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David Parker
Sirens
“Then all at once the wind fell, and a calm came over all of the sea, as though some power lulled the swell.”
Homer. The Odyssey
When Odysseus instructed his crew to lash him to the mast of their ship, he was preparing himself to hear the sirens’
song, “the song of the universe”. Their sweet singing, claims of omniscience and power to calm the waters, unfailingly
lured sailors off course to their destruction. Odysseus plugged his crew’s ears with beeswax, so that he alone could
savour the seductive laments of the sirens and experience a mystical encounter with the sublime.
Dreams and the sea are the closest we come to other worlds, and the solitary sea-stacks that David Parker has
photographed, or sirens, as they appear to him, stand as guardians on the threshold of both worlds. For Parker the
sirens’ song is a call to contemplation, not action, and these images chart his fascinated encounters with an enchanted
world of forgotten archetypes. His pictures are intended, siren-like, to lure the viewer into a mysterious abstract world,
both concrete and ineffable.
Myths and legends have often been inspired and shaped by geologic landforms and similarly, David Parker uses the
natural world as an arena for the personal exploration of mythic, symbolic and metaphoric motifs, a theme which he
previously developed in The Phenomenal World (an award winning book published by Edition 7L in 2000).
Ultimately the sirens song is the song of art, “which charms and fascinates us into the ego-diminishing state of
aesthetic enchantment, perhaps the goal and consolation of all art”.
David Parker was born in 1949 in England and was trained as an engineer and illustrator, before moving into
photography. He has published two monographs, and continues to make his own large scale toned silver-gelatine prints.
David Parker
Sirens
With an essay by Marina Warner
Book design by David Parker
92 pages with 38 quadrotone plates
16.5 x 11.25 in. / 42 x 28.5 cm
Clothbound hardcover
$ 85.00 / £ 48.00 / R 70.00
ISBN: 978-3-86521-306-8
PostScript Bild
(9783865213068)
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