Comets, Not Moons

IMAGE: Yogurt foil, photographed by Stanley Greenberg.

After I wrote about his image of the abandoned champagne cellar beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, photographer Stanley Greenberg emailed me to say that he had also begun working on a series of photographs of the aluminum foil found on yogurt containers.

IMAGE: Yogurt foil, photographed by Stanley Greenberg.

Greenberg — who stressed that the series is still very much a work in progress — explained to me that he had come to yogurt pot foils through a variety of other household items, including shoe inserts, the moulded styrofoam that new computers come packaged in, and “the bottom of some tart pans that looked like the moon.” The yogurt lids, however, struck him as “the least recognizable, if you photographed them the right way.”

IMAGE: Yogurt foil, photographed by Stanley Greenberg.

Some of the images are close ups, foregrounding the texture, colour, and material nature of the foil, while others show the shape of the lid. “One makes its an object, and one makes it something else,” commented Greenberg, “and it’s hard to know at this stage whether, in the end, it will want to be a study of yogurt lids or a way to abstract them even more.”

IMAGE: Yogurt foil, photographed by Stanley Greenberg.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Greenberg’s photographs is the way they reveal an overlooked variety. “You’d think that they all came from one factory or at least one particular machine, but I guess they don’t,” he says — instead, some are gold, while others are either a warm or blue silver; some are smooth and shiny, while the textured ones are all differently textured.

IMAGE: Yogurt foil, photographed by Stanley Greenberg.

Whatever form this experiment ends up taking, the transformation of mundane kitchen detritus into celestial objects is endlessly wonderful to me. If pots, pans, and tart tins are moons, then, Greenberg says, the yogurt foils “are comets — they have their tails.”

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2 Comments

  1. vanderleun
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    Well, Nicola, I have to say that you are doing admirable yeoman-like service here, but really when it comes to the subject matter here and the results what can one actually say except, “So what?”

  2. ‘celestial objects’ – totally agree.