In Arrangements Clayton Cotterell revels in the spontaneity of the photographic medium, allowing for succinct encounters with light, color and form to guide both the content and open-ended, sensuous meaning of the work. Seeking out naturally occurring abstractions, the photographs Cotterell has made are global in reach, yet are not about any particular place.
The simplicity of their content attests to the easily recognizable parameters of their meaning. Such transparency invites one to dwell not on a photograph’s meaning, but instead on the organized complexity of the photograph itself, whereby an image that dazzles at first encounter becomes endlessly richer the closer one scrutinizes it.
The resulting sense of malleability that occurs with such viewing is heightened by the deliberate sequential proximity of one photograph to another in the book. In this, Arrangements allows for continual shifts in its own framework while deliberately referencing the continual evolution of photographic language at large
