Four Balls

Throwing Four Balls in the Air to Get a Square (Best of 36 Tries) is a 1971 work by John Baldessari. Baldessari threw four balls into the air and his wife Carol Wixom attempted to capture the moment when the balls formed a square. The 36 attempts are the number of frames on the film. John Baldessari then selected the 8 most successful ones.

Jan Dibbets said in an interview (Pandora's Box: J. D. on Another Photography, 2016, page 19): In documentary photography the emphasis is solely on the "what" – on what's being photographed. Everything's tied to this "what". This as he see it, is the most problematic aspect of photography. Let's say that in artistic terms, it's the least decisive aspect. The "how" – Dibbets is talking about the creative, not the technical how – is much more important. The deepest content is to be found in the "how".

This way of thinking about photography is close to my heart. Where the meaning of photography itself is beyond the photographic image.

My photographic series Four Balls depicts palm trees. In Baldessari's images, the palm tree appears randomly in the corner of the frame, which was certainly not his intention, as the intention was four balls against a blue sky. I tried to capture the palm tree in three rolls (medium-format camera, fuji provia, 16 frames each). I tried to shoot like Carol Wixom, who was given the task of photographing four balls.. (palm trees).

I selected the seven best of tries.

excerpt from text by Mirjam Kooiman:

Baldessari points out that language has made-up rules that we all agree to follow. Despite the directive title to his photographs, however, something else caught Václav Kopecký’s eye: the palm tree in the corner of some of the 36 frames of Baldessari’s ‘Four Balls’. Roland Barthes describes the power of the punctum: that accident in the picture that pricks you, despite the studio which aligns with the intention of the operator operator behind the photograph.[3]The punctum touches upon the frame of references of the spectator, outside of the control of the photographer.
Kopecký’s exhibition cycle Four Balls is a reference without its referent. As if zooming in on Baldessari’s photographs, Kopecký shot three rolls of film with palm trees against a blue sky. The four balls are nowhere to be found – they are only there in words, as the title of this exhibition. It makes one wonder: what else is invisible in these pictures?

(https://drdovagallery.com/2019/05/25/photography_from_atoz/)