful pieces in their own right, that hint at their origins, without ever having to perform that function.
Watching a two foot high pot grow under his hands as his wheel silently spins is almost like watching a living thing being born. A type of creation that we all have seen before, but with early signs of an individual personality. I like things with function. The objects around me that best perform the tasks they are designed to do, are the ones that become most cherished. And perhaps unsurprisingly they are often the most beautiful. Olin Stephens, perhaps the greatest yacht designer of the 20th Century said “Though per se beauty is not a factor of speed, the easiest boats to look at seem the easiest to drive.”
And what’s this got to do with photography? Well, I think the reason that the first photographers were so excited about the potential of their invention, was not because they saw it as a way of creating great art. It was solely a way of telling a story, of showing the world people and things that they would never otherwise get to see….and showing a reality that up until that time, had never been able to be shared. It was a purely functional and original way of disseminating information. Much in the same way that a jar initially must perform its function (holding water without leaking) before becoming an object of beauty in its designed form or decoration, then a photograph must first tell it’s story and then, perhaps have an aesthetic value in its own right.
I also like it that Shane enjoys the accidents that happen in his work. The unplanned crack, the slight wobble of the wall of a jar, the mistaken splash of a glaze. I want to try to embrace this more in my image making. I miss the unplanned surprises we used to encounter as an image appeared in the tray of developer under the red glow of a safety light.
