Bill Armstrong's triptych of The Three Personalities of Thomas Jefferson commissioned by Christopher Hyland: L to R: agrarian, government leader, designer.
sublime. If we consider one photograph by each of these artists
– Leatherdale's Dunce, Self-Portrait, Mapplethorpe's Sleeping
Cupid, and Ritts' figure of the British athlete Jacqui Agyepong
– what we immediately notice is the dramatic placement
of a dark figure against a light background or a light figure
against a dark background. The juxtaposition of light and
dark places the figures in outline form, thereby accentuating
their theatrical presence, but the stylized dunce, the naked
torso, and the sleeping nude are neither threatening nor highly
sexualised. As Ben Lifson has observed in his commentary
on the Hyland Collection, 'A photography collection is strong
when it presents the world as though it has been imagined
by photography itself.' This is another way of talking about
turning the exotic into the familiar, into a range of images that
stretch the limits of how we make sense of the world.
HYLAND
