The Contraband

Issue date: 2/5/07 Section: Opinion

Photography, as a medium, is one of the youngest, most popular and innovating art forms. As college students we should feel more connected to media arts; we're discovering them! Photography and photographers excite me, I love how there are no set rules- yet.
Which brings me to Pam Fox, a fine art lecturer at Hampton Sydney College in Virginia, who is exhibiting in the Abercrombie Gallery (Jan. 11 - Feb. 8). Her collection of black & white silver prints, ranging from 1999 to 2003, project a macabre feel that can be found in American German Expressionist film (similar to Vincent Price in Edward Scissorhands), which stems directly from her subject matter. Fox used antique chemistry and physics equipment to create a ghostly presence. The extreme light is usually a light bulb or electrical current; intense blacks offset the ambience. In most of her pieces there is very little variety in dark gray values. As a viewer, though, I did not consciously notice this. The emanating light Abercrombie Gallery places you in the middle of Fox's photograph's story. You have to trace your way back, picking up pieces of what Fox is trying to contemporarily construe to you.
Thinking about the exhibit, I wanted to walk away with a huge story to tell. I could not tell a story and do Fox's work any justice. Three of her pieces, at most, could relate to one another thematically; however, most of her pieces would require me to write about them individually. Instead of doing that, one piece entitled 'Balance' spoke to me as one of the stronger pieces in the show, and thus, could stand as a stark representative of the whole. At first glance, "Balance" depicts a stone sitting on one side of a scale out weighing and an upright button-up white shirt on the other side.
Reading the stone as the primordial essence of man and the white shirt as what man has become. Not that the white shirt symbolizes the purification of mankind, in any way, but that man has left his primitive roots and taken up a pristine, clean, way of life. This is something we are all aware of if you just look around; no one is putting their ear to the ground to listen for food or slamming two rocks together to create FIRE! What we never think about, though, is that that primitive being that is an underlying characteristic in all of us out weighs our societal façade. This is what I feel Fox is conveying by having the stone outweigh the shirt.
Not to say we should go back to that culture, but is a part of who we, humanity, are. And, maybe, just maybe we are fighting that in ourselves. Sure, if we don't fight our primitive urges we'll succumb to the "stone," but then aren't we denying our nature? Is the point of being human to follow our nature? Yet our nature tells us to advance, to better ourselves. In truth, we're looking for "Balance."

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