I’ve had this picture up on facebook for a while and last night one acquaintance from high school asked if I had meant to allude to biblical references with the picture. I asked which he had in mind and he responded with this:

“Well I wasn’t really going to say what I thought you were trying to reference if it wasn’t actually your intent to reference it, because it sounds offensive; But okay. I thought it was in reference to the whore of babylon, what you’re holding could be ‘The cup full of the filthiness of her fornication,’ and, if that was the case, then the smoke could be seen as the artistic manifestation of ‘evil that calls out to men.’ I don’t feel like googling the specific passages, it’s in the book of revelations.” 

He deleted the comment shortly after posting it. 

At first I was just “whoa dude little off base there.” But really on the inside I wish I’d had the forethought to come up with that kind of intentional depth for this picture, because objectively I’m just sniffing the flower and thought the smoke layer would look nice. In the back of my mind there was the straight forward observation of how cool it would be to have the smoke be like the scent of the flower. So I was sort of flattered he got that much out of the picture, but still a little put off about being compared to the whore of babylon? 

Then, the day after this guys comment, in photo class we had to describe and explain one of Atget’s pictures and to find the difference between what was directly depicted and what the picture was a commentary on/possible suggestive meanings in the work. To convey the difference between dennotation and connotation our teacher used the example of Robert Mapplethorpe’s work.

So obviously the pictures are of flowers. However they connote vaginas. Same goes of Georgia O’keefe. 

These are not the most obvious examples of their work, but I like that they are the same flower and I thought I’d use them for parallel purposes. So anyways point is the picture isn’t much without the connotations or at least they aren’t as interesting. Tying it back to being the whore of babylon and her cup of filth and flowers being sexual, there is really nothing to get except what you want to read into it…although I totally think that guys observations were brilliant and made me feel like a “real” artist instead of a stupid kid with photoshop. 

And for anyone still confused there is always this handy venn diagram: “How the art system works” (from SFMOMA)