The Meaning of Two Photos In My Eyes

I’m much into photography so I chose two photos by Jane Hammond one is called Perpetual Love and the other one is Bee Line Trucking.

Perpetual Love is a black and white photo that shows two female children playing a ping pong game looking at an old building next to them. The building has windows with no glass so the girls can see clearly what going on in the building. You see a girl bending over and a middle-aged man spanking that girl with a paddle. When I see this photo I see something that would be true, something that people would actually do in the past.

Bee Line Trucking is a black and white photo but I think the art in it has some photo shop in this picture. It’s a photo of a Bee Line eighteen-wheeler truck that jacked-knifed and went out of control off the highway. The reason I said it looks like it was photo shop was because on the bended reeling there’s a giant slug. The photo reminds me of reality with fiction. The reality is accidents can always happen; car accidents are going on everyday and everywhere at any time of day. The fiction is there’s no way there is a 4 foot slug in this world.

Both photos stood out to me because I felt like I understood why Jane Hammond captured those photos. You automatically see the meaning and the feelings towards those photos. I found them to be rough, a flash-back, and something someone out in this world can relate to. Maybe my grandma was playing ping pong with her sister and saw their neighbors through the window getting spanked with a paddle. Or the truck loosing control and getting off the road into an accident. I know I can relate to that because my car flipped over from hw35 to 410.

I read an article from The New York Times that was written back in 2002 about Jane Hammond’s art work. The article was called To a Painter, Words are Worth a Thousand Pictures. What made me understand Jane’s art work more is when I read a part in the article about changing the word painting to novel. “And that is to make paintings “as complicated, inconsistent, varied, and multifaceted as you are, as I am, as life is.””

So whenever you have the time and you want to go see some amazing art, you can catch some of Jane’s photography at the McNay Museum. Trust me you don’t want to miss it!