Referring to Metaphor and Context in the analysis of an artistic body of work or project, we can also closely compare poetic metaphor and context to photographic metaphor and context. Metaphor coming from the Greek and Latin word for Transfer. A verbal metaphor transfers a word from one place to another. A photographic metaphor transfers our mind's eye or our emotions to another place. This place is what is known as context; the environment in which a word or photograph exists.
"The proper and natural environment for words is other words. Words join with other words to form organized utterances, according to grammatical laws, and they all have more in common with one another than any of them has with any non-verbal thing. A verbal context has no fixed or predeterminable size, and its boundaries cannot be decided except in a somewhat arbitrary manner. The phrase in which the word occurs, the sentence, the paragraph, the chapter, the book, the collected works of an author- all are verbal contexts, radiating like concentric circles outward from the central word".
From
The Design of Poetry
Charles B. Wheeler
W. W. Norton & Company (1966)
The consideration of context as radiating outward from a central idea, or word, or photograph is not something I have thought about before in respect to my own sequences and themes. I have always considered the contextual relationship between images in a series or sequence to be a lateral one. It is interesting to think in terms of the outward expanding circles. And not just one photograph in a series being the center and origin of the expanding context; but each individual image in the series creating its own ripple effect, (like so many raindrops on a water's surface).The circles overlap one another, and we could plot a Venn Diagram of the relationships created between the images of the sequence.
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