Compostion

By Stefan Szczelkun

Subjects: art, composition, compost, recycling, environment, metaphor, decomposition

Description: 17 large Premium colour photographs plus an Afterword. Landscape hardback. These dramatic photographs of my kitchen compost taken with a Sigma DP2 compete with classic art still lives. They made a big impact when I first put them on Flickr and then I had a further enthusiastic and insightful response when I asked for people to feedback on the e-proof. These previews are on the book page. *"The beautiful arrangements of rooting vegetable matter in Compostion entice and repel simultaneously. They are like the lovely matter of the commodity. It is as though each scene or frame has been arranged with a painterly eye for detail, for colour, for form, producing a still-life after Dutch painting of the seventeenth century that reminds the viewer of transience, death and putrefaction, of the corpse one will become; or the austere paintings of Cotàn, his ‘bodegónes’ representing the everyday through arrangements of vegetables in a shallow and precisely defined space. There is a similar light and a similar high drama in Szczelkun’s photographs, a quiet constraint that then rebounds on reflection."* Sharon Kivland