Reflection on Tableau Photography
Tableau vivant (plural: tableaux vivants), French for 'living picture', is a style of artistic presentation, often shortened to simply tableau. It most often describes a group of suitably costumed actors, carefully posed and often theatrically lit. By extension, it also applied to works of visual art including painting, photography and sculpture, featuring artists' models in similar arrangements, a style used frequently in the works of the Romantic, Aesthetic, Symbolist, Pre-Raphaelite, and Art Nouveaumovements. In the theatrical context, the actors/models do not speak or move throughout the duration of the display. The approach thus marries the art forms of the stage with those of the more static visual arts, and it has thus been of interest to modern photographers. The most recent heyday of the tableau vivant was the late 19th to early 20th centuries, during confluence of the above-mentioned art movements, and also featuring poses plastiques ('flexible poses') – virtually nude tableaux vivants – providing a form of erotic entertainment, both on stage and in print. - Defination of a tableau -Wikipedia
Reflection
The tableau, whether presented as sculptures, paintings, or nowadays more commonly through photographs and film works, all aim do do one thing. That is to capture a story within a freeze frame, a moment that describes all that has happen and all that might go on to happen. It is common to find clues within these images as to possible outcomes or motives for displays of behaviour all of which bring us to a rationalisation point of time.
This collection of film clips and images display that well, many factors come in to making a tableau and there are a wide array of variables that could alter the meaning of the scene. For example, the lighting, whether it is natural of theatrically back-lite, is there a spot light to push empathise onto a main character or characters, what information can be gleamed from the time of day. To where the scene is set, what are the actors wearing, how the objects in the scene an displayed, whether there are clues to a crime that has been committed, to even how the viewer should feel about this actions are all down to careful placement and display. So if we know that everything set within a scene such as this has be careful arranged to convey a narrative then shouldn't we ask what the point of the narrative is? Is it important that there is a message behind the surface? And what are the people that create this Tableau's trying to tell us? Is there a deeper message behind the surface, or is the point of the tableau not to depict factual truths, but to act as a portal into another realm of myths and truths to show us what all outcomes could be through a infinite range of narratives.
Sources
No comments:
Post a Comment