Trey Tomas
Jessica Backhaus
"World35"
year 2010
At first, this picture seems like some post-modern painting that pretentious rich people would pay millions for. But in actuality it's a photograph of a puddle distorting the buildings through its reflections. Backhaus has an entire series where she takes photos of water giving the buildings she's focusing on a distorted, Picasso-esque look to them. It's almost painterly. Impressionistic. An abstraction. Only giving us enough visual information to know that that's a building, that's an air conditioning unit, and that might be a pole. I'm not sure. I'm still gargling my coffee. Perhaps she's making a statement on the often dismissed small details of everyday life where we miss out on a world of beauty. On the other hand this certainly isn't staged. So maybe she isn't even saying anything at all. There's never a narrative or just documentations in her work. Either way, intended or not, maybe we should all break from routine sometimes, appreciate the small puddles around us, and drop the coffee.
