Pagan Songs: Ode to Mel

Pagan Songs: Ode to Mel / 2008

Traditional Silver Prints – 24 / 4” x 4”

Kim Borst

My approach to realizing this body of photographs was to rely heavily on feelings. My feelings regarding the natural and civilized environments I exist in and the memories of loved ones and friends who have departed this physical realm.

The traditional presentation of these photographs acknowledges the rigidity and control exerted upon me by the culture I have to exist in but often do not agree with. More specifically it speaks about the issue of the civilized human condition, the constant need to seek unattainable perfection through rigid control. The clean precise lines of the geometric picture frame, the sterile white matt board, and the secure geometry of the square photograph format as well as the obvious process of photography all suggesting the human altered and structured civilized constraints.

The photographic images, their form and content, sing about my pagan love and connection to natural environments in particular Lake Superior as well as paying homage to my departed friend and colleague Mel Olsen. For most of his life Mel had a home along the south shore of Lake Superior and had a deep respect and love for its beauty and mystique.

My initial concept with this work was to use the south shore of Lake Superior and somehow convey the issue of lapses in memory and feeling. This grew out of experiences associated with a recent visit to my parent’s home and facing my mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease and also my love of the lake and its biorhythms. But that was not translating in the initial images I made. Then one hot August day while making pictures on the south shore I thought of Mel and his love of nature and the lake and I realized what I was intuitively doing. I was paying homage to Mel and his and my own primal pagan love of Lake Superior. It is a very good feeling to pay homage to a departed kindred spirit.

I also feel it is important to acknowledge the “tool” or camera I used to make these pictures handheld at arms length. I used a “Diana” medium format film camera that is composed entirely of plastic, including the lens, with very few controls. In the 1960s the Diana camera, made by the Great Wall Plastics Factory in Hong Kong, became a well-known prize in gaming booths of traveling carnivals. An actual Diana camera and the box it came in, from my collection, are exhibited with my photographs. Artists soon began using the very low-tech camera mostly for its unique image quality of soft diffusion and the dark vignette of the corners of the square image. The Diana image is often referred to as “dreamlike.” As an undergraduate student in studio art back in the early 1980s I used Diana cameras in my work for several semesters. I also began collecting them and Diana knockoffs like the “Galaxy,” “Fantasy,” and “Raleigh.” It was then, with that experience, I concluded and proclaimed, “I do not need to use a Starship Enterprise to make visually exciting photographic images!” My experiences using the Diana have certainly contributed to my current low-tech philosophy on life. Keep it simple.