The great interests of man: air and light, the joy of having a body, the voluptuousness of looking.

Mario Rosso 1

the light, there, at the corner (because of the big elm and the reflecting houses) winter and summer stays as it was when they lived there, in the house the street cuts off

Charles Olsen 2

Topoanalysis, then, would be the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives. In the theatre of the past that is constituted by memory, the stage setting maintains the characters in their dominant rôles. At times we think we know ourselves in time, when all we know is a sequence of fixations in the spaces of a being's stability-a being who does not want to melt away, and who, even in the past, wants time to "suspend" its flight.

Gaston Bachelard 3

The chromogenic 4 photographs of Shelley Foster's North Texas Topography series entail engagement and detachment within the extraordinary pleasures of seeing in what are ostensibly the most quotidian of circumstances. Foster's work results from looking at the place where one lives, the place of one's indwelling in the world, the place of one's origin and return, a looking that is also a way of worldmaking. 5 The world is always already a world, and yet this is a perennial task for each person; thus Charles Olson observes:

that we grow up many And the single is not easily known 6

To look at that looking is to regard the relation of seeing and world, looking and representation, object photographed and artwork as a search for a center, an axis mundi.

Foster's photographs represent a world of habitation devoid of its inhabitants. Every object references the results human activity, but the activities and their human agents are absent from the photographs. The activity of these objects and spaces is the activity of light and atmosphere, an activity which nevertheless conveys the sense of stillness and silence. The presence of the artist is likewise not directly referenced: not appearing in the works, employing a medium that seemingly obviates the syntax of chierographic media, the artist is an absent but implied presence, the efficient cause of the photographs reduced to the trace of artist's vision. The eye as instrument of vision, and its extension in the camera, are a synecdoche for the absent artist:

Yo sólo soy una cámera fotográphica que se pasea por el desierto. 7

Thus Leon Battista Alberti's emblematic eye, 8 detached and winged: a trope subsuming omniscience, the epistemological primacy of perception, and detachment founded on the distal character of vision. 9 Thus Cézanne regarding Monet as "only an eye." 10 Thus also the positioning of the viewer within the gallery as a disembodied eye, for whom the disembodied eye of the artist is a surrogate precursor:

The Eye then stands for two opposite forces: the fragmentation of the self and the illusion of holding it together. The Spectator makes possible such experience as we are allowed to have. Alienation and aesthetic distance become confused-and not unprofitably. 11

The putative disembodiedness of the viewer and the artist is illusory; on the contrary, sensitivity to light and atmosphere in interaction with objects are informed by the artist's and the viewer's common lived experience of embodiedness. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty urges:

Lighting and the constancy of the thing illuminated, which is its correlative, are directly dependent on our bodily situation . . . . Taking up our abode in a certain setting of color, with the transposition it entails, is a bodily operation, and I cannot effect it otherwise than by entering into the new atmosphere, because my body is my general power of inhabiting all the environments which the world contains, the key to all the transpositions and equivalences which keep it constant. Thus lighting is one element of a complex structure, the others being the organization of the field as our body contrives it and the thing illuminated in its constancy. 12

Place is central to Foster:

Through photographs, I wish to create a place of origin and return. Everyone, no matter how they live, or where they live, has a home. A place to gather, find comfort, belonging, and acceptance. . . . As Lucy Lippard writes, "most of us live such fragmented lives . . . that no one knows us as a whole. The incomplete self longs for the fragments to be brought together. This cannot be done without a context of place." 13

Foster's photographs evoke and articulate this sense of one's inhabiting. Among the objects of the lifeworld, some structure the field of perception more strongly than others, rendering the perceptual field anisotropic. It is this transcendence of everyday detached indifference in the perception of affecting presences that funds one's indwelling in the lifeworld, and which Foster engages in these works.

The mode of appearing of the objects in Foster's photographs entails both strong engagement and detachment. Strong engagement is a function of cathexis, of the emotional charge in the subject's relation with the object photographed. Notwithstanding the affect entailed in their engagement, the objects represented by Foster are neither Winnicott's transitional objects, 14 for they are not the first objects of use of one's childhood, nor are they enactments precisely in Richard Kuhns' sense, 15 for they lack the honorific status Kuhns' term entails. Detachment is a condition of contemplation, a disengagement, manifested in the closed form16 of Foster's compositional structures: typically constructing the representation of space with the principle planes of the objects approximately parallel to the image plane, Foster engages what is photographed directly, but not too closely. There is a distance, a reserve, a standing off from what is photographed. One observes this bivalence as well in Foster's handling of color relationships, consisting typically of juxtapositions of warm and cool, often complementary colors. That this bivalence of engagement and detachment obtains, and indeed may serve to inform the structure of an image, is manifested in the selection of the objects for inclusion within the field of the image, on the one hand, and the compositional function of the representation of the object within the work, on the other.

Thus, in Morning, a rosary hangs from the upper edge at the left center of the image. The attributes of morningness are otherwise peripheral in the image: the directionality of the glowing light and its flat angle rendering the texture of the grooved wall paneling in low relief, the bedspread at the bottom of the image with palpable visual texture, a picture on the wall at the upper right corner, the otherwise empty space emerging from shadow.

Dearborn, with the green sphere of a table lamp on top of a Dearborn stove, presents the attenuation of hearth, with all its rich associations, reduced to a functional appliance, the spread of warm light from the lamp across the wall is the last trace of the central role of fire and light in habitation (focus is the Latin word for hearth).

Foster exploits the opposition of warm and cool hues, as in Karen's Backyard, where warm sunlight opposes the cooler area of open shade, and in Strand Street House, with the warm yellow catalpa leaves above the distinctly blue shadow on the automobile fender in the foreground. A similar juxtaposition of warm and cool, though not entailing the cooler color temperature of open shade but rather of areas of complementary local hues, is found in Off Oak Street, where an orange-red berried pyracantha is placed in opposition to the blue façade. 'Placed' is the proper term; while the photograph is an indexical description of what was photographed, the organization of objects within the space of the a photograph is the result of, as a minimum limit case, a construction entailing a set of decisions as to where the camera is to be in relation to the objects photographed, and the placement of what is photographed in relation to the edges terminating the image field. Indeed, one must also consider the underlying constructed character of the objects photographed: the setting back of the plane of the house façades thirty feet from the street, with separate houses connected by continuous lawn, are convention17 al practices with their own historicity. These areas of warm and cool establish loci of precession and recession, which may be in contradiction to the relative spatial proximity of the objects to the image plane; such is the case in Karen's Backyard, Pilot Point, Texas, and Strand Street House. In relation to each other, these loci of concentrated color form an axis within the image, subsidiary to the vectors generated by the shape and configuration of the objects represented. These contrapuntal color relationships are beautiful in themselves, but beyond the pleasure of their apprehension they are representations of transient effects, accidental in the sense that color has been long regarded in western aesthetics as an accidental and not as an essential quality of objects. 18 These ephemeral color events, entailing the perception and thematization of a momentary confluence of light, atmosphere, and object, are in contrast to the relative stability of the objects themselves. This underlying opposition of stability and transience is salient to Foster's work: a metaphor for the lifeworld in which one is always already situated within change, but within which one may posit the unchanging. Aristotle and Plato on the steps in Raphael's School of Athens, represented here by other means.

The interaction of objects and site with the envelope of light and atmosphere is central in Foster's representations of fragments of urban landscape. Thus the bright lower trunk of the tree at the center of Normal Street, thrust forward against the darker shadowed background, functioning as sculpture to close the prospect beyond the foreground lawn and beneath the canopy of leaves filling the upper half of the image. The bilateral symmetry elicits a sense of stillness, of repose, spreading outward from the central tree trunk. It is an extraordinary vision of an ordinary enough piece of urban landscape: the power of the central placement of the tree within the image to elicit a sense of immovable stability, and the transient moment of light falling on the lower trunk, evoke a garden from an ordinary grouping of plants. It is difficult to so evoke a garden without a prelapsarian resonance.

Foster's work is printed at a small scale, with the images matted to 4 x 7.5 inches; the works require one to stand near them for adequate viewing. So positioning the viewer in front of the work precludes more than one or two viewers from closely looking at a given image simultaneously, rendering one's regard of the work an essentially private act. This is correlative with the stillness and quietness of the images, and conduces to the intimate, contemplative character of Foster's works. Intimate smallness, stillness and quietness, are the conditions of interiority exteriorized in the works.

Shelley M. Foster received the Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of North Texas, and is currently a Master of Fine Arts candidate at the University of Oregon, Eugene. Recent exhibitions include Text/Context, Laverne Krause Gallery, University of Oregon, Eugene, 2001; F7, Laverne Krause Gallery, University of Oregon, Eugene, 2000; Three Denton Photographers, Rubber Gloves, Denton, Texas; Voertman Student Art Competition, Denton, Texas; Bachelor of Fine Arts Exhibition, Lightwell Gallery, University of North Texas; National Student Photography Exhibition, University of Tennessee, Knoxville; Annual Student Art Competition, University of North Texas, 1998.

1. Mario Rosso, quoted as epigraph in Wallace Stevens, "Evening Without Angels," Poems: Wallace Stevens, Samuel French Morse, ed. (New York: Random House, 1959), pp. 57-59. Return
2. Charles Olsen, "Maximus, to Glouster, Letter 2," The Maximus Poems, George F. Butterick, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 9. Return
3. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Maria Jolas, trans. (Boston: Beacon, 1969), p. 8. Return
4. Chromogenic photographs are color photographs in which the color dye comprising the image is produced by a dye coupler formed with the oxidation of the developing agent during the reduction of the exposed silver halide of the latent image to metallic silver. Return
5. Pace Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978). Cf. Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the World of Art," Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. Return
6. Charles Olson, "Maximus, to himself," in ed. George F. Butterick, The Maximus Poems of Charles Olson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p.56. Return
7. Nicanor Parra, "Mil novecientos treinta," Poems and Antipoems. Miller Williams, ed. (San Francisco: New Directions, 1967), pp. 2-5, l. 6: "I am only a camera that passes over the desert." Return
8. Verso of Matteo de' Pasti's portrait medallion of Leon Battista Alberti, 1446-50; see George Francis Hill, A Corpus of Italian Medals Before Cellini, vol. 2 (London: British Museum, 1930) and reproduced in Joan Gadol, Leon Battista Alberti: Universal Man of the Early Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 69 Return
9. It is notable that the arts largely articulate the perceptual fields of the distal visual and audile senses, while diminishing or avoiding the employment of the proximal senses of touch, taste, and smell. See Robert E. Wood, Placing Aesthetics: Reflections on the Philosophic Tradition (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999), pp. 18-21. Return
10. "Monet is only an eye, but what an eye!" Attributed to Paul Cézanne; but see Elizabeth Knowles, ed., Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 200.9.
11. Brian O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (San Francisco: Lapis Press, 1986), p. 61. Return
12. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Colin Smith, trans. (London: Routledge, 1962), pp. 310-311. Return
13. Shelley M. Foster, Artist's Statement, 2001. Return
14. D. W. Winnicott, "Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena," International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 34 (1953), pp. 433-456. Return
15. 15 Richard Kuhns, Psychoanalytic Theory of Art: A Philosophy of Art on Developmental Principles (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 53-58 et passim. Return
16. See Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, M. D. Hottinger, trans. (New York: Dover, 1950), pp. 15, 124-148. But see E. H. Gombrich, Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, for a critique of Wölfflin's comparative method (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 89-98. Cf. William V. Dunning, Changing Images of Pictorial Space: A History of Spatial Illusion in Painting (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991), p. 37. Return
17. Evolving from the idea of the lawn as a "garden of taste" in Andrew Jackson Downing's Treatise, 1841, the concept of whole neighborhoods of houses set back thirty feet from the street and connected by a continuous sweep of lawn as a metaphor of democracy is initiated in Frederick Law Olmstead's Riverside community in Chicago, to be further expounded and popularized in Frank J. Scott in The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Gardens, 1870; it was subsequently widely incorporated into building codes. Return
18. 18 While the terms 'accidental' and 'essential' have a medieval resonance, the devaluation of color and the pre-eminence given the description of form with line is at least as old as Aristotle; see Poetics 1450b; cf. Pliny, Naturalis Historiae XXXV.xxxvi.67-68. The issue famously served as the proximate cause of the opposition of the Poussinistes and Rubénistes in the French Academy at the end of the seventeenth century; insofar as this may be reduced to Charles Lebrun's dictum that "The function of color is to satisfy the eye, whereas drawing satisfies the mind" an analogy with the recent vitiation of visual perception in a valorization of theory obtains; for the twentieth-century situation, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Return