Preview Odd Shots Before You Buy

Odd Shots as described by Scarlet Cheng

We live in a world of quirky juxtapositions and anomalies, and sometimes it takes a photograph, a captured moment, for us to stop and see. Ave Pildas has an eye for those “odd shots” – where everyday moments are frozen and presented to us in a pictorial frame. That frame makes us look, it makes us focus, and then we see something that we might have passed by without a second thought. He is also an inveterate traveler, and he goes to places where we have not been, with his camera ever at the ready.

In New Hampshire he captures a sign along a road which advertises “America’s Perfect Pool,” with a bulky kidney-shaped fiberglass pool next to it. Our eye is naturally drawn to the words “America” and “perfect”, but the sign is rather crude, and the pool insert looks alien in the landscape – a strange idea of perfection is presented to us. Elsewhere, in front of an art gallery, perhaps a temporary one, a sign is propped on a parked van which says “Free Art Sale Today” – with the word “free” underlined, thus creating an inadvertent contradiction. “Cloud Leg” is one of my favorites – a single mannequin leg is suspended in a show window, with puffy cumulous clouds captured in reflection. It’s the Ascension of the Stockinged Leg, what could be more absurd and more delightful?

It intrigues me to think that when most of these photographs were taken – in the 1970s and 1980s – we were still in the Age of Analogue. That is, most of these photographs were shot on film, and processed in a darkroom. Photography had a certain preciousness then when we were aware of using up limited resources, a roll of film with 24 or 36 shots, and each shot needed to count.