Sculpture

We went to see the Rodin exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts on Friday evening. It was worth the price of admission to witness the sheer scale of “The Thinker”, lit to perfection and standing in the final room of the exhibition. Alongside his monolithic pensiveness were a series of rare photographs of other works by Rodin. The photographers were artists documenting art, so they played with light, filters and shutter speeds to try and bring to the fore the complex details of Rodin's sculptures - of which there are many, as the exhibition made abundantly clear. I dabble in photography and the whole Rodin experience made me think about what I try and do with a camera when I get behind the lens.

I would love to be able to take good portraits, but I can't do it. I can set up macro shots of intricate details, leaves, flowers and so on and they come out more or less as I plan them to, but if I get a good shot of someone's face it's by chance. Feet and shoes are different. I assure you this is in no way a strange fetish or related to that old adage about the size of men's feet being an indication of the size of other things! I find foot shots easy to compose, kind of quirky and yet really human. Somehow you get to the essence of a person – these are the feet they use to walk around, to go everywhere they need to go in life. You capture the foot, you capture a bit of that life, I think. Now one of the things you notice when looking at Rodin's sculptures is that the hands and the feet are extremely detailed, but quite out of proportion to the rest of the piece. Apparently he used to often get his students and assistants to make studies for these parts and then sculpt them for him, which may go some way to explaining why they're different and bigger, but from an artistic point of view he could be trying to draw our attention to these parts of the body and how they can be expressive. A face has lots of complex things going on. From a photographic point of view, one slight change, one shadow cast over an eye, a twitch, a wrinkle, cough or laugh and the moment is lost. Everything changes in an instant and you're constantly having to digest a lot of information. Hands and feet make bigger, bolder movements. They tell more simple tales and force the viewer into a slower, more steady and concentrated engagement with what they're trying to say. They represent human communication distilled and brought into a clearer focus.

Rodin made detailed studies of people's head's too, and many of his sculptures do have intricately realised faces (John the Baptist springs to mind), but the large, detailed hands and feet are a recurring theme. Their true artistic meaning is probably a matter of great debate, but they've certainly provided me with some food for thought and inspiration for some new photographs. Does “The Thinker” have big feet because the existence of man is somehow grounded in his thought and inner life? Or... well, who knows?