Review: One Eye

One Eye
Photography by Charles Burns
Published by Drawn & Quarterly. $14.95 USD

Ever since reading a Werner Herzog quote about how people crave fresh images and that's why he continues to make films, it's haunted me. Haunted in a good way; I mean it has really opened up my view on things such as less story-based comics. Burns has assembled a book of photographs he's taken with a cheap camera and no later digital manipulation and created something as rich, disturbing and funny as his comics work. All he did was take interesting pictures, place one on top of another, evenly spaced on the page, and provide a droll, enigmatic title to the work, and voila!, a masterpiece. At times the pieces join each other so that you're not at first sure where they separate, but most often Burns finds power in placing two very different images together and letting the viewer find their own connections. The work is definitely greater than the sum of its parts. He finds relationships between peeling skin and cracking paper, the shapes of doors and gates, the sickly tones of indoor lighting on wood paneling, items on shelves, and many more items. When human faces appear, they are there to add a humorous or horrific dimension to an otherwise ordinary image. It's a startling work that would probably be helpful looking at before every creative enterprise.