On allegory

Tucked away in the corner of gallery VII of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition is an image of a peacock in a wonderfully turquoise room, easy to overlook given its position at the bottom of a busy gallery wall but once seen, impossible not to notice. It is an image from the series India Song by another of my great inspirations, photographer Karen Knorr.

I confess that I have been struggling valiantly with the starting of this Musing. You see, I want the perfect opening line but the Muse is fickle and always seems to be off on a skite when I am in need of her. I take to heart the advice that to wait for the Muse to turn up and help you out is an exercise in futility, so I do as suggested and sit down every day to write. In yet another moment of serendipity, reading Do Story by Bobette Buster and a one word text from my Dad allowed me to get started, for in that word the power of Knorr’s work was made real.

Drawn to the intense colour and light, I find her images beautiful, mesmeric almost, in their visual richness. But the beauty is more than just skin deep. She uses the camera and the computer as tools to reinvent and reconsider myth and fable for contemporary times, and to challenge the notions of authority that underlie cultural heritage. By inserting an animal, magnificent in its wildness, into the very human space of an ornately decorated palace room, she questions traditional notions of power and also our relationship with the natural world.

This juxtaposition of two colliding and unrelated images or ideas is not new; it is the bedrock of every great story. For in the collision, new ideas are born, and old ones questioned and often dismantled. That the animals she photographs are in captivity, be it a zoo or a park, adds a layer of poignancy to the beauty. That she is also a feminist is not lost on me.

Sometimes those that cannot speak, speak volumes. All we have to do is listen.

Karen Knorr’s works Brief encounter, Palazinna Cinese, from the series Metamorphoses 2014-2018, and The Queen’s Room, Zanana, Udaipur City Palace, from the series India Song 2008-2017, are currently on show at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.