(Seven Themes) Artist Statement

union Photography is a segue to experience: it forces some level of communication where there might be none, challenges us to interact and facilitates that contact, speaking infinite languages. It also dumps us off in new places. This afternoon I photographed Sakura Matsuri (a Japanese Spring Festival) at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. Photographs played into everything that got me there: the black and white picture in the Voice, the colorful nature photos at bbg.org, even the photos already forming in my head of what I might find. Photography dresses in mimicry. If not of other photos than at least of everything we see. After a few hours and a nap on the grass it seemed that the same material (pink flowers, sleeping couples) kept cycling; it was photography and its consummate digging that kept me there: talking imported videogames with anime kids, haggling over the price of bentu bowls (the park closed in half an hour), even meeting my new favorite friend: a guy who called me a ‘creep’ for photographing his girlfriend and then ran after me cause he wanted to print the photos for her birthday? Photography leads to experience. I cringe at the concept of the camera as a distancing tool- it can cause trouble, yes, esp. if you’re scavenging; usually though, it engages: we help strangers to center precarious little cell phones, we stop in our path when we know someone else has a good view. We routinely cross borders- but the harm’s usually no deeper than a scrape; nothing conversation can’t unravel. Photography is a tool of engagement, and like any sort of communication, it can go either way. We share and e-mail and dump things onto photosites and as long as we’re not malicious about it, I believe we’re safe. The paranoia of 1984 seems old-fashioned; we’ve created a billion-pointed constellation with no center. We’re tangled up in photostream and videofeed- an age of Every Brother. The directors of the new world are the ones who bring order to the glut. Perhaps Kodak made everyone a photographer. On that same populist thread, flickr has born a million photo artists.

metamorphosis Blood might drain from my body if the negatives to Dead Desert Night dissolved. But certain consequences would remain the same: it was a miraculous experience; the project paralyzed the diurnal cycle of night and day that controls a dutiful mammal. I remember the first time I stayed up through an entire night, we all must- those fearful specks of light finally glinting through the trees put me in a holier place than baptism. I’ve matched that feeling only once and by accident- the night I left a shutter open long enough to find the air of daylight etched on the surface of a negative. The discovery is more a childhood reminder: that the earth is as dark as the moon; that all of the light comes from the stars. If our eyes had wider apertures, if the rods were more sensitive to light, we could see at night as we see in the day. Years into the project, the separation between night and day collapsed. In its place was this fluid transition: like a treaty between a divided self, a barrier collapsed: nighttime spilled into daytime, the eventual darkness became loaded with sunshine bounced from the moon. The anxiety wore off: all of those dim hours, suspect people, crooked places- they were gone. I realized that imagination fills the empty shadows of night with whatever fears it hasn’t abandoned. For some time- enough time- I became nocturnal.

time Photographs are often fashioned by fear: a fear developed from the persistence of time. Photographers are prime pursuers of time: to capture it, halt it, immolate it; cameras strapped like slings across hearts full of fear. But the race to stop time just amplifies its changes: we create control groups on which to gauge all future versions of everything. Imagine a world robbed of machined surfaces- mirrors, chrome, windowpanes…whatever occasional view you’d grab of yourself would be stifling, the differences so marked as to change the nature of identity. Each new generation born of the internet will master the self-portrait for fear of an objective view. Photography infects us with a need to monitor; likewise, this control version of the self gives us an origin from which to change- or stay grotesquely the same. The world’s photographic archives are already so deep, so explicit and document the past two centuries so completely that time itself might as well have begun with the invention of photography. It’s curious that nostalgia begins to disappear- as a medical condition- at the moment photographs became so prolific (around the Civil War). Was nostalgia erased by the photograph because we no longer needed to remember? Was Marcel Proust commemorating a dying sense of nostalgia in …Things Past? Perhaps, but it’s photographic time that marks the 20th century: from the day-in-a-kaleidoscope of Ulysses, the staccato blister of Battleship Potemkin, the stroboscopic Nude Descending a Staircase. Modernism breeds on photography’s ability to time-shift, time-lapse; to explode one second into five hundred separate moments.

youth The first year I remember was my fifth. Within it fell 20% of my life experience (up to that point). This is an exponential curve peaked at birth; for a moment a single second making an entire lifetime: 100%. It’s no wonder that an artist works from the earliest, most unavailable and intangible scraps, channeling art through all of that static. What, after all, is more harried and suspenseful than the beginnings of something? Well, its death- but I won’t be around to offer commentary on that. I had no choice in the world to which I came but childhood is a personal goldmine. Art is a way to resolve those memories, to decipher things anew. But memory is fluid and unreliable; practically anything is primed for a new translation. Paintings like The Rose do not surprise me; what surprises me is that there aren’t more lifelong works. I have this image in my head; as far as I can tell it’s the longest-running in my brain, other than the basic slope of a breast or the shape of a tree leaf; I’m propped on a car seat- finally able to support the weight of my head, catching moving glimpses of the horizon. There’s nothing special about the recollection- it is banal. But the image is fluid, changing with me, never the same. The muted green of not-quite-seeing in color. Fields. One hill. I can’t photograph them- I can make only estimates and I’m certain to have generated a hundred landscapes in their place. We’re so ill and misshaped when we’re young, our early memory bounding in half-truth and no-truth, fever, hunger spells; days spent idle and asleep giving way to too many dreams, nights frayed with insomnia. And it goes on for years, confusing and reordering memory until finally, eventually, speech and sight become intelligent and more things make sense than don’t. And so we unravel it.

myth If photography existed at the time of Christ could there be a Christianity? Might a prophetic God-king materialize under media scrutiny? The murky provenance of a photograph could encourage a belief but the media would make a cult of it (for credibility: sacrifice yourself, not your apostles). Photography, as document, resembles other scientific tools: ridding the world of rarity and romanticism and for that, I hate it. It’s an imperialist of the imagination that offers amnesia in place of Old World superstition. Pier Paolo Pasolini, always fraught with God, said that he’s a non-believer with great nostalgia for an era of belief. Of all the arts he practiced, photography wasn’t one of them. We look to photography for verification, especially of things that horrify: it’s impossible, say for a modern monster to exist without photographic evidence: Loch Ness and Sasquatch have been invented and codified by photography; Hitler was bound to be the fount of evil because he had so many damn photographers, his image mesmerizing all time in a cold, black wave. A photograph is too easily faked but modern mythology cannot exist without it: UFOs are a bacchanal for photographic inquiry: of estimated distances, approximate speeds, negatives broken-down like atoms in a particle accelerator. They’re all myths fostered by our mistrust of photographic evidence. Photography is as much a liar as a truthsayer. We know Booth killed Lincoln- we’ve seen the drawings- but if there was security footage from the alley of Ford’s Theatre we’d have our pick of six killers all fleeing on horseback. Photography is amazing because it inherits the oracle of folklore. Photographers and mythmakers don’t just interpret the culture, they create it. And it’s the storyteller’s right to append an ending or change the sex of the protagonist; the original perverted in its retelling: 9/11 carried out by a genocidal landlord with a favorable insurance policy.

fantasia I admire early photography for its reliance on accident: Louis Daguerre sure recorded one surreal shoeshine. Experimental chemistry, little consensus, and then finally: negative, fixative, print. They were chemists and tinkerers and gentleman inventors. With slow lenses and molasses-fast emulsions, time-lapse was standard procedure. Left with a little free time, they could eventually practice photography. Early fantasies were born of photomontage: Henry Peach Robinson’s morbid Fading Away wholly depressing in its odd craftsmanship and Victorian dressing. Charles Dodgson was one of the first to find fantasia looking in: gaining fame as Lewis Carroll and photographic infamy from his underage fantasies. Accident aside, the deliberate fantasists finally arrived: Man Ray, Hans Bellmer, and Paul Outerbridge all doing it in the nude. But their manipulations force a question: is photography enough? Those I’d call chance-fantasists are the most enduring: photographers who estimate the effect of fantasy not through artful processing, performance, mockup, or theatre but by pinning reality just the other side of the real. The slow amble of Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld uncovers a simple American vernacular made mythic by hyperreal transparencies; greater commentary derived from their scenes of anything than a newspaper full of editorialized content. Walker Evans and Jacob Riis warded projects set on specific milieus- and the social extremes which they tended were certainly fantastic: the South in collapse, New York trapped in a horrid adolescence. Chance fantasists are realists yet their work is too evocative to have barred the unconscious. They record the unforgiving mood of American time and so their lessons are forgotten: progression abandoning and abstracting our most awkward and telltale stages until they finally seem made-up, like false fantasia.

document A photographer is more an archivist than other artists: pinning prints on the wall like an entomologist does insects. Given a studio space, there is equal play given to craft and organization. All of those projects, some in whole, others in part: cardboard boxes full of prints and discs, property and model releases, cabinets of bodies, formats. The painter can’t have that level of control and may not even want it. A painter loses physical control of every work; a photographer usually trades in derivatives. Control attracts photographers: if forced to tape a negative to the back of every print and corrupt every file queued in the printer, would as many still do it? In photography it’s impossible to not focus on themes of change, time, progression, etc. The moment an exposure’s over, time begins to draft a commentary, even pervert it: benign gone doomed (WTC), fringe turned mainstream (Betty Page). Photographers protect singular images by building little arks: collecting their work in photobooks, slideshows, galleries, websites- any sort of vehicle or vessel which might give things context. The glut of books that act as photographic catalogs are particularly smart in this way: they shrug critical estimation for utility. They are the genre fiction of photobooks and are guaranteed an audience. I don’t need a book of 100 Barns or The Most Beautiful Villages of Tuscany but I have used Photograde for United States Coins to inspect my steel pennies. These books aim for art but they do so in a less personal way. The more personal a photobook becomes, the harder it is to sell. The purpose of all this organization is documentation. In school there was always a contest to land the choicest objects in the class time capsule. A book cannot aim at timelessness- that objective is too complex, allusive. But a photographic work can aim to venerate, to become an archive outside of aesthetic quality or subjective value. It can be read fifty years in the future and it will present a lost world- no matter what it contains.