NZ Visual Diary - entry 386

intimations of Edward Hopper

The visual narrative style of American painter Edward Hopper has always been a guiding light for me.

His paintings often place people in uncomfortable isolation at the edges of his canvases, trapped in spaces — austere hotel rooms, bleak cafes, unadorned living rooms — that appear to bear down on them with angular physicality. His subjects often project feelings of muted tension, of troubling apprehension and foreboding, of numbing self-absorption.

Perhaps because Hopper’s work haunts and intrigues me, I regularly shoot street scenes that seem Hopperesque. And so it is with today’s entry, although as my older daughter described it ‘futuristic Edward Hopper.’

I deliberately cropped the image to force the emotionless subjects, a server and her two customers, into a corner of the frame. I attempted to heighten that sense of disquieted isolation and constraint by suggesting that the image frame was insufficiently spacious to accommodate the partner of the female customer. We see only a partial view of him as if all three have been enclosed within a space too small to comfortably fit them.

Meanwhile, the soda fountain machine looms menacingly large; indeed, the left frame cannot contain it. The dispenser, with its projectile-like and ominous appearance, more resembles a piece of military equipment from a Flash Gordon movie than it does a commercial kitchen accessory. Furthermore, the store is cluttered with little more than the utilitarian items of culinary commerce making for a rather stark aesthetic and is almost completely devoid of colour, save for the blue facing on an appliance.

Lastly, the array of window reflections of distant buildings invade the physical space of the store’s interior, as does the store’s low ceiling, creating a palpable sense of disconcerting confinement.