the cycle

This body of work, a cycle of 21 -- three sub-cycles of seven -- was exhibited only ten miles southwest of the center of the Universe at the gallery of the Adams State College Department of Art in January, 1994.

the portfolio of 21 5x7 prints, in an edition of 4, one sepia-toned, three selenium-toned, on Portriga Rapid (Grade 1) paper is available for sale.

The Commentaries:

The introduction to an early Confucian text quoted to the right suggests the idea of organizing things into organic categories as a means of understanding the World -- an understanding that would bring about a harmonious internal and external life. I have been contemplating this concept and have begun formulating what exactly an organic category might be. One divided thought is that perhaps language is an organic category, or, that language is incapable of describing what an organic category is. Two nonexclusive solutions. Organic categories are probably cyclic and connected rather than linear and discontinuous. And so on...

Language and Image comparisons and interactions are legion these days. This series of images is no particular exception, except perhaps for its simplicity:

NOUN: A Naming in 21 Parts

The word noun is rooted directly in the Sanskrit word nama which means approximately, the process of naming. Naming is elemental to many creation stories from different cultures. In the romantic sense, naming can be a personal process of world creation, a knowing of the world. In the place of coming-to-know (Eden), naming defined the sensual relationship between the human and the world. The photographic act is very much related to a process of naming. Knowing opens the eyes to the binary nature of the world and the price of loving it.

"Often when I am asked what I consider a banal question, "What kind of photographer are you?" (a boring one?, a clever one?, a stupid one?) or "What is your favorite subject or motif?" -- I have to explain that limited subjective photography, that is, landscape, portrait, flowers, girls, children, cars, and sunsets, does not interest me. Or, to be precise, I find subjective categorizing of anything to be limiting and in the extreme case, dehumanizing. At any rate, I have formulated the following canned answer to put the question to rest: "I photograph who I am with, what I am doing, where I am, and what things I see.""


An old idea of mine -- the idea of editing a series of images based in the etymological idea of the Noun -- fit well enough with the idea of exploring possible organic categories and of visually naming the World. Language probably does not suffice to described what can better be ascribed by the photographic images.

One way of image-ining the process here is to sense the photographs as a naming. The senses frame the limits of knowing. Between these sensual limits thought oscillates through a space of more or less resolved imagination. Images of people and objects and landscapes come-to-be in varying degrees of realness. These are the images of making, the images that I make. I make this world. I name the things in this world. And I turn these images/imaginations into objects. Photographs. You are seeing an organic process of creation and perhaps, of understanding, named in black and white.


These images were exposed through a nikkormat camera with a 28mm lens on tri-x film (asa200) developed in hc110 six minutes and printed with a cold-light omega enlarger on agfa record rapid chlorobromide paper that was then lightly selenium toned.

john hopkins, 1 december 1993, Reykjavík, ice-land.