Paul Salveson with his ancient basil plants. — Photo by Mimi Luse
Framing his surrounds or sometimes interfering with his environment to create formal compositions, the photographs of Paul Salveson bestow the most banal objects with a vague, uncanny symbolism.
The 24-year-old lives and works on Willoughby Street, a block away from Maria Hernandez Park. Centered on an impulse to document the things that appeal to him, Salveson’s process is egalitarian to the extreme, and anything from cooked beans to drain hair are game. “A lot of the time I like visually simple things,” he says. “It has to do with details, like photographing someone’s floor with photo lights, maybe it looks normal in normal light but once you start getting real light on it you start noticing gross stuff…I give equal value to gross things and other things.”
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If Salveson finds something he wants to photograph, he will often take it back to his studio, where he carefully manipulates it, sometimes taking up to 60 digital photographs until he achieves the result he wants. By striking a balance between order and filth, or the familiar and the alien, each photo is both repulsive and attractive simultaneously. He shows me a picture of some loose hair atop a towel fixture stuffed with chocolate covered peanuts. “I was showing this picture to someone and they liked the image but they really didn’t want to look at it. My dad doesn’t like to look at either. But of course I like to gross people out too.”
Next he pulls up a picture of what looked like a spore colony poised to attack some rotted bone marrow, and explains to me that what I’m actually looking at is the fortuitous result of him playing with his dinner; the spores are a few dozen small Japanese cookies that he’s carefully arranged into rows, and the bone is in fact fou fou, a West-African yam product, all mashed up and stretched out. “There is a lot of improvisation and randomness involved. A lot of these are taken when I’m alone. I’m self-conscious around other people, especially when I’m re-arranging their stuff.”
In another photograph what I thought was a sickly animal sitting against a blue backdrop, was “actually a breakfast burrito sitting on a mouse pad. My girlfriend was appalled that I would do that, but of course I couldn’t waste. I still ate it.”
What makes his works so surreal is their removal from context. Often cropped at close range without reference to proportion, his photographs become creepy portraits of objects. Each seems to possess some unknown power or meaning. However uniquely weird they look though, Salveson doesn’t usually go too far out of his way to find his subjects.
“I rarely make a special trip to photograph, it happens naturally in my daily travels. At least it’s developed into that. I feel it’s important that the images are tied to my personal life rather than sought out.”
