100116 – Macellaio – Exmouth Market, London

I spent a day thinking about the photos I had taken of the Macellaio restaurant front on Exmouth market to try and describe why I found the images both powerful and yet so familiar. Eventually out of the dusty recesses of my past memories came a visit to the Lumiere cinema in 1989 to see the Peter Greenaway film The Cook, The Thief, The Wife and Her Lover. Greenaway uses framing and frames within frames to both focus the viewer and capture the reference of the work (often a painting). The framing can be literal i.e. enclosure or phenomenal i.e. suggestive or referential. In the image of the hanging carcasses with the sofa we have a double frame. First the Chesterfield leather sofa placed in the street below a canopy captures a space to focus the viewer, a suggestive frame of an interior space. Second the hanging meat is behind the window to a butcher’s refrigerated store, a second framed interior space set deep within the first. Both spaces are private spaces inverted to become public spaces and in so doing create an intimacy with the viewer through suggestive enclosure. Phenomenal space is referenced through subjective association, for me this was the films of Peter Greenaway. The frame within a frame and the inversion of most private to public domain are well-used techniques in Greenaway films. The impossible panoramic scenes supposedly shot in the back of a meat van from The Cook, The Thief, The Wife and Her Lover immediately come to mind as do the food still life paintings of the 17^th Century Dutch Baroque.