I'm still reading the book about Frances Glessner Lee's crime dioramas and I can tell you that it's really creeping me out. If you don't mind, I'll inflict some of my morbid thoughts about this on you, with the promise that this'll be my last post on the subject.
The living room above caught my eye because it's so red. In nature red is always an accent. It never covers a whole field of view like it does here. When it does, in a man-made picture, it always conveys an idea or an emotion. Here that idea seems to be evil and death.
It's as if some supernatural force, not a person, has somehow become aware of the humans who live here, and is lying in wait for them.
Something electric and malevolent is in the air. Even this picture of a stag seems to have bad intention.
The model includes a view of the closet where the victim was killed while reaching for her coat, but I won't show it here. There's more information in this one (above), in the sense that here, in this infernal red, the decision was made to kill another human being. The woman was a prostitute and the killer was a boyfriend or a client. They'd been drinking and arguing and I guess she decided to walk out on him. Yikes!
I don't want to go out on a horrific note so I'll digress to talk some more about red for a moment. Artists who use it frequently darken and dilute it with a bit of another color. That's odd when you think about it because once the red is muted and bludgeoned the next thing artists try to do is revive it again by running tendrils or dots of another color through it.
Interesting, eh?
The red apartment looks like it would be right at home in a David Lynch movie! I just read Crime and Punishment for the first time, and these pictures have me imagining a diorama of that scene.
ReplyDeleteMiniatures and models always seem to be more intense than real life. Do you think it's because our brain knows we are looking at a "fake"? like the miniature is trying to trick us? Cool posts, what a brilliant mind Francis had!
Nodnar: Wow! Interesting! I've always wondered why people are so fascinated by the fake reality you see in stories and pictures. As you said, maybe it's because we're built to have a keen interest in what attempts to trick us.
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