What Are We Looking at?

This has already been strongly determined by the title of the image. Our blood relations of dad, mom, sister, brother, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins are the family we have been given as opposed to the one we choose and later recreate. The powerful word “dad” instantly triggers most of us either positively or negatively, and everything in between. The three letters, one repeated, so only really two letters unless we go with daddy, which still only leaves us with three letters are very important and flood the viewer with associations. My hero. My protector. My inspiration. My friend in prison. My first experience of abandonment. My first experience with physical violence or worse. However this affectionate and intimate word informs you will most likely determine your immediate entry point into this image. In whichever way this title directs you, the inevitable experience will become more nuanced. You may never have had a dad but instead a father or a sir or an anonymous sperm donor. No matter what, we all are the product of female and male genetic information that collided intentionally, unintentionally, in a Petri dish, in an act of violence or in an act of passionate, loving abandonment.

A title thus can have a massive impact even before we really get into the picture.

How Can the Titled Image Be Interpreted More Broadly?

Depending where you are coming from you may go to the cornfield, The Children of the Corn, Americana, back-yard barbeques or just kernels of corn stuck between your teeth. Because the corn is so densely planted it may represent a vista of individual memories or moments that collectively have grown to represent dad for you. Further still, you may see the corn as the stand-ins for all your ancestors, for all the genetic information that made him and then you. Along this vein of inquiry you may wonder about the corn itself. Is it a genetically modified organism, or traditionally grown, with a healthy dose of added pesticides, or is it organically grown? Note that although we are getting into somewhat different territory we still are informed by the title.

How Can the Untitled Image Be Interpreted More Broadly?

Easier said than done, yes? Myopia or tunnel vision has been put in motion somewhat and it is now harder to just forget about the title. As none of us experience and react in a very linear fashion, you may already have explored the following observations: as viewers we are floating above the image. We become suspended hummingbirds, just hanging, or enormous giants. The man in the corn has shrunk and is looking up to us. We as viewers are looking down on him. Is the man with the red thing in his hand about to set fire to the field and deliberately identify himself to the security camera's monitor(s) or, oh wait, it is a baseball cap and not a gas can? Check! Oh yes, the giant checkmark “✓,” the most graphic element in the image. Checked off. Good. Yet, the checkmark continues outside of the frame in ways we can only imagine, as it is not contained. The “√” does it perhaps represent an equation and we didn't know because we can only see so much? How long is the maze he has to wander through to reach an end? How long do any of us have to search for where we are meant to be? And when we get there, will we recognize it, or just feel stuck?

Conclusion

The middle-aged man is looking up at us and if we are not dying, maybe he is. As his child we may have become a caregiver too young. The sudden, disorienting, and devastating role reversal is irrevocably established. Maybe it is a less dramatic situation. Maybe we have just grown up. Maybe we realize that our hero is also just human like all the rest of us. Maybe we have the uncomfortable experience of realizing for the first time, that he too has a weakness or some vulnerability and can get lost. Maybe we hold someone on a pedestal and are curious what it would be like to experience that equation in reverse. Maybe we are Alice in Wonderland and have drunk the growing potion or maybe he drank the shrinking one.

No matter what, Plum has changed our viewpoint, literally, figuratively and instantaneously, to see dad and ourselves or others in a different way.