“Water Foul” and “Unbreakable”

Daniel W. Coburn  (Website and Blog), BFA Student Washburn University, was one of the first people I met at SPE today (though I’ll be posting these portfolio features in no particular order). He had good sized dyptich prints spread out on his table from a work in progress tentively titled “The United State”  – and after talking to him for some time about sequencing, how the body of work might work as a book, and the challenges of presenting work as something more than a set of singular images, I left his table with one of the most professional take-aways I saw today. It’s just a panoramic postcard with “Water Foul” on it, but it’s also got a mini-CV on the back – a detail I thought was worth mentioning.

It was easy for me to warm to his project after seeing some of the more obviously formal dyptichs – which lead me back to the ones I had skimmed more quickly over. Many of these included more subtle cultural interactions with a good amount of humor.  It seemed, as another viewer noted, that some were in danger of becoming “one liners” – but perhaps both pictures could still be used in the project by seperating them and placing them in different parts of the book. They’d still have the interaction in the short term memory of the reader without being so forced by proximity. Both of us reviewers agreed that there was no reason a project had to be confined to just dyptichs (just as no project must be strictly singular images.)

We talked a bit about the interaction between page turns, something he hadn’t considered before – though it seemed like he felt it was a bit early in the project to be thinking about book tweaks. It seems to me that it’s one of those bodies of works (like many many) that will benefit from the artist’s long term shooting habits – building slowly over time as the right images drop into it from various other projects and happy discoveries. I’m looking forward to seeing where it heads.