Portland Opera Puccini in Concert Keller Auditorium Portland Oregon

Still Life in a Time of Sequestration

As other subjects retreat into solitude, K.B. Dixon shifts his camera gaze to the beauty of domestic things.

March 30, 2020

K.B. Dixon

Culture, Photography

TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY K.B. DIXON

As a photographer I am interested in people, places, and things. These interests do not change with sequestration, but the opportunity to pursue them does. When the people one is sequestered with do not want to be photographed and the places one is sequestered in tend to be private rather than public, one is forced to rely almost exclusively on things.

This particular collection of photographs is the product of the Covid-19 crisis—a crisis that has forced a street, documentary, and portrait photographer to spend more time than usual indoors. It is a radically edited inventory of household goods, of objects near and sometimes dear—the utilitarian, the talismanic, and the decorative. Each item, of course, has its own story. For example, the magnifying glass. It was purchased twenty years ago to help an aging lexophile negotiate the microscopic print of a cheap, compact edition of the OED—a dictionary where one can find the words “mundane” and “miraculous” sitting almost side by side.

PITCHER, 2020

WOODEN BOX, 2020

FINIAL, 2020

METRONOME AND BASEBALL, 2020

Sponsor

Portland Columbia Symphony Adelante Voices of Tomorrow Beaverton and Gresham Oregon

DRIED FLOWERS, 2020

POTTERY, 2020

MAGNIFYING GLASS AND VASE, 2020

STONE CARVING (H. MWASHUSHA), 2020

K.B. Dixon

K.B. Dixon’s work has appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers, and journals. His most recent collection of stories, Artifacts: Irregular Stories (Small, Medium, and Large), was published in Summer 2022. The recipient of an OAC Individual Artist Fellowship Award, he is the winner of both the Next Generation Indie Book Award and the Eric Hoffer Book Award. He is the author of seven novels: The Sum of His Syndromes, Andrew (A to Z), A Painter’s Life, The Ingram Interview, The Photo Album, Novel Ideas, and Notes as well as the essay collection Too True, Essays on Photography, and the short story collection, My Desk and I. Examples of his photographic work may be found in private collections, juried exhibitions, online galleries, and at K.B. Dixon Images.