copyright Mary Jo Hoffman, provided courtesy Monicelli, a Phaidon Company>
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Still, The Art of Noticing
by Mary Jo Hoffman
a book review
Tuesday, 16 April 2024
UPCOMING Mary Jo Hoffman will be presenting at the New York Botanical Garden on May 15, 2024.
Her talk, Session Number: 244NAT810, will be in the Mertz Library Reading Room from 11:00am-12:00pm EDT
Non-member registration is only $39. Even more exciting, she will guide a 2 hour flatlay composition workshop,
Session Number: 244CRF287 from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. Non-Member : $205.00 Member : $185.00 This is full
but there is a wait list. Phone: 718.817.8720 to register for her morning talk or more information.
What's that saying? You can't see the forest for the trees. Perhaps it is more that you cannot see the trees for the forest. We need to look and what's more, see what we are looking at. For more than a decade, Mary Jo Hoffaman has - every day for more than a decade - taken a photograph of something found in nature. It is a matter of seeing what you might be looking at. Not rigid as to time of day, stones on Sunday and twigs on Tuesday. Rather, a delighted acceptance of what the natural world presents to you. Which is exactly what "Still, The Art of Noticing" presents to the reader.
copyright Mary Jo Hoffman, provided courtesy Monicelli, a Phaidon Company>
What might be found . . . a stone that would be here tomorrow, next week, next century
copyright Mary Jo Hoffman, provided courtesy Monicelli, a Phaidon Company>
a mushroom that will soon deliquesce and rot away. Even if white on white means something must have a tinge of gray.
When I heard about Still I was immediately attracted to its concept. The classes I taught on patterns of nature, the mathematics of growth and form - Fibonacci sequences, Mandelbrot sets - should certainly have some correlation.
copyright Mary Jo Hoffman, provided courtesy Monicelli, a Phaidon Company>
Yes, the aptly named violin like fiddleheads of uncurling ferns were familiar. But Still is so much more
than a book of pretty pictures. White background, no frame, an artist's vision force us, the reader, to see.
And the text which opens each - shall I call them chapters - each section lets us see into Hoffman's mind,
the thought processes that open our mind to the beauty of dead birds as well as flowers, a sifting of snow
on the fur of a dead coyote on the roadside. It is the every day after day after day stop/look that lifts Still
above and beyond the snapshots that clutter up our phones (Wait, let me scroll, I can find the picture . . .)
Within each chapter there are occasional headings for a subset: September 8 to September 22 Time of Color
copyright Mary Jo Hoffman, provided courtesy Monicelli, a Phaidon Company>
"Cooling begins . . ." and takes us to the change from green of leaves to clusters of ripening crabapples.
Objects are not randomly dropped, to be photographed where they happen to plop on
copyright Mary Jo Hoffman, provided courtesy Monicelli, a Phaidon Company>
A bluejay's wing on the left, a scattering of shed bluejay feathers laid ladder-like on the right. Yes,
it is not just your cat, birds also shed. Have you never noticed the vivid spring shift of goldfinch?
The very act of bringing something home (coyote was a roadside exception) is an act of manipulation
which is magnified by the following mechanism of picture taking. For two fish, in December's Time of Ice
copyright Mary Jo Hoffman, provided courtesy Monicelli, a Phaidon Company>
it is minimal. Winter. Cold. Short days with weak light from the sun low in the sky. Hoffman creates
let us call it a sculpture of ice, a thin, clear, rectangular shape encasing smooth bubbles of stones.
There was a year of photographing on a black background, an attempt to manage the issues of
white on white - white feathers, flowers, shells, sun-bleached bones bleached and overexposed.
copyright Mary Jo Hoffman, provided courtesy Monicelli, a Phaidon Company>
Black as a background immediately solved those issues but Hoffman found the results dark, moody, edgy.
And happily returned to white.
The portraits of the various objects - living, once living, stone, seasonal - are fantastic.
copyright Mary Jo Hoffman, provided courtesy Monicelli, a Phaidon Company>
Then there are assemblages, a geometric sunburst of coneflowers just beginning to wither.
(I think of the very recent solar eclipse, with corona expanding from around the concealing moon.)
copyright Mary Jo Hoffman, provided courtesy Monicelli, a Phaidon Company>
Or cattail leaves precisely cut into tesserae and then made into a mosaic.
Enough! I must stop here, or find I have included the entire book. What can I say except urge you to order a copy of Still, the Art of Noticing for your very own. And then, perusing page by page, find the images that speak most clearly to you.
Still, the Art of Noticing
by Mary Jo Hoffman
published by Monacelli, a Phaidon Company
ISBN 978-1-58093-633-0, hardcover $60
A review copy of this book was provided by the publisher
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