October
![[October /1]](http://photos.jpgmag.com/186076_2192_5dc327bc00_l.jpg)
By Stephanie Fysh
1 July 2007
"The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in a sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." —T.S. Eliot, "Hamlet and His Problems," 1919
In the modernist formulation of this earlier idea (Eliot's phrase dates back to the 1840s, when Washington Allston used it in explaining how an object could evoke pleasure – without the intermediary of art), the function of that object which concentrates emotion in the work of art is to dissociate the creator from the work: to make the work of art independent of the artist, objective.
In October there is no dissociation. Though (or perhaps because) the person of the artist is not visible, this is the subjective correlative: photography as the immediate documentation of emotion.
More Photo Essays
More stories by Stephanie Fysh
