Apple’s Reciprocity
I took an apple, a common fruit in Canada and North America. The harvest of apples is happening during the months of September and October, so right now the markets all over the lower mainland are full of crispy, fragrant, and colorful apples. Therefore, when my group members looked at the apple photo series, they were familiar with the fruit itself; however, the location and the position of the apple were not conventional. Another conscious decision that I made was having the photos in black and white, the lack of colors calls attention to the hollows, rises, and textures, as well as to the highlights and shadows in the photos. The first reaction one of my group members had was asking the question: ‘What happened to the apple and how was it carried around?’ Then they asked questions regarding the surfaces, saying, ‘as we touch the apple, what is the apple touching?’ They continued to wonder ‘what is the meaning of apple?’ before concluding that the relationship between the apple and the surfaces tells a story.
Since I was a child, whenever I was hungry between meals, I would just grab an apple to eat and be satisfied. Therefore, there are always apples around me: in my home, the backpack I use for school, in the lunch I take to work, or next to me when I have class on zoom. Apples fascinate me. Besides the fact that my body likes to eat apples, my mind marvels at the wisdom and abundance within their essence. The apple’s seed contains within it the memory of recreating another apple tree, the apple tree’s flowers are a source of pollen for the bees, and the apple tree gives tens of apples year after year. I want to communicate the apple’s wisdom and the personal connection I have with apples through my photos.
In the first series I try to relate the visible qualities and characteristics of apple as I see them. A fruit which is a friend with seeds that hold the memory of the apple tree within them and can create the image of a bee in the core of the apple. The core of the apple also connects the top and the bottom of the apple: the stem at the top and the remains of the flower at the bottom. I envision these parts of this apple as the antennas that collect information from outside of this apple’s world, transferring it into the apple’s core. Lastly, the numbers, which were given to apples by humans, represent for me the transformation of apples into commodities in our society in the name of globalization.
In the second series I try to communicate the inner qualities I associate with apples: wisdom, worldliness, and globality. One photo represents for me the image of the globe, spinning around and around on its axel like our own planet earth. The photo on the right manifests my desire to connect to the endless wisdom and memory of the apple. The image represents to me an image of a human body in profile embracing, above their head, the apple’s abundance.
The six photos as a whole communicate the thousand faces of an apple: its generosity, reciprocity, memory capacity, loyalty, resiliency, abundance, and so much more.