Oranges and Sardines or Why I Photograph
I’ve been thinking about orange(s) and sardines lately. Which is to say I’ve been thinking about poetry and painting and photography, too.
I mean whenever I think of sardines I think of the poem by Frank O’Hara:
Why I Am Not a Painter
by Frank O’Hara
I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.
But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.
I’m not kidding, I spend time thinking about things like sardines, and then how to photograph sardines, and what I would say in a poem about sardines even though I haven’t written a proper poem in more than a decade. I read this article on sardines, and suddenly, I needed to also take photographs of sardines.
You can learn a lot from attempting to photograph a can of sardines. How to make canned fish look interesting? How much shadow, how much light, how many highlights, how to capture the sheen and the sardine-ness of the sardine? How much detail on the scales, how much sleekness should be preserved, what tones to emphasize? What light to place the sardines in, what table to place the sardines upon? Should the can be centred, or placed off kilter? Maybe in one photo the tin might be leaning out of the frame, as though it’s leaning on a doorframe, all casual and kind of sexy.
We all know the saying about being packed in like a tin of sardines. But have you ever looked at how they’re arrayed? It’s all precision. Quite careful. Tidy. No wasted space. Efficient.
I’m not a poet anymore but I think there is poetry in a tin of sardines. Is life terrible? Are sardines? And what can be said about the colour orange?
