ABSTRACT
The repetition of form, the obsessive reiteration of a particular pose or set of conventions, that Patrick Pound and so many other collector-artists bring to the people attention has always been a central aspect of photographic practice. A professional photographer would be hired as part of the funeral ceremonies to shoot a collodion glass negative of a still life comprised of the various flower arrangements displayed at the funeral itself. The still life is therefore often a model of an ideal, or at least an arrangement of things with a specific message in mind. One might say that the still life picture is designed to propose a series of relationships between its constituent elements and then between that collectivity of relationships and the presumed viewer, the consumer of this other thing, of the picture itself. By forcing photography to reflect on itself, the genre of the still life is transformed into a nature vive.
