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Phil Douglis | all galleries >> Galleries >> Gallery Seventeen: Memories in Metal and Stone: How monuments, sculpture, and tombs express ideas. > In memoriam, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2007
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12-NOV-2007

In memoriam, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2007

The last image I made in Santa Fe, and quite fittingly one of the last of my entire journey through Indian Country, was this photograph of an art print mounted on a slab that to me appeared to be shaped like an oversized grave marker. The artist portrays an idealized Indian, brooding under a stylized moon. Yet when I walked back and photographed it from a distance, it appeared to become a memorial to a vanishing culture. The slashes of lingering light on the ground around the slab echo the stripes on the Indian’s blanket, and the darker I made the image in post processing, the more somber it became.

Leica V-Lux 1
1/125s f/4.0 at 66.8mm iso100 full exif

other sizes: small medium large original auto
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Phil Douglis11-Dec-2007 19:29
I am glad you can see why I made this image as I did, Patricia, and why I put in here in my "Memories in metal and stone" gallery. Thanks for interpreting the long shadows as "the relentless march of time." You articulate so beautifully exactly what I had in mind.
Patricia Lay-Dorsey11-Dec-2007 17:10
This is a magnificent example of how monuments--or in this case, an artist's interpretation of a monument--can symbolize an entire culture. Your placement of this object in the frame with late sun hitting trees to the right and casting long shadows in the foreground heightens the sense of the relentless march of time.
Phil Douglis24-Nov-2007 23:55
Thanks for pointing out the message that comes out of interplay of color and black and white here Tim. Black and white in itself is always a form of stylization. It is less "real" than color, and thus more able to imply symbolic meaning because of it. I love the metaphor you suggest here: "As we leave the past, it loses its color." That's because the past itself is less real than the present, just as black and white is less real than color. Black and white images tend to be seen as "timeless" while color often suggests the here and now.
Tim May24-Nov-2007 18:13
I am struck by the interplay of color and black and white. As we leave the past, it loses its color. We are left with a stylized vision of that which we did not live.
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