Hollis Frampton 1936-1984

Label Texts by Malik Shaw

This photograph is part of a series created by Marion Faller in collaboration with her husband Hollis Frampton. The avant-garde filmmaker Hollis Frampton is best known for his abbreviated cinematic works, with a style most directly attributed to the experimental film movement of the late 60’s and 70’s. Frampton’s proclivity to surrealist works fuses with Marion Faller’s ability to capture the magnificence within the ordinary to create the series Sixteen Studies for Vegetable Locomotion.  Stylistically, this work draws its influences from Eadweard Muybridge’s 1878 photograph, Horse in Motion, and subsequent series titled “Animal Locomotion,” which contemporarily is viewed as one of the precursors to modern day cinema. Frampton and Faller’s punning series, “Vegetable Locomotion” represents inanimate objects as if they were capable of moving, thus drawing attention to the role of the photographer in creation of the image. This photograph playfully stretches beyond the titular paradigms of the series by using humor. 

The photograph’s elaborate title suggests a scientific study of a particular variety of apple, as if variations in speed might be charted.  If viewed in a sequential order, in the fashion one would view a flip book, the images tell the abrupt tale of an apple advancing. Frame by frame, the apple’s apparent progression from obscurity to black-out collision is defined by a background grid. Arguably, the most intriguing aspect of this photograph is the contrast between the first and last frames. They are dissimilar in what they depict; although without the contextual evidence provided by the pictures in between, they both seem to capture the unknown, or rather, the incomprehensible. Which is to say, both stills can be interpreted as the juxtaposition between the beginning and the end; portraying different perspectives, but still managing to be cloaked with the same sense of obscurity without context endemic to postmodern themes.

Adult label:

As the apple seemingly advances, in this collaborative work, it becomes more and more abundantly clear that some force has moved it. Without the title, can an understandable intrigue be exacted from its mystique, potentially, reminiscent of the things that are obscured by time and space? Does the impending nature of such a work draw special attention to its minuscule start and overwhelming end? This photo thoroughly begs the question “What is the significance of this progression?” and compels the viewer to contemplate an answer that has no objective claim to right or wrong.