Artwork
Untitled
Untitled is a photographic photography by David Edstrom. It is held in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
About this work
Overview
The work is a black‑and‑white photograph by David Edstrom, presented on a green mounting card. It records a sculptural study featuring two stacked heads, each with closed eyes and solemn expressions, the upper crowned with pressed foliage and the lower marked by age and a beard. The image’s grainy quality emphasizes the raw texture of the sculpture.
Subject & Meaning
The composition juxtaposes youthful vitality, suggested by the leaf‑adorned upper head, against the weathered, bearded lower head, evoking themes of life cycles, mortality, and the passage of time. The closed eyes and austere demeanor invite contemplation of inner states rather than external narrative.
Technique & Style
Edstrom’s photograph captures the sculpture’s unfinished surface, highlighting chisel marks and rough planes that convey a sense of immediacy. The high‑contrast monochrome rendering and grainy texture reinforce a haunting, almost documentary atmosphere, aligning the image with early twentieth‑century experimental photography.
History & Provenance
The photograph entered the collection through the 1938 bequest of William Kineton Parkes, a noted scholar of sculpture who gathered visual responses from artists via questionnaires in the 1920s. It now resides within the Archive of Art and Design, preserving Parkes’s broader investigative project.
Context
Parkes’s questionnaire initiative sought to document contemporary sculptural practice, and Edstrom’s contribution reflects the period’s interest in raw materiality and expressive form. The work exemplifies the dialogue between photographer and sculptor that characterized interwar artistic exchanges.
Artist & collection
Artist
