John Moses

Metonymy is the imaginative process that uses a part to represent the whole. Proximity, or contiguity, is basic to how it operates in figures of speech. But more than just a literary device in poetry, metonymy is part of everyday communication, a way of understanding and speaking about the world—for example, “hand” for helper, “Hollywood” for American movies, “Rothko” for the artist’s paintings.

But what does that have to do with photography, you may be wondering. Linguists and artists have long extended the concept to the visual arts—from painting to the cinema. Roman Jakobson contrasted the metaphors of surrealist art to the metonymies of Cubism. Sergei Eisenstein theorized about the metonymies inherent in distinct categories of cinematic montage, the relations of shot to shot.

Photographers constantly make judgments involving contiguity. Whether in the viewfinder or the darkroom, they reveal what is in the frame and what is beyond it. Sometimes the subject is complete and surrounded by empty space—a still life, a building, an object from nature. Just as often, the subject is only implied by the part shown, sometimes so abstracted as to be ambiguous even in its concreteness.

The images of “Metonymies” play with these possibilities. They imply what is not there as much as present what is. Some are abstract, minimalist images—a light shining on a reel of film; a detail from a 6-foot bronze; a hoist drum from a Cornwall mine. Others are more recognizable parts of some whole—a building façade, a tree within a forest, components of a steam engine. And others are of images connected to concepts like flag for country. Each illustrates how metonymy is as basic to visual language as it is to verbal.

Functionally, metaphors are the opposite of metonymy, based on imagined similarities rather than recognized proximity. Yet the two creative processes often operate together. A flag connects to country but also evokes ideas about honor or dishonor. The closeup of a sunflower’s center may epitomize the beauty of the flower but can also remind us of Van Gogh’s fields of yellow or a dreamlike scene from a Busby Berkeley musical. So, while I present the images in this exhibit as examples of metonymy, I invite you to imagine the metaphoric possibilities as well.

November 2021