This pumpkin lived with me and was my friend for about four months. After It had been hanging out with me for some time, it started to decay in such a way that it appeared to have a face not unlike that of my friend, Funkie Ghost. This was not intentional and I did not cause it to happen in any way. It just goes to show that anything that lives with me and which I care about for a long period of time starts to have a personality and a soul of its own.
Time and causation eventually produced their inevitable effect – Funkie Pumpkin decayed away to a mushy mess, which I froze so I can give it a proper burial in the spring. I saved the seeds. Funkie Pumpkin will live again. It’s the least I can do for an old friend.
Also, for the sake of posterity, I will state candidly that this is likely the only portraiture I will ever post on this site. It isn’t that I don’t take such photos. I have done so when circumstances and individual subjects merited it. But in general, I think the photography world has moved far too much towards portraiture when it comes to subject matter. Just like creative writing has not benefited from the obsessive focus of the past several decades on the memoir as a form, so too portraiture taken to this sort of extreme verges on the self-indulgent and the egocentric. Can we not see the world anymore because we are too concerned with how we see ourselves? If this comes to be the case for any given person, the transcendent and the sublime in the world will vanish simultaneously. This is not the meaning of photography in my opinion. To make the beauty of the world as it is found all around us manifest is the art of photography, and is the way in which photography can take us towards something beyond ourselves and beyond the mundane. This is the meaning of transcendence.
On a side note, this was not the first attempt I made at this still life. I often post photos on here of things I shot on expired film, sometimes focusing on adventitious accidents or textures created from the film. Film as a medium can offer this in a way digital can’t (not that digital doesn’t have a feel of its own – it does. It’s like the difference between oils and watercolors. Each have their own feel). But I don’t always post the frames that don’t work as well. Expired film is unpredictable because you don’t know how it was treated before you got it. That’s the beauty and the potential downfall of it. Here, for your enjoyment, are three other Funkie Pumpkin frames shot on Plus X from the mid 1970s. It didn’t turn out exactly as I hoped. Even Funkie Pumpkin looks a bit concerned and uncertain in these shots. They have an interesting aesthetic, but they’re underdeveloped and lacking in tonality in places. Still, Funkie Pumpkin looks very cute.
